MAKE 2020  Symposium - Art & Labour, will focus on the labour of art, its value in social and economic contexts, the status of the handmade and of the factory.

MAKE 2020 is hosted by CIT CRAWFORD COLLEGE OF ART AND DESIGN

Tickets: Sold out

VENUE:  Stack Theatre in CIT Cork School of Music, Union Quay, Cork.

ENQUIRIES:  Pamela.Hardesty@cit.ie

SPEAKERS

DR. DANIELLE CHILD

AN EDUCATOR AND AUTHOR ON ISSUES OF ART AND LABOUR:

Dr. Danielle Child is Senior Lecturer in Art Theory and Practice at the Manchester School of Art, Manchester Metropolitan University UK. Her research interests lie in the post-war and contemporary periods and particularly in the relationships between artistic practice and labour.  Within this focus she is interested in making visible the work and the workers who are often hidden. Her recent paper at the Courtauld Institute, London, dealt with this issue in Fabricating Value:  the Invisible Hand of the Maker (2018).  Other research concerns include de-skilling in art fabrication; commodification; digital labour; and art-activism. 

Her recent acclaimed book Working Aesthetics: Labour, Art and Capitalism (Bloomsbury Academic, 2019) examines the moments where art and labour intersect under capitalism, with an emphasis on the neoliberal period.  

Working Aesthetics takes a step back to ask why labour has become a valid subject for contemporary art, and explores what this means for aesthetic culture today.

SARAH BROWNE

ARTIST

Sarah Browne is an Irish artist concerned with non-verbal, bodily experiences of knowledge and justice, expressed in sculpture, film, performance and public projects, writing and publishing.  She is associate artist in residence with UCD College of Social Sciences and Law.  Her recent solo exhibitions include Stockholm, Derry, Brisbane, and Frankfurt.  In 2016 with Jesse Jones she made In the Shadow of the State, which addressed the position of the female body as the focus of repressed histories and political desires under the regulation of the nation State. In 2009 she co-represented Ireland at the 53rd Venice Biennale with Gareth Kennedy.   

In Stockholm, 2019, her film project, The Hands at Work, (#1 and #2) dealt with the body’s place in contemporary labour relations.  In Sarah Brown’s film, The Invisible Limb (2014), the hand can be seen as the narrator; it allows us to consider the symbolic resonance of the hand within different workplaces and political systems, in dialogue with the intimate affect of work on the body.  She has also explored communities and economies of making such as her film work with knitters of the Shetland Isles in Something From Nothing (2014).

ANNE WILSON 

ARTIST

Anne Wilson is a Chicago-based visual artist, and Professor in the Department of Fiber and Material Studies at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago.  She creates sculpture, drawings, Internet projects, photography, performance, and DVD stop- motion animations employing table linens, bed sheets, human hair, lace, thread and wire. She has exhibited widely in the USA, at the Museum of Arts and Design, the Whitney Museum, and The Drawing Center, New York; and in Chicago, Boston, and Houston museums; and internationally at The Whitworth, Manchester;  the Victoria and Albert Museum, London;  the 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art, Kanazawa, Japan, and the Zhejiang Art Museum, Hangzhou City, China, among other institutions. 

In Wilson’s recent exhibition, A Hand Well-Trained, (2018) Rhona Hoffman Gallery, Chicago, she investigates the textile industry’s social underpinnings and the politics of re-use by laying bare fabrics’ previous lives. These works continue her conceptual deconstruction of textile and material studies, investigation of social and labour concerns, and intersections between text and textile. Revealed throughout is the subversive potential of material practices in the light of cultural histories that have devalued textiles and women’s work. 

RÓISÍN DE BUITLÉAR

ARTIST

Róisín de Buitléar is a visual artist, an alumna of NCAD. She has completed many site-specific installations of blown, cast and architectural work in glass, drawing her inspiration from her cultural heritage, in public and private buildings throughout Ireland.  Spanning architecture, sculpture, and design, her artwork is also represented in national collections in Ireland, Northern Ireland, Britain, Japan, China and USA. Her recent work focuses on sound objects for exhibition and performance.  She is a renowned educator, on the staff of NCAD until 2006, with further workshops and lectures worldwide.

Róisín de Buitléar has a long association with the iconic Irish glass company Waterford Crystal and has organised many collaborations with the factory, forming personal relationships with some of the 4000 workers, blowers, cutters, engravers and sculptors employed there.  Most recently the National Museum of Ireland hosted her exhibition CAUTION! Fragile.  Irish Glass: Tradition in Transition (2018-19) featuring her collaborative works with three Master Craftsmen from Waterford Crystal, as well as photographic and oral histories of the factory, and sound works documenting the life and culture that was the Waterford community. 

CLARE TWOMEY 

ARTIST

Clare Twomey is a British artist and a research fellow at the University of Westminster who works with clay in large-scale installations, sculpture and site-specific works. Over the past 10 years she has exhibited at the Victoria and Albert Museum, Tate, Crafts Council, Museum of Modern Art Kyoto Japan, the Eden Project and the Royal Academy of Arts.  Within her practice Twomey has maintained her concerns with materials, craft practice and historic and social context.  In her recent exhibition,

Factory: the seen the unseen, at Tate Exchange, UK in 2018,  Clare Twomey transformed Tate Exchange into a factory, making everyday objects from clay to explore ideas around the concept of production. 

A factory is a term that refers to shared labour, where the production line is composed of many parts and processes and through shared goals a product is completed. Clare Twomey’s factory was a place of simulation with the intent to draw us into a conversation about how we connect to our everyday ideas of labour, value and exchange. 

A PANEL DISCUSSION WILL FOLLOW ALL 6 PRESENTATIONS THAT WILL OFFER A CHANCE FOR ALL SPEAKERS TO TAKE FURTHER QUESTIONS, AND QUESTION EACH OTHER.

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HAND Exhibition

IN ADDITION, WE WILL OPEN AT 6PM OUR ACCOMPANYING EXHIBITION:

HAND at the CIT Gallery 46 GRAND PARADE

showcasing an exchange project between TEXTILES students of CIT Crawford College of Art and Design and THEATRE and PERFORMATIVE STUDIES students of University College Cork.   By a focus on both the tools and gestures of repetitive textile processes HAND project highlights the value of this labour of creation, expressed both in the textile objects resulting, and in the performance works that respond in movement to the creative interplay of body and tool and material.