Dates: 19th November 2022 – 14th January 2023
Gallery: Great Patrick Street
Hold on Tight was a provocative exhibition of corporeal artworks by four artists working in performance and moving image: Sinéad O’Donnell, Katherine Nolan, Jayne Parker, and Hollie Miller. Each of these four female artists worked in response to their bodies, questioning the vulnerability of human flesh through lived and sometimes violent experience.
Curated for the Golden Thread Gallery by Peter Richards and Mary Stevens, Hold on Tight presented the different ways in which these artists used materials and how they could be manipulated by the body. Uncomfortable tensions underpinned the exhibition; abject guts and soft slime contrasted with ice and hard porcelain. A visceral exploration of moist, slippery and sticky material gave way to a precariously tall pile of plates teetering on the edge of falling over. Both the artistic concept and the nature of the materials merged. Different aspects of control were important, e.g. what could be made to happen? What did we anticipate? What could we let go?
Performative pieces that took place during the exhibition, leaving traces and ephemera—shattered plates, for example—then became part of the show. The artworks appeared to be at a sort of precipice, akin to our bodily experience of life. We were waiting for something to happen.
Golden Thread Gallery was a leading contemporary visual art gallery in Belfast. We worked to broaden access to and improve public experience of visual art in Northern Ireland, with programmes of high quality that embraced the breadth and variety of contemporary arts practice, and developed, supported and promoted the work of Northern Irish artists. Our mission statement was: “Creating a context, challenging perceptions, promoting creativity, delivering contemporary visual art for all.” Annually we hosted six major exhibitions in our main galleries and six Project Space exhibitions of emerging local artists; workshops for all ages/abilities, talks and tours, artist mentoring, and community outreach.
A Text
Dr Angela Halliday
This is a work in progress, held onto into existence.
Fresh flesh, blank leaves.
Arrival early, timely, late.
The act is all muscular and sheer grit. In this moment the bones rest. This is utterly endured.
The moment pivots on life and death. The organ is aged, less reliable, and yet you emerge.
The isolation is necessary, I read too high. I am taken away from the others and you must
join me in segregation.
A Lone. The antithesis of nurture.
There is no approach to the bed, the misanthropic apparatus. We lie on the inflatable pillow
that tries to hide under crisp polyester. I know you are there, non-compliant, uninviting me
to rest. You are not receptive to humans. I am not receptive to euphemisms.
you’ve been through the mill
you must be shattered
a bit the worse for wear
This is a remorseless room of tiles and glass only moderated by a marginal view of industrial
gable ends, as grey as the atmosphere that encloses us, a desperate pair.
You are pink and yellow, I am white. We are cast in blue.
We grow and degenerate. We will leave here, and autonomy will be restored.
A papery Corpus,
Committed acts, written down, figurative records.
Transformations and edits, censor and cut, enlarge, reduce, deliver.
In our short eternity, we navigate each recorded word, that administration of us.
Signs and symptoms created by living changes, chronicled through subjective, obscure text.
It is it,
it is not us.
We may labour over the determinations of others, meaning to shatter each articulation.
And when we create this work, the Flesh speaks. In its actuality, wielding a distinct
vocabulary. Form and movement push back the textual and bring forward perception. Here
is held up a visceral mirror that we may not want to glance into.
Whether we look or not, we read.
We authorise our own texts.
About the Artists and works
Sinéad O’Donnell
‘Violent’ Performance
Prepared with a stack of 220 white dinner plates.
Sinéad O’Donnell is an Irish performance artist, who works with installation, site, and time-based art. Based in Belfast, O’Donnell studied sculpture at the University of Ulster, textiles in Dublin and visual performance and time-based practices at Dartington College of Arts. She was lead artist and curator for an ‘Unlimited’ commission entitled CAUTION as part of the London 2012 Festival. She is currently a Flax Arts Studios artist, Belfast, Northern Ireland receiving the Arts Council of Northern Ireland Major award in 2017.
Her work explores identity, borders, and barriers through different encounters. She sets up actions or situations that demonstrate complexities, contradictions, or commonality between medium and discipline, timing and spontaneity, intuition and methodology, artist and audience. O’Donnell often uses her body to investigate boundaries, particularly in relation to the restrictions placed on women.
