Silver Part 3
21 November to 16 December 2015
Silver Part 3 at Uillinn: West Cork Arts Centre was the third in a series of exhibitions taking place throughout 2015 to celebrate the twenty-fifth anniversary of the Backwater Artists Group.
Founded in 1990 by graduates of the Crawford College of Art and Design, Backwater Artists Group (BAG) is the largest purpose-built artist studio facility in the region. It houses an established artists' group, now in its twenty fifth year. Backwater is an artist-run organisation with an artist-led Board of Directors who are dedicated to improving the working conditions and support structures for visual artists. Located in Wandesford Quay in the heart of Cork City, BAG share their premises with Cork Printmakers and CIT Wandesford Quay Gallery.
Backwater catered for thirty-nine artists at the time of this exhibition. The artists worked in many different disciplines including sculpture, painting, photography, new media, installation, performance, print, ceramics and stained glass. For the exhibition at Uillinn, work by twelve of the Backwater artists was selected for a group exhibition spanning both galleries.
The exhibition was opened by Peter Murray, Director, Crawford Municipal Gallery, Cork on Saturday 21 November.

Cosmic Oceans 
Rachel Parry 
26 September - 11 November 2015 
Cosmic Oceans was a solo exhibition by Beara-based artist Rachel Parry, using the space of Gallery 2. 
The artist says of her work ‘For this exhibition, I have made a three dimensional version of an early 19th century Indian painting. It is part of a folio called the Nath Charit which deeply affects me. I have also made a series of 150 x 50 cm drawings on rice paper, combining elements of the painting with diagrams of the senses. This is the first time I have made work based on an existing piece of visual art.'

Wasteland 
Eva Koťátková and Dominik Lang 
26 September - 7 November 2015 
Wasteland transformed West Cork Arts Centre’s James O'Driscoll gallery into a hypothetical place, an absurd playground overflowing with salvaged objects, postal packages, sculptures and debris. Nestled amidst its poetic surrounds the story of the artists’ attempts to dismantle and relocate a public park to a new location unfolds. 
This exhibition explored the institutional rules and regulations that pervade our lives, and what happens when things slip through the cracks. It also marked the first collaboration between Czech artists Eva Kot’átková and Dominik Lang.

Charles Tyrrell 
15 August - 19 September 2015 
New Paintings 
This new collection of paintings by Charles Tyrrell continued his explorations with paint on aluminium. 
The artist had worked with aluminium for many years, usually alongside working on canvas, enjoying the contrasting and complementary nature of the two grounds. However for the past three years he had been working exclusively on aluminium. The paintings in this exhibition had grown from the very particular response of the paint to the metal ground; a ground that has been scoured and in which a geometric frame work has been engraved. 
The paintings attempted to achieve a distillation and intensification of the artist’s experience of the manifest world; working with natural forms and forces set within the armature of the conscious and the rational.

Tara Brandel: 25 
James O'Driscoll Gallery 
18 July - 8 August 2015 
25 was a retrospective exhibition of images, videos and text from twenty five years of Tara Brandel's choreography. With reoccurring themes of gender, sexuality and strong female archetypes, Tara's dance is influenced by her time spent in Berlin, London, San Francisco and West Cork. With an underlying thread of feminism and more than a passing nod to gay culture, this exhibition encapsulated Uillinn: West Cork Arts Centre's Dancer In Residence, Tara Brandel's ongoing interest in creating non-normative and diverse images of the body and especially the female body on stage.

Laura Gannon: Silver House 
Gallery II 
18 July - 10 August 2015 
Silver House comprised an installation made especially for Uillinn, of new large-scale metallic drawings and sculptures responding to the architecture and natural light of the gallery, and the premiere of a significant new film work Silver House which was made on location in Goleen, West Cork, in the spring of 2015. Gannon collaborated with composer Susan Stenger who incorporated recorded sounds of the house and the landscape to create a new audio composition. Silver House features Eilish Lavelle who created a unique environment, where she designed and modified her house and garden over a forty-year period. The film was accompanied by a white fur bench referencing the modernist designer Adolf Loos.Read about the Silver House Discovery Box created in response to the exhibition by artist Sarah Ruttle here. The VAN critique here. DNOTE here. 

