Frank McElhinney, the first of our exchange artist photographers from Glasgow, is spending the month of November with us at Fort Dunree. While in Donegal, his ancestral homeland, he will be using his camera as a tool of investigation, immersing himself in the landscape of Donegal; discovering more about this place his family came from in the nineteenth century.
His artistic practice focuses on migration and nationhood. He uses different types of photography including aerial (using kites and drones), pinhole (making his own primitive cameras), digital and analogue.
For the last four years Frank has been researching and making work about Scottish migration with a focus on the Highland Clearances. ‘The Far Field’, comprises four photographic series:  abandoned settlements in the highlands and islands of Scotland; the Atlantic coast; Scottish settlements in Nova Scotia; deep space. This project began in response to the ‘migration crisis’ of 2015 and reflects on a time in the nineteenth century when migration both from and to Scotland had a huge social impact. The opportunity to take part in the residency programme at Artlink was very timely as it allowed him to expand this project to explore migration from Donegal to Scotland and elsewhere.
The themes he wants to consider during his residency at Artlink include migration to Scotland and the ‘new world’ but also the causes of migration. He'll be visiting sites associated with the Great Hunger and subsequent evictions including Doagh, and Arranmore. Although informed by historical events the work will be an investigation of what Donegal is as a place today.
All four of frank's grandparents were from Irish families (McElhinney, Gallagher, Durkan, and Brannan). They all died before he was born. Frank says, "My work is typically objective but sometimes the personal raises burning questions. When visiting cleared settlements in the highlands and islands of Scotland I’ve always asked myself the question: where did all the people go? Lately however I’ve started asking myself the question: where did we come from? Although Donegal is my ancestral homeland I do not know it well. Using my camera as a tool of investigation I would like to immerse myself in the landscape of Donegal and discover more about this place where my family came from and then share these discoveries with others through my photographs".
Frank  holds a degree in fine art photography and has produced and exhibited a new body of photographic work every year from 2014 through 2019. Most of his work is based on landscape and is informed by his first degree in history. In April 2018 he began writing the only blog dedicated to Scottish photography reviewing other photographers work.
 
This exchange in association with Streelevel Photoworks http://streetlevelphotoworks.org/  will allow a local artist to be selected to travel to Glasgow in 2020.

Frank McElhinney's Projects

Artlink's artist-in-residence throughout October, Emily McFarland, uses video and installation to reflect on the construction of shared cultural narratives and identity in cinema, television and visual culture. Often through citing a referent - borrowing from an assemblage of film clips, imagery and cultural artefacts - she restages structures and narratives in order to examine and re-appropriate articulations of cultural authority and representation. McFarland is interested in renegotiating ideological structures of cinema using methods associated with the cut-up as a tool to recode cinematic conventions. Most recently, incorporating text, video and spatial interventions, the work is often generated from one or two significant reference points - films, plays and cultural ephermia, which is revisited and translated through an editing process. The aesthetic and political qualities of these sources are used a framework to trace or unravel particular histories, identities, communities and stories.

During the residency with Artlink at Fort Dunree McFarland will develop a new 16mm film  loosely based on a three-act play by Irish playwright Brian Friel titled, Translations. Located in BaileBeag - a fictional village in Co.Donegal - the play is set in the year 1833, a time marked by the beginning of more active intervention into Ireland by Britain. The play focuses on themes of language issues, post-colonialism, identity and culture which play out in the isolated community and hedge school in rural Co.Donegal. In spite of the rural isolation, tales of Greek goddesses are as common as the local oral histories and in addition to Irish, Latin and Greek are spoken in the local hedge schools too. Translations uses language as a tool to explore the inherent problems of communication and narratives which are lost and potentially gained in each act of name place translation, including lingual, cultural and generational,  and is a starting point for the  new work.

Emily McFarland is an artist working in Belfast and Glasgow. She studied at The National College of Art and Design (IRL) before completing an MFA at The Glasgow School of Art. McFarland is currently a recipient of the Freelands Artist Programme at PS2, and a previous recipient of the major Arts Council Northern Ireland ACES Award (2017-18) in partnership with LUX and Artist Moving Image Northern Ireland; Culture Ireland Fund (2016 & 2017) and was awarded the Creative LAB residency at The Centre for Contemporary Art, Glasgow (2018), and Digital Art Studios Residency, Belfast  (2015). She is a co-founder of Soft Fiction Projects, an artist-run organisation devoted to producing digital and printed matter, providing a platform for new artworks, collaborations, writing and exhibitions, and is a former co-director of Catalyst Arts Gallery, Belfast.