Recent work has been presented at: International Performance Art Archive, Black Kit – Die Schwarze Lade, Cologne/ Giessen/ Burgbrohl, Germany (2022); Millennium Court Art Centre, Portadown, Northern Ireland (2019); Subte Contemporary Art Space, Montevideo, Uruguay (2018); Future Histories, Kilmainham Goal, Dublin, Ireland (2016); ’TIPA’ this is performance art, Peacock Visual Arts centre, Aberdeen, Scotland (2015); Art of the Lived Experiment, Bluecoat, Liverpool, UK; Voices Travel, Kaohsiung Museum of Fine Arts, Taiwan (2014); Asiatopia, Bangkok Arts & Cultural Centre, Thailand (2013); Museum of Contemporary Art, Zagreb, Croatia, (2013); Golden Thread Gallery, Belfast, Northern Ireland, (2012);Southbank Centre, London (2012).
Katherine Nolan
Fluid Flesh 2021
Dr. Katherine Nolan is an artist, lecturer and curator. Working primarily in live and lens-based performance, her art practice investigates gender, identity and desire across live and digital spaces. She has exhibited internationally in Europe, America and Asia. Recent exhibitions include: The Mistress of the Mantle solo show at MART Dublin (2017); and group shows at LACE Los Angeles (2018); Supermarket Art Fair Stockholm (2016); and Future Histories at Kilmainham Gaol (2016)
She regularly curates with MART, Livestock Performance Art Platform, and previously Dublin Live Art Festival. Recent projects include: HOME made HOME at MART (2020); Care. Complicity. Critique at the Centre for Irish Contemporary Art Los Angeles (2019); and Livestock’s bi-monthly experimental performance platform.
Her research practice occurs at the interstices of lens-based media, performance and digital culture. Recent papers include: Fear of Missing Out: Performance Art through the Lens of Participatory Digital Culture (College Art Association Annual Conference 2020, Chicago); and Reading Queer Irish Performance across Live and Digital Practices (Interfaces Journal, 2021). She is currently Lecturer in Creative Digital Media at the Technological University Dublin.
Jayne Parker
K.
1989. 13 mins b/w 16mm film
K. is a film in two parts. Part 1: A woman pulls her intestine out of her mouth and lets it fall in a soft pile at her feet. Then she knits the intestine using only her arms. Part 2: She stands on the edge of a pool and makes herself dive again and again. ‘K.’ is an abbreviation of ‘to knit’. The British Film Institute National Film Archive re-mastered the negative of K. (1989) from its original 16mm film to 35mm film in 2011.
“I bring out into the open all the things I have taken in that are not mine and thereby make room for something new. I make an external order out of an internal tangle.” – J.P.
b. 1957, Nottingham, UK, Parker is an artist and filmmaker whose work has been widely shown, both nationally and internationally, in major art institutions, in survey screenings of British artists’ film-making, on television and in film and music festivals. She studied at Canterbury College of Art (1977-80) and the Slade School of Fine Art, University College London (1980-82) in what was then their Experimental Media area. Working with 16mm film, analogue photographic processes and object making, including stone carving, much of her recent work explores the form and expression of music. Her films are distributed by LUX <www.lux.org.uk> and she teaches at the Slade School of Fine Art, University College London, where she is a Professor and Head of Graduate Fine Art Media.
Hollie Miller
TO MELT/ TO CRYSTALLIZE (2019)
Single Channel Video, 3 Minutes 13 Seconds, HD, Colour, Black & White
Hollie Miller is a performance artist with an interdisciplinary practice and background in contemporary dance. She has performed in contemporary art galleries, museums, land art and performance art festivals in the UK, Europe, Finland, Switzerland, Argentina and Japan. She holds an MA from Royal College of Art (2016) and a BPA from Northern School of Contemporary Dance (2010).
“I use my body as an activated and politicised site. Following my performances, sculptural objects, material traces and clothing are often left in the gallery as artefacts that haunt the space in the afterlife with late viewers. I view the photographic documentation of my performances as crystallisations of living images.” H Millar
She has been artist in residence at: Hogchester Arts (UK); NAIRS Contemporary Art Centre (CH); Serlachius Museum (FI); and La Ira de Dios (AR). Her short films have been shown at feminist film festivals internationally and in 2019 she won The Next Thing Moving Image Award at Bury Art Museum (UK). Exhibitions include: San Mei Gallery, South Kiosk, UK; Mexican Arts Society, London; Airspace Gallery, Stoke-on-Trent; NewBridge Project, Newcastle; and Baltic39 Gallery (UK). Select performances include: MEM Experimental Festival Bilbao (ES); Land Art Biennale Art Safiental (CH); Revolve Performance Art Days (SE); London’s Biennale of International Performance Art & Noise; Apulia Land Art Festival (IL); and 100 Years DADA (JP).
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