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Artist Residencies & Research

Developing Arts and Health at Uillinn West Cork Arts Centre

Studio layout

Uillinn West Cork Arts Centre offers Artist in Residence studio opportunities and research supports for artists working on the Arts for Health Programme and in an arts and health context.

Artists of all disciplines are invited to apply for an opportunity to research and develop their practices, and to engage in dialogue with Uillinn, other organisations in Cork, the local community, and general public.

There are three Artists’ Studios located on level 2 of Uillinn, suitable for visual artists or writers. They range in size from 18.2 metres square to 21.2 metres square. They are interconnecting work spaces, with north facing roof lights, that can be closed off from each other.  There is a fourth studio on level 4  suitable for dancers, musicians or performers, equipped with barres and mirrors and wired for sound and projection.

Current

Sarah Ruttle – Exploring Possibilities: Visual Impairment
An Arts for Health Partnership supported Research Project

17 April 2023 to 30 November 2024

Sarah is exploring how sound can be integrated into visual engagement methods. Develop learning around sensory engagement, creating balance and equality for all participants, benefiting Arts for Health participants with a variety of needs, inclusive of high dependency participants.
Project Objectives include:· Desk based research of Arts & Health projects exploring sensory engagement and of inclusive technology tools; practical exploration making a sensory/tactile piece which can support engagement of higher dependency participants and to share with AfH participants / staff for feedback.

Sharon Dipity- Mark-making and movement Research project
An Arts for Health Partnership supported Research Project

Justin Grounds and Rachel Singleton
An Arts for Health Partnership supported Research Project – a legacy of Arts for Health engagement with Creative Brain Week
March to November 2024

Archive

Sharon Dipity & E.R. Murray_Conversation Between Two Typewriters

8 January to 3 February 2024

Through conversations between two Brother Deluxe manual typewriters, the artists will explore making new work while experimenting with the written word. Their investigations will include poetry, prose, call-and-response methods, visual poems, and sound pieces. They will work with constraints such as lipograms (omitting the use of specific letters) and also research traditional shorthand methods.

This residency offers the chance for both artists to expand their usual disciplines in terms of prolonged use of a different medium (typewriters). Collaborative exploration and play between a variety disciplines (mark making, the written word, signs and symbols, movement) will allow both artists to push the boundaries of their practice. Working with chance will be central to the residency, and this will be enhanced by the transience of creating bespoke pieces for the public.

Sharon Dipity is a multi-disciplinary visual artist working across the media of drawing, sculpture, printmaking, painting, textiles, performance, installation and participatory arts. She holds a Postgraduate Certificate in Scenography from U.C.E, Birmingham; and a B.A. Honours Degree in Textiles from Goldsmiths College, University of London.

Elizabeth Rose Murray writes in multiple genres for children, young adults, and adults. Her books include Caramel Hearts (Alma Books) and the award-winning Nine Lives Trilogy (Mercier Press); The Book of Learning (Dublin UNESCO Citywide Read 2016), The Book of Shadows (shortlisted Irish Literacy Association Award & Irish Book Awards), and The Book of Revenge.

Toma McCullim – Salt and Pepper
Supported by Uillinn and Cork Kerry Community Healthcare, HSE
2022 – 2024

Áine Rose O’Connell A Dive in Line – Art & People living with Parkinson’s

May 2023 to May 2024 (Uillinn Studio 1 to 21 December 2023)

Áine spent 2023 working artistically with people with Parkinson’s disease, as part of the Arts for Health Partnership Programme. Mentored by Composer, Justin Grounds and Advisor, Justine Foster, Aine delivered a series of one to one and group arts based sessions in hospital and daycare setting, progressing with sessions in the home with family carers. The sessions were integrated into the participants care through the healthcare professionals partnering on the Arts for Health programme.

Additionally, she has been working clinically with this population through her work as a speech therapist. Áine will use this time in the studio in Uillinn to reflect on the learnings, stories and experiences that she has shared with participants through her participatory practice this year. Studio time will build on sensorial, cognitive, communicative and physical limitations, and question its impact on art-making generally, pushing her own practice in novel ways.