Exhibitions include; No Longer Peripheral, (Screening) AEMI & The Douglas Hyde Gallery - Dublin (IRL); EVA INTERNATIONAL 2020 - Limerick (IRL); The Complex Seer (Solo), The Centre for Contemporary Art - Derry-Londonderry (UK); Draft Systems, WRO Media Art Biennale - Wroclaw (PL); CYFEST 10, New York Media Art Centre - (NYC), Taiga Creative Space - Saint Petersburg (RU) & SOFA - Bogota (CO); In the Jungle of Cities, GLASGOW INTERNATIONAL - Glasgow (UK); Í DRÖGUM, Akureyri Art Museum - Akueyri (ISL); Artist Moving Image Northern Ireland, (Screening), Platform Arts - Belfast (UK); ScreenGrab, Pinnacles Gallery - Townsville, (AU); An Other Ending, Glasgow Open House - Glasgow (UK).
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Events
Experimental 16mm Film Workshop
Sunday 27th October 2pm - 5pm
While at Artlink Emily will be leading an experimental 16mm film workshop. This will be run as a drop-in event, open to adults and children over 10 years of age. The event is free.

​Lucy Andrews makes sculptures, installations and architectural interventions. She combines organic and industrial materials to form dynamic arrangements in which the passage of time is  incorporated or alluded to. Recently she's been working with dust, soot, liquid chlorophyll, rocks, and molten plastic, addressing  the provenance and longevity of these materials and probing their fundamental nature as well as the concept of nature itself. The work communicates  a sense of contingency through  forms that are fluid, amorphous and yielding, revealing  the agency of  'matter out of place' in both  human and non-human systems. 
 
She proposes to use the residency to try out ideas for a new body of work. This will engage intimately with the landscape of Dunree by focusing on the fallible shifting  layers of its physical surface, both architectural and geological. She is developing a casting process  which  traces the form of various  terrains while also subsuming  part of each  into the form of  removable  ‘skins’.  This process engages with the legacy of land art, and specifically Robert Smithson’s dialectic of Site and  Non-Site;  a displacement of part of a site, which goes on to become  'a three dimensional map' creating both a presence and an absence. 
 
 Lucy Andrews is a graduate of NCAD Dublin, and the Sandberg Institute, Amsterdam. She was born in Stoke-on-Trent, UK and now works in Ireland and Belgium. Recent exhibitions include: Outgrowths at Leitrim sculpture Centre (2019) I send my love along the Boyne, Solstice arts centre, (2019) And the days run away like wild horses over the hills , Scoil Lorcáin, Dublin  (2019)  In 2018 she was resident at the Bemis Centre for Contemporary Arts, USA.

Artlink is delighted to announce that thanks to the generous support of the Arts Council of Ireland and Donegal County Council it is able to continue the International Artist Residency Program. A panel of experts including Mary Cremin, Director of Void Gallery and curator of this years' Irish entry in the Venice Biennale, Sara Greavu, CCA Gallery, Shelly MacDonnell of Visual Artist Ireland and Stephen Lewis artist and Artlink board member painstakingly examined 592 applications to the program. Matthew de Kersaint Giraudeau was finally selected and will arrive in Ireland next week to undertake an artist residency from Monday 29th July - Saturday 24th August based at Artlink Studios, Fort Dunree, Inishowen, Co. Donegal.

Matthew de Kersaint Giraudeau creates sculptures, drawings, performances and films. His work addresses abject materials, negative affective states, and the ambiguities of language and objects. 

His work examines affects, bodies and language through ‘ugly’ techniques and formal qualities. These paintings and animations incorporate words, objects and sometimes a character he calls ‘The Creep’ who facilitates and is subjected to strange processes that allude to an allegorical or mythical function.

His latest animations are made with the ugliest animation technique from recent history - Flash animation, a style last used in the early days of the internet, before bandwidth rose to allow for streaming video. As he developed these animations, he began to make ‘digital paintings’, and base them on compositions based on from Medieval religious painting which to modern eyes often appear ‘ugly’ or naive because of the different pictorial conventions in that era.

For this residency, he proposes to  make new paintings and animations, developing the work he has been focusing on over the past few years. He will visit sites of interest in the local area such as old monastic sites, as well as speaking to local historians and artists to develop a better  understanding of  how the history of Irish Medieval art is embedded physically in the landscape of Donegal, and how that history is represented in contemporary culture. As part of the residency Matthew will be delivering a talk and spending time with artists to help them develop their practice.

