Dates: 4 April – 22 April 2024
Days/Times: Tues-Fri, 10am-5pm
Location: Studio 12, Backwater Artists Group, Wandesford Quay
Closing Event : Studio 12, Friday 19th April, 6 pm.
Open Viewing: Saturday, 20th April from 10am – 4pm.
Page / Process / Proceed is a project by Ciara Rodgers, Kate McElroy, and Sarah Long, curated by Kim Crowley. The project is a site-specific response to the Backwater Artists Group building through the activation of text-based instructions and visual scores. These instructions function as starting points for each artist to engage with their experience, occupying and working at the Wandesford Quay building.
The project is rooted in the idea of language as a raw material that can be manipulated, deconstructed and reconstructed. It focuses on the dual function of the printed page as a site of materiality and instruction. Embracing experimentation, unknowing, mistakes and curiosity, Page / Process / Proceed is a platform for the artists to engage with production with a focus on process.
The project has three key phases;
- A package of materials and scores are given to the participating artists. These scores are activated across several weeks.
- The artists will come together in Studio 12. Working collectively and individually, they will activate a set of scores written in response to the room’s architecture.
- The project will culminate in a closing event on Friday, April 19th at 6 pm. This event is open to the public. All welcome. RSVP for the closing event here.
About the artists and curator:
Ciara Rodgers is a visual artist and art educator based in Cork City, Ireland. Rodgers is drawn to the incongruous, contradictory nature of the changing built environment. The psycho-geographic process of walking and gathering from the detritus of the city has become the central source of materiality for her art practice, leading to works created in media such as sculpture, drawing, performance, and Polaroid photography.
A studio member of Backwater Artists Group and Cork Printmakers, she holds an MA in Art from MTU Crawford College of Art and Design. Rodgers received a Visual Art Bursary from the Arts Council of Ireland in 2020 and an Agility Award in 2022. Rodgers’s work has been exhibited Nationally and Internationally.
Exhibitions include; Green Mouth (Solo) performance, SIRIUS, Cork 2023, Come What May, LIVESTOCK, MART, Dublin 2023, a city of beautiful nonsense (Solo), Studio 12, Cork, 2022, Monuments II (Solo) Garter Lane, Waterford, ArtSevilla 2019|Bauhaus, Spain, 2019.
Kate McElroy is a Cork based artist with a First Class Honours Master’s Degree in Art and Process, MTU Crawford, 2021. Since graduating she has exhibited both nationally and internationally and co-founded the artist collective inter_site. Recent exhibitions include Error: /undefined, Pallas Projects, Dublin and Oscillation: An Altering Rhythm, Counting House, Cork City, 2023. Kate has been supported by Arts Council Agility Awards, a project award and a Cork City Council Artist Bursary. Upcoming residencies include GlougauAIR, Berlin and past residencies include PADA, Portugal, 2022 and Uillinn: WEst Cork Arts Centre, 2020 – 2023.
Her work captures an atmosphere of constant growth and the simultaneous sense of incipient destruction of the natural environment. She aims to fixate the viewers’ perception on the process of change itself, suspending them in a sense of transformation. She creates dynamic installations using photography, film, performance, found materials and sound, drawing on multifarious aspects of the environment to create new ambiguous spaces of contemplation. Coalescing a sense of space and time, the work highlights a moment of precarity. A space between construction and deconstruction
Sarah Long is an artist and writer based in Cork. Her work focuses on suppressed female archetypes, the politics of representation, nationhood, and myth through the lens of feminism. It has been described by UCC scholar Claire Connolly as, ‘calling for a renewal of our understanding of Romantic Ireland.’ Her practice involves painting and has been expanding into the mediums of writing, sound, moving image, and performance. Long is a studio member of the Backwater Artist Group (2022-26).
In 2023, she presented a solo show at St Luke’s Crypt, Cork, and her first performance at SIRIUS, Cobh, based on my first novella and as part of its Critic in Residence scheme. Other recent solo shows include SO Fine Art Editions, Dublin (2021), Sternview Gallery, Cork (2020), and Studio 12, Backwater Artist Group, Cork (2019). Her work has been reviewed by the Visual Artists’ News Sheet, among others. She holds an MLitt in Art Writing from Glasgow School of Art and a BA (Hons) in Fine Art from Crawford College of Art & Design.
Kim Crowley is an emerging curator based in Cork City. Her research is concerned with expanded publishing, place, language and encounters where the visual meets the textual. Past projects have explored networks of communication and generative ways of working through exhibition-making and publishing. She looks to work with artists whose work embraces materiality and process.
Recent projects include Hidden Pasts, Potential Future (2024)- a group exhibition with Sample Studios x Engage Studios x A4 Sounds, The Licks Within The Lips (2023) – solo exhibition by artist and writer Sarah Long, Reach Out and Touch Me (2022) – group exhibition with Lynn Marie Dennehy and Aisling O’Connell, Hypertext Exhibition Map (2020) and These Stately Hills (2019). Kim is a 2022 graduate of the MLitt in Curatorial Practice (Contemporary Art) jointly delivered by the Glasgow School of Art and the University of Glasgow. Alongside her own practice, Kim is a co-director of Bloomers, an Irish arts organisation and publisher.