SEE CASE STUDY artsandhealth.ie/case-studies/a-dive-in-line-art-parkinsons-disease/

Edel Ní Nualláin_Earth – Organ – Transplant 

Arts and Health Coordinators Ireland

24 to 30 November 2023

During this residency Edel will be exploring the potential for Organ Music performances for Organ Transplant patients, their families and friends, together with relatives and friends of those who will or have donated Organs. While in residence she will also be researching the Medicinal Native Irish Plants that benefit specific organs, as potential gifts for audience members, shifting awareness to protecting our environment. Using the time to begin exploring the power of visceral metaphors as living PR campaigns generating awareness of Organ donation and protecting our organs and researching the intricate links between humans, plants and music through artistic enquiry.

Edel’s typical work is Arts in Healthcare program management at Cork University Hospital, St. Luke’s General hospital Kilkenny and Wexford General Hospital. She often sees patients with issues related to their organs, such as dialysis, diabetes, lung and heart patients and Eyes. CUH is a center of excellence and one of the transplant hospitals in Ireland. She also manages the Piano Music recital programme at CUH where they have in total 2 pianos and 2 piano-organs. The baby grand piano is located in the Cardiac Renal center and transplant and dialysis patients often hear the performances. CUH is a pilot test center for a major Nationwide poster Campaign to encourage people to become Organ donators. CUH is also the first Green Campus Hospital in the world and therefore this project linking Healthcare, Music and Nature fits our hospital ethos.

Nuala Clark_Healing Experiments – abstract

2 to 30 September 2023

Can an abstract painting be prescribed for an ailment?  I am spending my time in residence asking this question through conversation and experimental art making. Abstract art allows us to describe and make tangible that which we know exists but has no solid, visible form. Paint is a magic substance, malleable to an infinite degree; perfect for the exploration of the non-visible known world. I wish to create and test a variety of open-ended ‘art-making while listening’ experiments with the view to exploring the parameters of the question I’ve posed; to look to see if there is healing potential in the process of making an art object created with specific intention.

As part of Nuala’s public engagement programme, she worked with older adults at Skibbereen Day Care Centre, through the Arts for Health Programme

Born Dublin, 1970. BA in Fine Art Painting from NCAD, Dublin, 1993. Afterwards moved to New York City. In 2007, awarded a fellowship to the Ballinglen Arts Foundation, Mayo and began returning to Ireland from NY to work every year. In 2013 moved full time to Mayo. Primarily an abstract painter. Recent: OnSight, National Museum of Ireland, Country Life, Turlough, Co. Mayo (summer 2023) Book publication: Radiate Outwards, Incrementally, Crystal Gandrud & Nuala Clarke. The Owl Circus Press. Presented “An Artist Reads Boyle’ at the Robert Boyle Summer School in Waterford, June 2023.

Dominic Thorpe_Collective Memory and Perpetrator Trauma

22 July to 16 September 2023

Perpetrator trauma could be characterised as the pain of causing pain. Growing research in several areas of atrocity, violence, and trauma studies shows that perpetrator trauma can be experienced by individuals or groups who become overwhelmed or struggle to comprehend violence they were directly or indirectly involved in inflicting. However, perpetrator trauma is routinely ignored in the narratives of violence. This can be understandable, not least given the imperative to prioritise victim and survivor experiences. Importantly however, giving attention to perpetrator trauma is not intended to take vital focus away from those hurt by perpetrators. Rather, it is to acknowledge a fuller spectrum of trauma that can exist within society in the aftermath of violence. Given the scale of historical and contemporary conflict, terrorism, gender-based violence, institutional abuses, and criminality within Irish society, levels of individual and collective perpetrator trauma are potentially vast. As such, giving attention to perpetrator trauma aims to productively contribute to processes of healing, not least as ignored perpetrator trauma may fester in ways that perpetuate both generational suffering and repeated cycles of violence.

Dominic Thorpe aims to develop processes that sensitively explore and give form to difficult embodied experiences of perpetrator trauma symptoms, such as flashbacks and embodied disturbance, while also invoking the domestic contexts in which such experiences may be suffered in silence. To do so, he will work with both domestic objects and multi-media performance-based imagery. When making live performance art he has frequently worked with domestic orientated materials, such as chairs, tables, cutlery, mirrors, and petroleum jelly, often with highly sculptural outcomes. However, any resulting objects are generally disposed of following a performance, rather than being (re)presented as sculptural works. Conversely, during his residency at Uillinn, Dominic began to work with domestic objects in embodied ways and present them as sculptural objects that also incorporate photographic and video imagery of performance gestures.