Matthew de Kersaint Giraudeau was an Associate of Open School East, 2013-2014. He runs The Bad Vibes Club, which is a research project into Morbid Ethics, runs Radio Anti with Ross Jardine, and collaborates with Ben Jeans Houghton as the ARKA group. He lives and works in London.

Anaïs Tondeur, a visual artist based in Paris, was artist-in-residence at Artlink from the 12th till the 30th of August 2018. She is a graduate of Central Saint Martin's School and  the  Royal College of Art, London. Her art practice has included collaborations with anthropologists, philosophers, oceanographers and geophysicists and explores the interface between sense and science, fact and fiction. Her work dissolves the boundary between art and science, creating a mysterious and lyrical journey which traces absence, memory and loss.
Through installations, drawings, early photographic techniques and digital processes, her work carries a sense of history, time and perception. Her use of 19th century processes is a nod to an age when the scientist was also an inventor, an artist, or an explorer.
Her practice is anchored in an investigation of fiction as a transformative tool - “Fiction gives us the power to participate in the construction of other possible futures,” says Tondeur, “to build or project ourselves, to test and embody other models in response to ecological crisis.”
She has undertaken residencies at institutions such as CERN, Université Pierre et Marie Curie, and the Hydrodynamics Laboratory at the Ecole Polytechnique. Although her work emerges from within a scientific tradition of research and experimentation, running throughout her  practice is a critique of the time-honoured technique of empirical observation. She questions the limits of what we can see with our eyes, pushing at the boundaries of scientific knowledge.
In 2014 she invented an island, later known as Nuuk - the Greenlandic term for ‘promontory’ or ‘headland’. Over a period of two years she worked with philosophers, physicists, oceanographers and geologists, researching this fictional place, using it as a springboard to reflect on the Anthropocene, the term coined for the new geological epoch, when the impacts of our civilisation on the earth and its ecosystems have outstripped our understanding of them. Through an image making process combining digital and analogue techniques, she unveiled the brief history of humanity’s interaction with Nuuk: from a serendipitous encounter in the early 18th century by a French naval officer to its rediscovery in 1948 by a Nordic nation. Yet none of the expeditions succeeded in surveying the island in its entirety because a deep fog covered Nuuk. She was struck by the similarities between Dunree and what she imagined to exist on Nuuk and hopes to use the residency at Fort Dunree to explore what was behind the fog. 
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What better site than a military camp to “raise questions about the political and ideological underpinnings of architecture and social spaces?” as stated by Tamsin Snow whose practice includes projects developing both physical and digital immersive environments. Snow utilises installation, virtual reality sequences and CGI animations to examine the legacies of modernist architecture and design.
 
Fort Dunree is a military fort or bastion formed of a network of barracks and bunkers set on a remote headland in rural County Donegal facing out onto the North Atlantic. Tamsin proposed “an enquiry into the historic architecture of Fort Dunree and the notion of the Fort or Bastion and the legacies of such models in modernist architecture”. Modernist architecture is driven by a totalizing dynamic, accentuating the tendency of modern capitalism to integrate and rationalize everything it encompasses - with tropes such as the homogenization of space as an extension of a rational order. Le Corbusier’s concept of a dwelling as ‘a machine for living’ within the overarching modernist project may be understood within such extension.
 
It can be argued that Snow’s work brings this spatial rationalization into contrast with two variants of the uncanny: that of an architectural uncanny, and that of the uncanny valley.
 
The rationalized order of military architecture - bastion, tunnel, blockhouse, bunker, pillbox, observation post -sits as an example of military engineering against the natural headland of Fort Dunree. Le Corbusier wrote that “Nature presents itself to us as a chaos; the vault of the heavens, the shapes of lakes and seas, the outlines of hills. The actual scene which lies before our eyes, with its kaleidoscopic fragments and its vague distances, is a confusion”.[1]
 
The rational, the designed, the constructed set amidst nature as chaos can seem to detach the rationalized order of military architecture from its broader social-political programme of control and power relations, and it could be argued that modernist architecture when encountered in such a detached context is experienced as ‘uncanny’ or as an alien form. The architectural uncanny may be described as the encounter with an artificial structure that is perceived as alien to the natural context in which it is set against. It may signify the repression of a broader social-political programme of control and power relations and the emergence of an ideological blind-spot.
 
Likewise, in the notion of the uncanny valley, there is a sense of estrangement. In 1970, Japanese roboticist Masahiro Mori coined the term ‘uncanny valley’ to describe our slight revulsion toward artificial entities(robots, or more recently digital virtual representations) that appear endowed with human attributes. There is likewise a sense of estrangement in the virtual spaces of digital architectural 3D modelling in which the artist engages and creates her work: the sensation of being both engaged in the virtual space yet not feeling fully present, of being both present and absent in the same instant are linked to the uncanniness of an encounter with a spectrum of varying degrees of reality.
 
