Elisabeth S Clark and Adrian Williams: Between the Woods and the Water
Curated by David Upton • Residency at The Courthouse Arts Centre Monday 7 to Friday 11 September • Performance of Watering Hole at Tinahely village square followed by reception in Courthouse Friday 11 September 1.30pm
The Courthouse Arts Centre (Tinahely), Mermaid Arts Centre and the Wicklow County Council Arts Office are partnering together for the first time with funding from the Arts Council of Ireland to work with a Curator in Residence, David Upton.
David will host a week long residency with two international artists, Adrian Williams and Elisabeth S Clark in the Courthouse as well as curate an exhibition of their work in Mermaid. Adrian Williams will work during the residency with students from Kilcommon National School and a brass band to produce a performance of her work entitled Watering Hole in the village square. Elisabeth S Clark will perform her work Today I turned a library of books inside out, in Tinahely library throughout the day. Drawing on the area’s history and landscape Elisabeth will also present her piece May I draw your attention to a cast eyelash leaving a cast gold eyelash along the Railway Walk between Tinahely and the nearby Tomnafinneog woods, the last surviving fragment of Ireland’s native oak woodland.
“While still a student, I first came across the work of Adrian and Elisabeth at the Terminal Convention in Cork Airport in 2011. Both Adrian and Elisabeth’s practices create poetic narratives from every day experiences and objects giving them a quality that clings to the memory allowing their work to spill over the bounds of the gallery, to be activated and enjoyed again by the day to day act of living. Between the Woods and the Water explores these traces and fragments that remain in the memory and their capacity to affect a whole landscape or thought process.”
–David Upton, Curator in Residence
The exhibition will bring elements of both artists’ practice and results from the residency to Mermaid. In Adrian Williams’ conceptually narrative work, explorations of spaces both literal and fictional are presented as performance, intervention, and film in a form of expanded writing. Originally from Portland, Oregon, she lives and works in Frankfurt. Elisabeth S Clark’s art practice explores the topography of language, of time, of sound and thought. Through a slightness of touch, Clark carefully interweaves what is already ‘there’, to accentuate, isolate and question the ephemeral, integral and changing qualities of ‘being’.
Supported by an Arts Council of Ireland Curator in Residence Award and Wicklow County Council Arts Office with warm thanks to Joanne Katus and Melanie Hadden and all the staff at Kilcommon National School.
Co. Wicklow
Monday – Saturday, 11am – 5pm