Boondocks III
2017
Participation in Transition: Boondocks III
21 - 24 September 2017
This project gave a cross section of artists from Bbeyond practical experience in working for a concentrated time of 5 days based in Hanover, Germany.
The invited artists - Sinead Bhreathnach Cashel, Jayne Cherry, Zara Lyness, Leann Herlihy, Colm Clarke, Brian Patterson and Hugh O Donnell, took part in 5 days of public performance, along with local artists in various location in Hanover, including The Day of Public Action on the Friday.
Born and based in Belfast, Sinéad is a member of Bbeyond, the Array Collective and BBDB weekly zooms. She works as a curator for Northern Ireland Screen’s Digital Film Archive, developing live cinema projects using the Ulster Television archive. Sinéad studied her BA Hons Fine and Applied Art in the Belfast Art College (Ulster University) and Post Graduate Studies in Art Room Methodology in Bath Spa University.
Jayne Cherry is an artist living and working in the countryside of Co.Down Northern Ireland and was brought up with a deep respect for the ground we walk on and all who breath upon it, so making work that stems from that is only very natural. As her statement would have us believe she inhales her surroundings, which she then mulls over before looking with new eyes and making work. Having been a nurse and garden designer explains her penchant for spiky, uncomfortable forms which often include death and other references to our own mortality. These then contrast with rotund, touchable elements she then 'stitches together' using skills which are new and old too her. Performance actions keep her attached to the realness of her existence and inform her sculptural and text work.
Zara Lyness is a female, Irish artist based in Co. Down. She has an integrated approach to her practice, combining sculptural, ceramic, mark making and live performance processes in her work. Her attention alternates between themes of relationships, marginalisation, and permissions, applying perceptions of memory and experience through a semi-autobiographic and gendered lens. This is underpinned, or undermined, with an internal cycle of dialogue regarding conceptual and material values, and the validity of outcomes, influenced by learned perceptions of what art is.
Léann Herlihy [they/them] is an artist, researcher and educator based in Dublin.
Their practice is informed by trans*, queer ecological, feminist and abolitionist theoretical frameworks which deploy alternative modalities of expression through an array of mediums including live performance, video, billboards, sculpture, text, workshops and radical pedagogies.
Rigorously and creatively critiquing the positioning of Otherness in a heteronormative society, Léann actively transgresses beyond 'Other' as another tick-box option to choose from and moves to explore the generative capacity of collective engagement and resistance when we abolish colonial and capitalist prescriptions of personhood, the body and gender.
Colm Clarke is an artist based in Belfast and working from Queen Street Studios. His performance work is concerned with ecology, resonance, vibration and the aesthetics of power structures. His collaborative projects (WABFM, starewars, MOOK) utilise strategies of participation and humour to critically question historical and contextual possiblities of artistic endeavour and representation.
He has exhibited both locally and internationally with his performance/installations recently featured in PRESS START Catalyst Arts (Belfast), Soft Bodies Ars Electronica (Linz), EPAF CCA (Warsaw), BLOP Arnolfini (Bristol) amongst others. In 2010 he undertook two artist in residencies in India- Art Karavan (Dehli) and GWAF (Orrissa).
Brian Patterson graduated 1992 from Ulster University and has taken part in numerous group exhibitions, mainly with installation work. In 2001, he contributed to Routes, a project set up to promote the work of the transport union in keeping sectarianism out of the work place in Northern Ireland. “Our position within the cultural map of time is the result of humanity’s constant search for identity and meaning." Patterson’s working practice is concerned with the poetics of being in relation to place (the present/environment) and intellectually how we have arrived here (through our past/histories), and the potentially to navigate our future/s.
Hugh O’Donnell graduated in 2002 from the University of Ulster with a degree in Fine and Applied Art, followed in 2006 with a Masters degree in Fine Art. A full-time performance-based artist, he was actively involved in the Belfast arts scene, including several years serving on the committee of Bbeyond and, from 2013, as Creative Outreach Officer at the University of Atypical. He was lead curator of the 2013 ‘Duo Days’ International Performance Art Festival in Belfast.