Tamsin engaged with these forms and research themes within her Fort Dunree residency – which carries the promise of much to encounter.
 
TAMSIN SNOW lives and works in Dublin and London. She completed a BA in Fine Art at Goldsmiths University, London (2008) and an MA in Sculpture at the Royal College of Art, London (2012). Upcoming exhibitions include Cross Sections, Curated byBasak Senova, Kunsthalle Exnergasse, Vienna (2018) and Showroom, Block 336, London (2018). Recent exhibitions include Dead Rubber, UEL Project space, London; Dazed X Confused Emerging Artist Award, Royal Academy, London (2015); Lobby Part I & II, Oonagh Young Gallery, Dublin (2015) and Pavilion, Store, London and was the recipient of the HIAP/ TBG+S Residency Exchange 2017.
 
Text by Declan Sheehan, Independent Curator and part of selection panel for the 2017 residency programme.


[1]Le Corbusier, The City of Tomorrow and its Planning, Dover Publications (New York), 1987, translated from French original Urbanisme, Editions Crès & Cie (Paris), 1925, p.18; 1st English publication Payson & Clarke, New York 1929.
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What is the history of a particular site? Is it within the written records, the published accounts? Is it in the vernacular, verbal histories of its communities, the histories of its individuals? The artifacts and architecture of its past and present?
 
The projects of the artist Becca Albee have been generated by a curiosity about tracing a history, whether that bedrawn from a personal archive or in the public sphere, looking for a tall tale to examine, or a cultural movement, or a particular aesthetic, or a collection of personal artifacts. Her practice uses physical materials as the means with which to research stories, by mining for artifacts, whether those physical materials be old photographic negatives from a family, or newspapers, or published books, orthe personal items carried in pockets or purses. Albee investigates the mechanisms of history by using such material as the original subject material for an art practice, through processes such as photographing the material, then scanning,printing, and rephotographing, staging setups in the studio. These photographs are either the springboard for the project or become part of the final work, recreating artifacts to reconstruct stories.
 
This process is at once both blind and guided, led by the encounters, the directions, wayward and forward, that the research practice uncovers,aprocess of recreating artifactsin which the artist looks to the visual, social, and political implications of these original materials and to the references they can have when re-contextualized.
 
 
As an example, her recent series of prints Radical Feminist Therapy (2016), was inspired by her encounter with a book, Radical Feminist Therapy: Working in the Context of Violence by Bonnie Burstow, which she had read in undergraduate school.The work saw a process of the artist scanning each page of the book that she had annotated by hand – each page in which she had underlined passages and made handwritten notations -and then removing from the scans the printed text, leaving only her handwritten marks, collapsing the scanned pages of each of the fifteen chapters into fifteen single pages, producing a series of fifteen final individual prints - so deconstructing the original treatise while creating an inscrutable visual archive of her earlier thinking.
 
This means of thinking about materials and of making work does several things. Primarily, it deconstructs the hierarchiesof objective and subjective, and positions as central to the artist’s work the challenge of the intersubjective, the notion of knowing the subjective experience of an other and of expressing the subjective experience of a self- a notion described as quale or qualia - a quality or property as perceived or experienced by a person, e.g. ‘in a different world, I could have the qualia of ‘red’ when looking at the sky (but would continue to label it as ‘blue’)’. Secondly,it positions her practice as somewhere between the individualartistic freedom of Paul Klee’s taking a line for a walkand the collective radical potential of the dériveof Guy Debord. In this, Albee’s stated method is a powerful approach to adoptto a particular site and its written records, its artifacts and its vernacular histories.
 
The technique of the dérive is well known as a critical concept in the theories of the Situationist International, as an unplanned journey through a landscape(in the case of the Situationist International, usually urban) or as a rapid passage through varied ambiencesin which participants let themselves be guided by disorientation into negating their everyday relations and everydayconditioning drawn by the attractions of the terrain and the encounters they find there.
 
The relationship of an art practice to the commitment of an artist’s residency can de understood as the gradual progress of theorientationof the practice to a new environment: beyond this, Albee’s practice also holds the promise of encountering Fort Dunree with this force of a parallel disorientation.
 