Philippa Donnellan_Taking Flight Dance Production

An Arts for Health Research Project/Arts Council Bursary Award 2022
Phase 1: 4 July to 16 July and Phase 2: 5 December to 11 December 2022 Phase 3: 20 June to 1 July 2023

Led by Dublin based Choreographer Philippa Donnellan with dance artist Justine Cooper, and West Cork-based Musician/Composer Justin Grounds and visual artist Tomasz Madajczak.

TAKING FLIGHT: exploring themes of confinement and the power of the imagination, sets out to delve into the world of dreams and make believe inspired by personal experience, movement, music and imagery.

What happens when your whole world is confined? How do you remain resilient? Can you experience a sense of freedom or autonomy? Might you inhabit another imaginative life where dreams, memories and fantasies allow you to fly?

This dance residency expands our collaboration with Uillinn that began in 2022 through support from an Arts Council Dance Bursary Award and an Uillinn Artist Residency. Designed originally to enable collaborative interdisciplinary research, it bought together the four artists and introduced artists and communities for the first time.

In this new residency, supported by Uillinn’s Arts for Health, West Cork programme and the network that the programme has established, the team of artists will continue to creatively engage with health professionals, artists working in healthcare, and older people attending day care and long-term healthcare settings, along with the wider West Cork community to facilitate development of a new professional dance theatre piece in 2024.

Philippa Donnellan is a choreographer based in Dublin. Originally from the UK, she is passionate about making dance theatre by engaging with people of all experiences and exploring themes that respond to the time and place in which we live. Most recently, she collaborated with dancer Ailish Claffey on creation and performance of DANCE BUALADH BOS for older age audiences, supported by Kildare Arts Service & Creative Ireland. As Curator of DL.BRIDGE/Dance Limerick, she has led THE ROAD WE LIVE ON an intergenerational community project with a St John’s Brass & Reed band, and WOMEN & WORK, THE CONTRACT detailing women’s experience of work and performed in Limerick Chambers for Culture Night 2021. Between 2006 – 2020, Philippa was Director of CoisCéim BROADREACH with whom she led a range of projects in partnership with different institutions, organisations and communities.

Sharon Dipity_The Line Has Two Sides

Bealtaine/Cork County Council/Uillinn Artist in Residence 2023

3 May to 3 June 2023

Describing what she hopes to achieve during her residency at Uillinn, Sharon says ‘My ambition for the Bealtaine residency is to develop the drawn line through mark-making, movement and word using different parts of my body to draw and move with. I want to revisit some of the performance pieces I made during my research project Following the Line funded by a Cork County Council Artist Bursary in 2022. This project focused on developing a performative aspect to my practice and the creation of ‘the drawn line’ through task-based performance art. I want to bring my learnings from the physical performance back to drawing on paper.  I will also continue to make and use natural brushes and collect found objects to draw with. I want the marks and the movements I make to be inspired by the qualities of the drawing tool I am using, for the drawings to take on the quality of the feather, the marram grass or whatever I am using.

I am particularly interested in translating my body’s movement to the page, the movement of the tracings made with my body, and working with other elements that have come into play during my research, including the wind and the tide. I have been working a lot with constraints and in The line has two sides, I will be looking at my body’s limitations as a constraint and developing movement and drawing from this. I particularly want to look at creating movement with an older body, to embrace and transcend its limitations and old injuries, to create my own fluid vocabulary of movement and gesture.’

Sharon Dipity is a multi-disciplinary visual artist. She holds a Postgraduate Certificate in Scenography from UCE, Birmingham and a BA Honours Degree in Textiles from Goldsmiths College, University of London. Recent achievements include Leap of Faith, a solo exhibition/residency at Working Artist Studios, Ballydehob (2019); One rung on the ladder, a solo exhibition at Clonakilty Arts Centre (2018) and Journeys, a commission for Blackrock Hall Primary Care Centre, Cork (2015). She has been awarded residencies at the Ballinglen Arts Foundation, the Tyrone Guthrie Centre, Cill Rialaig, Co. Kerry, Uillinn: West Cork Arts Centre, WCEC BLAST and Teacher Artist Partnership Residencies (2023, 2021, 2020). She has been an artist practitioner with the Arts for Health Programme, West Cork since 2007. In 2022 received an Arts council Agility Award; and a Cork County Council Artist Bursary.

