West Cork Arts Centre is pleased to bring a manifestation of Amanda Coogan’s recent, highly acclaimed exhibition at the RHA, Dublin with a series of performances to Uillinn. At the opening Amanda Coogan will perform You told me to wash and clean my ears.

The exhibition, across both galleries will include a series of sculptural objects from Amanda’s performances including The Yellow Mountain, which was commissioned by West Cork Arts Centre and made through a collaboration between Amanda and a group of young people from WCAC Friday Night Youth Arts Group in 2009.

Amanda Coogan is one of the most exciting contemporary visual artists practicing in the arena of Performance Art. She is at the forefront of some of the most exciting and prolific durational performances to date. Her extraordinary work is challenging, provocative and always visually stimulating. Her expertise lies in her ability to condense an idea to its very essence and communicate it through her body. Her work often begins with her own body and challenges the expectations of the contexts, such as head banging to Beethoven’s ‘Ode to Joy’, and signing the lyrics to Gill Scott-Heron’s ‘The Revolution will not be Televised’. Coogan’s recent practice has been concentrating on the longitudinal durational performance presented as living installation in the gallery. This durational aspect invites elements of chaos, with the unknown and unpredicted erupting dynamically through her live artworks.

West Cork Arts Centre builds on a number of collaborations with Amanda Coogan including Performance Event, 2004 and The Yellow Mountain, 2009. Linking to the BA in Visual Art Programme on Sherkin Island and with Cork-based contemporary dancer and choreographer, Inma Pavon, Amanda has developed a series of durational performance events as part of the exhibition. These will build and develop over 6 days of live performance on Thursday 24, Friday 25, Saturday 26 and Tuesday 29, Wednesday 30 and Thursday 31 March from 12 noon to 4:45pm each day. This is a unique opportunity to experience exceptional live performance that is ambitious, complex and demanding.

Published jointly by Limerick City Gallery of Art, Royal Hibernian Academy and West Cork Arts Centre, the publication I’ll sing you a song from around the town visually documents Coogan’s and her collaborators’ performances of six pieces at the RHA Gallery in the Autumn of 2015. Six writers were commissioned to respond to their experience of one of each piece performed. Authors included are Brenda O’Connell, EL Putnam, Liz Burns, Jennifer Fitzgibbon, Helen Carey and Luz Mar González-Arias. The book retails at €15.00 available from the galleries.