Taro Furukata, Ann Maria Healy, Claire Huber, KVM • Curated by RGKSKSRG • In association with Cow House Studios

Wexford Arts Centre and Cow House Studios are pleased to present I like to eat with my hands, a group exhibition of video and mixed media works curated by RGKSKSRG. The exhibition will run from 29th August to 5th October at Wexford Arts Centre.

I remember picking the earth from under my fingernails. As a child, at twilight, the end of a summer day, outside, hair askew, hands roughened from soil, twigs, water. I remember burying bees and birds, found dead, digging holes for their stiffened bodies to drop into. I remember throwing my own body down grassy banks, dizzy, whipped-up within the world, kaleidoscopic treetops and bruised skin. 

Last winter, I dated an Italian. He drove a Porsche. The day before we first met, he had quit his job as a Head of Sales within Google. He said that he’d stood within Chartres Cathedral, near Paris, three months previous, and had an epiphany. He had a growing paranoia around the impact of digital technology on human relationships, our interactions, our ability to truly connect on the deepest level. I had this strange feeling that he was telepathic. He seemed to be inside my brain.

I read an article in The New Yorker a few days ago – How Trees Calm Us Down. I spotted it via Twitter. It was full of all sorts of case studies and findings about the effect of trees on our mood, our health, our experience of the world, and concluded that “If someone offers you ten thousand dollars or ten trees, take the trees.”

Earlier, in autumn, I’d flung myself into a pond in Wexford and had my own epiphany of sorts. The act was an unannounced ending to a public talk. There was an audience, filled with an audience’s expectations, their judgment of who you are, how you behave, how you look. And you, the speaker, are accommodating these perceptions, articulating projects, the how’s and the whys. Being public. Then, within a split second, you’re not; you’re deep inside a body of mud-brown mountain water, utterly private among the river trout, body shocked by the sudden cold. Rising, head up, legs kicking, eyes towards the ball of golden light, dazzling through a silken surface. The intensity of it all must have been a little like being born, or dying, because for some reason I was unexpectedly, and completely, awestruck.

I’ve been arguing now for a few days, back and forth, about how best to write this text. A back and forth of questions over the easy romanticisation of the natural world, a classic argument of man versus nature, nature versus technology/the machine, real versus virtual. We need complexity! We need progressive thought! We need to move beyond the clicheé! And here I am, sitting cold in the garden, fighting off nausea, desperate for the leafy world to make my body better, whilst intermittently checking Instagram and staring blankly at the laptop. Tap, tap, tap. Control-Alt-Delete.

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I like to eat with my hands is the outcome of an artistic residency involving five contemporary, international artists. The participants were artists Taro Furukata and Ann Maria Healy, dancer/choreographer Claire Huber, and writer/artist duo KVM – Ju Hyun Lee and Ludovic Burel.

For a period of eight-weeks in autumn last year, they re-located their practices to the deeply rural environment of Cow House Studios, situated on a working farm in the foothills of the Blackstairs Mountains, County Wexford.

Together, they immersed themselves in research between the studios, the land and the shared accommodation, to create new work, share skills, and reflect on their own and others’ individual practices. Within this activity, the question was asked: can situating oneself within these new ‘Pig Earth’ surroundings potentially radicalise an existing working process?

Our answer comes to you in the form of this exhibition. It comes in the lonesomeness of Taro Furukata’s poignant attempts to assimilate (physically metabolising new spaces in the sanctity of his actual body) and to reach back home (phoning his Grandma for hand-me-down recipes); in Claire Huber’s struggle out of the physical and metaphysical confines of the body (dancing with and in nature in a wild and comic reach for meaning); in Ann Maria Healy’s search for spiritual guidance or resonance amongst dated mythological traditions (removed and ritualised in their almost but not quite kitsch physical form), and in KVM’s more than skin-deep transference of cultural mores (echoes of nasty cultural realities, warts and all).

RGKSKSRG is the paired curatorial practice of Rachael Gilbourne and Kate Strain.