BECCA ALBEE's work includes photography, sculpture, video, and performance. She received her MFA from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, a BA from The Evergreen State College in Olympia, Washington, and attended Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture. Her work has recently been written about in Artforum, Aperture, The New York Times, and Bomb. Recent residencies and fellowships include: Yaddo, Irish Museum of Modern Art, and MacDowell Colony.  She is currently an Associate Professor of Art at The City College of New York, CUNY.

Text by Declan Sheehan, Independent Curator and part of selection panel for the 2017 residency programme.
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There is a dynamic and potent sense of the paradox in the artist residency of Niamh McCann in the breathtaking and remote landscape of Artlink in Fort Dunree.  The artist has said:
 
 I think of myself largely as a landscape artist – of the constructed landscape, the stuff we make, the stuff we consume.
 
With the  rural landscape itself commonly conceived of as  unfabricated or unconstructed, that idea here of the constructed landscape is particularly striking. It prompts notions not only of how the artist understands the world, but also of how the artist engages in her own practice with a process akin to a kind of construction or assemblage - a term commonly read in the history of visual arts as referring to a form of art that is made by assembling disparate physical elements (perhaps most easily understood as a 3D version of collage).In fact, in a contemporary sense, the notion of assemblage can be usefully extended to be more than a methodology for a single artwork, and be considered as a way of  thinking about a whole exhibition, with each element of the exhibition functioning as one physical element assembled by the artist and acting as a combined work or selection of works with a certain affect. Curator Mary Cremin wrote this of Niamh McCann:
 
The notion of artist as nomads, collecting cultural artifacts and gathering them together to create an imaginative landscape is an undercurrent in her work.
 
In a contemporary art context, the proximity here of the terms nomad(ism) and assemblage could also act as a reference to the complex notion of assemblage theory. This theoretical model developed by philosophers Gilles Deleuze, Felix Guattari, and Manuel De Landa is an analysis of the interaction of forces in society and culture, which looks at the whole as a combination of  interrelated component parts, and how this whole, now acting as a collective, generates specific complex behaviors and qualities that were not present within any of the individual parts. These are emergent properties, the characteristics that a part gains when it becomes part of a bigger system, the characteristics parts gain when they are combined to act as a whole which is more a sum of its parts, which has functions and qualities that diverge from those of the constituent parts.
 
The artist has spoken of her art practice constantly engaging with the notion of a specific circular narrative, the circular relationship between the shaping of our environment and having it shape us in return - a notion which perhaps when extended to her practice can situate the context, the artwork, the viewer, the audience all working together to generate emergent properties, an affect that is bigger than the sum of its parts and that diverges from those of the constituent parts. This process of making new properties is generated very much from an art practice as a maker. Across many projects, the artist has made individually defined sculptural objects, paintings, drawings that function independently but which also function within the overall construction of an exhibition as a kind of sculptural poetry, in a dynamic relationship between the audience, the object and its mode of display specific to that context, an exploration of the position of the viewer when confronted with the act of looking at, and relating to, objects within specific contexts.
 
The primary context of Artlink Fort Dunree as a site is of course the historic resonance of the location and the beauty of the surrounding habitat. As a decommissioned historic military fort, the site contains what the artist could  describe as the visual debris of history – that artist has written of her interest in how certain visual debris survives and continues to evolve even when separated from initiating ideology. The Fort Dunree site sees the display of redundant military equipment and infrastructure, the symbolic language of nation and military in the visual culture and design of the location. The artist has proposed to work with the histories, stories and resonances within both these historical and natural landscapes by engaging with them through a precise and defined visual language - Vexillological design, the symbolic language of flag-making. In a process of onsite studio research and practice, and invited workshops, the artist will explore the Fort Dunree archives and museum, the local folklore and indigenous landscape, to compile a potential list of symbols for use on a flag which should be both functional and beautiful:
 
a functioning object, to represent and state intent within the local community, a flag to join, not divide(which)would exist as standalone artwork, capable of being sited and integrated into the fabric of and function of the location.
 
As a final gesture, here once again is a striking example of the paradoxical in the flag engaged with at its apogee and functioning with distinctive emergent properties generated from its diverse constituent parts:
 
The flag represents a living country and is itself considered a living thing.
(United States Code, Title 4, Chapter 1, Part 8j.)
 
Niamh McCann is an Irish artist living and working in Dublin. A graduate of Chelsea College of Art & Design, London, She has exhibited extensively in Europe, Ireland and in the USA. Recent solo exhibitions include La Perruque (Protest Song) at MAC Belfast (2016) and Just Left of Copernicus in Visual Carlow (2016).
 
Text by Declan Sheehan, Independent Curator and part of selection panel for the 2017 residency programme.