West Cork Arts Centre Members' Exhibtion 
20 June - 11 July 
West Cork Arts Centre celebrated the 31st annual Members’ Exhibition which was the first members’ exhibition in Uillinn, West Cork Arts Centre's new building. 
West Cork Arts Centre Members’ Exhibition has a long tradition of displaying the work of its membership artists, with both professional and amateur artists exhibiting side by side. This year member artists were asked to submit up to three pieces incorporating new and older work of any scale.

Nearshore 
Cormac Boydell, Karen Hendy John Kingerlee, Kathleen Standen 
James O'Driscoll Gallery 
9 May to 11 June 2015

Nearshore was an exhibition of work inspired by the indented, west Cork and south Kerry coasts - a coastline of peninsulas, estuaries, harbours and islands, where sea and land meet at gravelly and sandy beaches, mudflats and cliffs as well as at piers, docks and slipways. 
It included new wall works by Cormac Boydel which represented local sights such as Roaring Water Bay and the Fastnet Rock. 
The extensive triptych Liminal by Karen Hendy reinforced the artist's occupation with the subject of time through the exploration of thresholds and flux of past, present and future. 
John Kingerlee's paintings refered to that enigmatic place where it is land no longer but not yet sea, that indefinable edge where tide 'rubs things out', concealing, then revealing; where sea and sky can also merge. Kathleen Standen's exquisite ceramic sculptures also referenced the colours and textures of the shore and objects cast adrift there.

Tess Leak: I shall make for my own castle 
Gallery II 
9 May to 11 June 2015

Tess’s solo exhibition I shall make for my own castle was a culmination of work developed during her residency at Uillinn: West Cork Arts Centre comprising large scale ‘emergency drawings’, sound collaborations and a collection of ’42 unfinished books that would be brilliant’. 
Tess also commissioned composer Justin Grounds to create a piece of music for strings, bassoon and the phono-fiddle that she had recently inherited from her grand uncle, music hall performer Frank Clifton. The Vespertine Quintet, of which Tess is a member, premiered the work, also titled I shall make for my own castle, at the opening of this show on Friday 8 May.

Antrum and Disconnect 
20 March – 2 May 2015

The opening season at Uillinn: West Cork Arts Centre continued with two new exhibitions;Antrum, Daphne Wright’s solo exhibition of sculpture and video and Disconnect, a three person exhibition of installation and paintings by west Cork-based artists - Bernadette Cotter,John Doherty and Sue Crellin McCarthy. 
The official opening of Antrum and Disconnect took place on Friday 20 March 2015 with Mary McCarthy, Director of the National Sculpture Factory.

Fourth Space 
31 January - 14 March 2015

Fourth Space comprised sculptural and installation work by 9 leading artists based in Ireland: David Beattie, Karl Burke, Rhona Byrne, Maud Cotter, Angela Fulcher, Mark Garry, Caoimhe Kilfeather, Dennis McNulty and Liam O'Callaghan. 
The exhibition, curated by Director, Ann Davoren, extended throughout the ground floor and first floor galleries, and drew together works by artists who shared an approach to making that is fluid, questioning and open-ended and yet displayed a fascination with space and materiality. The artworks both articulated and responded to the galleries and the location and context of the new building. Each artist’s work remained specific to their own concerns and practice, but came together in this exhibition to experiment with, and enquire into, notions of space, place, time, legacy and transformation.

2013 PROGRAMME

Three Days Later 
Magnhild Opdøl 
16 November 2013 - 7 January 2014 
Three Days Later, featured new work by Norwegian artist, Magnhild Opdøl. Comprising film, sculpture, drawing and photographic work, this dark, yet thought-provoking exhibition invited the viewer to contemplate our relationship with the natural world.

Alphabet: featuring Ireland: Alphabet Series by Cork Printmakers and other work 
20 September - 9 November 
This exhibition featured the Ireland: Alphabet Series by Cork Printmakers; a sculptural piece,Abecedarium by Roscarbery-based artist and poet Michael Ray and from the Collection of the University College Cork Art Collection, Our Union Only In Truth by Garrett Phelan.

