The expanded field Co-curated by Lismore Castle Arts and Askeaton Contemporary Arts

In 2018, Lismore Castle Arts and Askeaton Contemporary Arts co-curated, The Expanded Field a group exhibition and culmination of a series of artist residencies, which collectively explored the multifaceted nature of the Irish landscape. Aiming to find new methodologies and reflections on the urgent issues it faces today, artists Stuart Whipps, The Center for Land Use Interpretation, Olivia Plender, The Domestic Godless, Superfolk and Filip Van Dingenen all debut new artworks.

Askeaton in Limerick and Lismore in Waterford were used as initial bases, The Expanded Field artists had prior to the exhibition for 18 months, established many contexts to dwell and work within. Their journeys have branched out to uninhabited islands, schoolrooms and quarries, with keen research interests and inquisitive stances finding unexpected and rarely explored terrains - everywhere has a story to tell and secrets to divulge.

Cork-based collective The Domestic Godless, known for their irreverent attitude to the food and drinks industry, launched their new Spirit of Munster Collection, a series of alcoholic drinks derived from extensive ramblings around the province. Many unusual ingredients featured in the six variations were available to sample at St Carthage Hall. The Domestic Godless were founded by artists Stephen Brandes and Mick O’Shea, later joined by Irene Murphy under the Cork Artist’s Collective banner at the exhibition Artists/Groups at The Project Arts Centre, Dublin in 2003. Since then, it has been their mission to explore the potential of food (its taste, its presentation, its history and its cultural values) as a vehicle for irreverent artistic endeavour and experimentation. Through recipes, installations and public presentations they employ food as both a concept and a medium through which to convey humour, empathy and other qualities that distinguish art from purely craft.

The Center for Land Use Interpretation, founded in 1994 in Los Angeles, is a research and education organisation interested in understanding the nature and extent of human interaction with the surface of the earth, finding new meanings in the intentional and incidental forms that we individually and collectively create. Aurora Tang, CLUI’s programme manager, toured Ireland earlier that year, and documented locations such as the M7’s Barrack Obama Plaza, and Lough Boora Sculpture Park in Offaly. Tang’s visit to the Copper Coast, the abandoned extractive industries of the Waterford now a designated UNESCO site, had resulted in the debut of a new artwork, creating a comparison between varied sites of mineral extraction on different sides of the globe. Described by CLUI as a “landscan”, a video shows an elongated aerial flyover in Utah, where solid rock is transformed by mining operations into billions of dollars worth of copper, gold, and silver every year. This landscape featured the Bingham Pit, a site that its owner, Rio Tinto, claims is the largest man-made excavation on earth, and a smelter with a smokestack as tall as the Empire State Building.

Video documentation and graphic prints made from seaweed describe The Algae Summit, an international conference convened by Belgian artist Filip Van Dingenen on uninhabited Coney Island on the Shannon River Estuary. The area, an acknowledged centre of seaweed cultivation from at least medieval times, saw decline and depopulation in the 1950s with the introduction of chemical fertilisers to replace the use of seaweed. Van Dingenen’s gathering of artists, ecologists, policy makers and local inhabitants speaks of this history and the still-unresolved nature of harvesting rights, now subject to aggressive corporate multinational overture.

Superfolk are a Mayo-based design team led by Gearoid Muldowney and Jo Anne Butler.

In a new display at the time entitled Trade Roots, their research into the possible future directions of design culture in Ireland are presented in a variety of objects that could be handled and touched by exhibition visitors. In encountering tactile materials from around the world such as Portuguese cork and Canadian cedar stool, boiled Italian leather and Connemara marble, Superfolk point to a dissolution of borders and nation states. Trade Roots acts as a place of potential, of radicalisation of the everyday through a heightened awareness of materials, of their sourcing, manipulation and exchange as an open, communal activity.

Stockholm-based British artist Olivia Plender is known as an investigator of the social structures that bind together and enforce communities. An artwork, appearing as an instructional school poster, was realised in collaboration with children in Askeaton and Lismore. In asking groups of five to eight year olds to imagine alternative versions of their respective towns, a world upside down emerges, akin to speculative fictions developed by Utopian socialists in the 19th century such as William Morris’ News From Nowhere or Charles Fourier’s visions for a new order free from inequality. Plender’s workshops evokes how children hold their own surreal perspective, one extremely sensitive to social and power dynamics. In their thoughts, no one dies but difficulties arise about how to feed an ever increasing population; gravity and the difficulty of ploughing upside down are discussed; and conversations abound about whether gender still exists.

When asked about his first project in Ireland, Birmingham artist Stuart Whipps said “It’s about stones. It’s also about birds, and about plants, and what it means for these things to shift from one place to another or what it means when we shift our perspective or our way of looking at them.” Various shapes from ‘Miscelanea Structura Curiosa’ a surreal and sometimes grotesque 18^th century book on garden design by Birr’s Samuel Chearnley have been remade in stone by Whipps, juxtaposed with an image of corporate-style planting of non-native plants at the Rusal Aughinish bauxite refinery, Ireland’s largest industrial site. In addition, a new film followed the cutting and grinding of limestone to a fragile one millionth-of-a-metre thin section, with resident African Sand Martens nesting in the residual dust created by the process of quarrying the stone.

Running concurrently to The Expanded Field, Lismore Castle Arts presented No More Water, a major solo exhibition by Rashid Johnson (see www.lismorecastlearts.ie). In addition, Askeaton Contemporary Arts presented the 13th edition of Welcome to the Neighbourhood, an annual festival of contemporary art featuring resident artists and numerous public events from July 14 – 28 (see www.askeatonarts.com for programme details)

The Expanded Field was made possible by an Arts Council Visual Art Project Award. In addition, many organisations hosted artists by facilitating a variety of artistic research, production and discursive events. In particular we thank McKeon Stone, Laois; Utah Museum of Fine Arts, University of Utah; Birr Castle, Offaly; Temple Bar Gallery and Studios, Dublin; aemi, Dublin; Askeaton Civic Trust, Limerick; Askeaton National School and Lismore Mochuda National School; The LAB, Dublin; ARC (Art and Research Collaboration programme) IADT, Dun Laoghaire; Groundwork, Cornwall; Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin; the staff at Lismore Castle; Sean Willoughby.