Sharon Dipity_Bridging the Imagination

Arts Council Agility Award 2022
November 2022 to February 2023

Sharon Dipity is a multi-disciplinary visual artist. In recent work, she has been exploring a performative element to her practice. She currently works regularly at Skibbereen Community Hospital as a Visual Artist on the Arts for Health (AfH) Partnership Programme, West Cork.

In 2022, with the backing of hospital staff and the AfH programme, Sharon received an Agility Award from the Arts Council to explore new ways of working, introducing a performative element to enrich and expand the ambition of her participatory practice with older people in a healthcare context.

The award afforded Sharon vital time for experimentation as part of sustaining creativity in long-term participatory practice; and to work with two mentors: Dr. Katja Hilevaara, lecturer at the Department of Theatre and Performance at Goldsmiths College, University of London, for guidance and feedback on developing a performative practice in her work; and Sarah Cairns, educator in dementia care and communication skills, for advice and support in working with older people in a healthcare setting and to safely extend the creative ambition of the artist’s work in the hospital.

In addition, the artist received the support of Uillinn: West Cork Arts Centre for performance and workspace to develop the work.

Sharon invited a focus group of six residents to collaborate with her. This research project took place over four sessions in the hospital. The artist centred the work on bridges, as a metaphor for connection and transcending obstacles. She drew on the experience and interests of the focus group to investigate this theme through movement, spoken word, storytelling, soundscapes, drawing and sculpture.

This project enabled more time to research the concept and prepare for the engagements than would normally be possible in a weekly Arts for Health session. In addition, it allowed the artist to make her own creative responses to the work through drawings, sculpture, writing and performance. Through reflective conversations with and guidance from her mentors, Sharon planned each session responding to content that arose from the weekly sessions with the focus group.

Ida Mitrani_Arts for Health Learning Residency

29 September to 6 November 2021

Ida Mitrani’s concerns and interests are influenced by concepts and theories of plant culture in the current environmental crisis, including plant blindness, post-naturalism and hybrid material. The creative process explores the relationship and the interaction between humans, plants and technology, and looks at the function and meaning of weeds in today’s society. Her aim is to capture a memory of the present era using an environment of textures that reflects the diversity and adaptability of life, and contemplates a vision of a possible new understanding of a ‘clean landscape’ where plastic is incorporated in nature.

During her residency at Uillinn, – with guidance from her mentor, Sarah Ruttle and Programme Manager Justine Foster – Ida designed a creative kit that was mailed to eight participants on the arts for health programme at isolating home.

The experience of the residency benefited the artist in generating new ideas while learning new techniques and methodologies to better adapt to various situations, to help with problem solving, and to develop and deliver future socially engaged creative projects in a safe environment.

Ida Mitrani is a multidisciplinary artist and art educator currently living in the Beara peninsula, in West Cork. She recently graduated from the Crawford College of Art and Design with a First class honours masters degree in Art and Process (2021).

Toma McCullim_Coming Home

June 2019 to June 2020

In a year long project based in the Ludgate Hub in Skibbereen , West Cork, Toma McCullim will be engaging older generations to talk and share stories of emigration, through a series of workshops in the community and as part of the Arts for Health Programme. Toma will be making links with residents in the community attending day care and resident in Community Hospitals. To make the connections, Toma will be benefiting from Ludgate’s 1GB internet, linking with diaspora who left these shores for new lives in other countries. She will be also be gathering stories of what it was like to be left behind. Calling Home will create a virtual holding place for memory, a liminal space between places and time.

Toma has also been awarded a studio residency at Uillinn West Cork Arts Centre, February 7 – 21 and again April 23 – June 3 2020 to coincide with the national Beataine programme, celebrating creativity as age. Funded through the Ludgate Hub AR Programme, as part of the Business to Arts, Artist in Residence Programme in partnership with the Creative Ireland National Creativity Fund, Arts for Health Partnership and Uillinn West Cork Arts Centre

Sarah Ruttle and Charlotte Donovan, Marielle MacLeman, Kirsty Stansfield_Fragments

11 May to 27 June 2019

In Spring 2018, following the annual Check Up, Check In, a reflective practice and reading group was initiated at Uillinn. The group comprises West Cork-based Sarah Ruttle and Charlotte Donovan, Galway-based Marielle MacLeman, and Glasgow-based Kirsty Stansfield – all visual artists with over 15 years experience of working in Arts and Health.

