Title

Where you are lost, we are Sídhe

Year

2019

Category

Curator

Where you are lost, we are Sídhe

Gallery Project Page

A group exhibition at Engage Art Studios, Galway. This was the Engage Art gallery's inaugural exhibition.

“[This] prompted me to wonder if ‘woman’ and ‘interior’ were synonymous."
Julieanna Preston, Performing Matter: Interior Surface and Feminist Actions

Where you are lost, we are Sídhe is explored ideas situated between land art practice, traditionally-feminine creative crafts, and contemporary art practice. Each of the artwork presented is rooted to an action that began outdoors. The artists look at natural landscapes and social structures and explore their place within them as women, as artists, as occupants of space. Their actions are different from those of men artists who work with landscape: They do not conquer, they do not reshape, displace, or replace. They place a body or a texture, they harvest to create.

creatively acting outdoors, indoors, and filling the space with their work, these artists are constituting a reality in which land art means placing and creating rather than displacing and reshaping. The idea of “constituting a reality” references Judith Butler’s ‘Performative Acts and Gender Constitution: An Essay in Phenomenology and Feminist Theory’ where Butler states that acting within public reality, unlike theatrical acting, potentially constitutes a changed reality. The work is rooted outdoors; it comments on the social structures that await us when we walk outside; it represents a creative relationship with land.

Participating artists:
Monique Blom, Zara Lyness, Ilaria Pellizzaro, Anushiya Sundaralingam, and Ruby Wallis.

Events

The opening event included a performance by artist Zara Lyness.

Curatorial "In Conversation" event with Engage's own Grace Mitchell.

Closing Critique, writer and editor Michaele Cutaya (CIRCA Magazine, Engage Art Studios board member) facilitated a critical conversation about the artwork included in the exhibition. This public conversation discussed the artistic outcomes as well as the creative and conceptual intentions of the various pieces.

Photos by Ruby Wallis.