Alphabet Series was initiated by Cork Printmakers consists of 26 prints by 26 artists, each work taking a letter of the alphabet as a starting point. The artists are: Dave Connolly, Zoe D’Alton, Deirdre Delamere, Tom Doig, Aisling Dolan, Shirley Fitzpatrick,Marion Gilroy, Valerie Gleeson, Sean Hanrahan, Catherine Hehir, Heike Heilig, Mae Holland,Marianne Keating, Jo Kelley, Eileen Kennedy, Brian Lalor, Paul la Rocque, Aoife Layton,Peter McMorris, Donna McNamara, Claire Nagle, Noelle Noonan, Shane O’Driscoll, AntoniaO’Mahony, Georgina Sutton and Sylvia Taylor.

The exhibition opened to the public with a Culture Night Gallery Talk, When Alpha met Omega, Adventures with the Alphabet by Brian Lalor, artist, writer and Chair of Cork Printmakers.

Diarmuid Delargy: Paintings and Prints 
17 August - 14 September 
This exhibition comprised a selection of Delargy’s significant oil paintings and a number of monotypes musing on the theme 'Art and Extinction'. Click here to download a catalogue of works from this exhibition. A video of the Artist's Talk in the Gallery is available to view here

Processes of Change 
Tomasz Madajczak 
20 July - 10 August 
A multimedia art project comprising photographic works, sound installation and video installation, based on the private experience of the artist in relation to the global, social and technological changes which influence the life styles and focus points of modern societies. Tomasz Madajcza is a Polish artists living and working in west Cork. For video documentation of the exhibition, please click here

E •gress 
26 July - 3 August 2013 
An audio-visual installation which engaged with the paradox of absence and presence and its relation to Dementia, which takes as its inspiration the work of Boss (2004) around Ambiguous Loss Theory, made by artist Marie Brett and musician Kevin O’Shanahan in collaboration with a number of partner organisations. A catalogue accompanied the artwork which was launched on Thursday 25 July by poet Thomas McCarthy.

West Cork Arts Centre Members’ Exhibition 
15 June - 13 July 2013 
A group exhibition celebrating visual art in West Cork, the exhibition is open to all artist members of West Cork Arts Centre. It is an opportunity for the Arts Centre to showcase the talent of the artists who live in the area or are connected to it through the Arts Centre. Each artist can enter one piece in any two or three dimensional medium. The variety of styles and subject matter makes the Members’ Exhibition one of the most diverse exhibitions of the year and is a great way to start the summer season. 
To see a selection of the work on exhibition, download this PDF (1.1MB) here and here

Octagon 
4 May - 8 June 2013 
An exhibition of painting, print, drawing, mixed-media, video and sound works by Alison Cronin, Marie Cullen, Sharon Dipity, Paul Forde-Cialis, Ian Humphreys, Tess Leak, Susan Montgomery and Sarah Ruttle, which showcased the diverse studio practices of 8 artists who facilitate creative learning programmes at the Centre.

See for Yourself 
12 - 27 April 2013 
An exhibition of artwork by second level students participating in WCAC's Second Level Exhibition Project in response to gallery visits to Dermot Seymour, Selected Paintings 1987 – 2012, and Rita Duffy, Arctic Circus at West Cork Arts Centre in Autumn 2012, supported by facilitating artist Alison Cronin and their class teachers. The participating schools were Clonakilty Community College, Rossa College, Skibbereen and Sacred Heart Secondary School, Clonakilty 
The exhibition also featured Wheel of Life, a short experimental film by the Youth Vision Project, a group of young people from Clonakilty, guided by artist Tomasz Madajczak.

Mikala Dwyer: Panto Collapsar 
2 February - 7 March 2013 
Mikala Dwyer is one of Australia’s most established and influential contemporary artists. This exhibition included an array of theatrically staged sculptures, totem-like structures and an extended wall painting. Dwyer is known for her playful, imaginative style and abstract installations that explore different notions of time, space and reality. The exhibition opened on Friday 1 February with an introductory talk by Ruth E. Lyons, Artist and Tour Co-ordinator and Niamh O'Donnell, General Manager & Executive Producer, Project Arts Centre and can be seen here

Lecturer, author and critic, Jon Bywater's response to Panto Collapsar can be seen here

Project Arts Centre on Tour: 
Panto Collapsar was originally commissioned by Project Arts Centre and the tour has been made possible with the support of an Arts Council of Ireland touring award and The Australia Council for the Arts. Originally curated by Tessa Giblin, Project Arts Centre, Dublin.