This group provides a supportive space for the individuals to reflect on their broad experience and explore pertinent questions relating to maintaining an artistic practice in health settings. The residency will form an important incubator period for the group – time to focus on critical reflection with peers, using dialogue, making and writing to explore participative and collaborative methodologies in Arts and Health – and a catalyst to generate the momentum needed for continuous exchange.

During the residency at Uillinn West Cork Arts Centre,  the group will explore ideas related to:

autonomy, creativity and end of life; place-making and place-based knowledge in hospital and community health contexts; the interplay between participative and collaborative approaches in hospital and community health contexts; authorship and visibility of the visual artist in Arts and Health and in the wider contemporary art world

Kirsty Stansfield   Sarah Ruttle and Charlotte Donovan

Marielle MacLeman studied Drawing and Painting at Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art and Design, Dundee and relocated to Galway in 2011. She has worked widely in participatory Arts and Health contexts for 15 years including the development of long-term programmes in palliative care and haemodialysis, and public art commissions spanning care for the elderly, paediatric, maternity bereavement, neonatal, and mental health contexts. She has written and designed for publications including The Music of What Happens (2014), The Magician and the Swallow’s Tale (2013), The Pattern of a Bird (2008), and Creative Engagement in Palliative Care (2007) and collaborated with filmmaker Tom Flanagan for GUH Arts Trust on the artsandhealth.ie Documentation Bursary 2017-18. She was awarded the Arts Council Artist in the Community Scheme Bursary Award 2018: Collaborative Arts in Health Contexts.

Image: Sean O’Hagan ‘Impressions of the Sea’

Toma McCullim_110 Skibbereen Girls

 8 January to 7 February and 5 to 22 June 2018

This year-long project explores the poignant stories of 110 girls from Skibbereen who escaped famine for Australia c1850. Artist Toma McCullim plans to investigate how various people sharing Skibbereen Community Hospital campus today – staff, service users, residents and visitors – can contribute to the development of a permanent site specific artwork to mark this moment in history. Attention will be paid to how the process impacts on the participants’ sense of place, their relationship with the location and with each other.

Toma explains, ‘Earl Grey’s Famine Orphan Scheme sent 110 girls, aged between 14 and 18, from Skibbereen workhouse (now Skibbereen Community Hospital campus) to Australia between 1848 and 1850. It is now estimated that there could be 10,000 descendant diaspora from this group of girls, each with a story. History lives on through us. Narratives tell us who we are. Making new stories of the past can change how we feel about who we are in the present. By bringing people together to talk about the legacies we have inherited we can make new shapes of the future. The Skibbereen girls can be celebrated for their contribution to the making of modern Australia. A diaspora of relations can find their way back to celebrate these young women’s courage. Modelling a spoon from beeswax, we feel that connection made in our own hands. Making together we are made one.’

The process begins with a studio residency at Uillinn, shortly followed by a residency on site in the Hospital Campus. The residencies will give time for Toma to research and develop her ideas and support a number of public interactions to include tours, talks, film screenings and participatory workshops, all investigating the theme of the 110 girls, their journey to Australia and diaspora that exists now.

A series of 110 bronze spoons will be cast to signify the 110 Skibbereen girls. A stone donated by the Australian Embassy has been brought from Australia to incorporate into the artwork which will be located near the Famine burial ground on the Hospital Campus. Work from, and documentation of, the project will be exhibited alongside Coming Home: Art and the Great Hunger, an exhibition of historical and contemporary artwork from Ireland’s Great Hunger Museum, Quinnipiac University, Connecticut, USA which is being shown at Uillinn: West Cork Arts Centre from July to October 2018. An online documentation with photographs, sound clips and film will document the process, the artwork and emergence of a story.

110 Skibbereen Girls by artist Toma McCullim is a Cork County Council, West Cork Arts Centre and Cork Kerry Community Healthcare, Famine Heritage Project, funded by the West Cork Municipal District Creative Communities Scheme, Cork Arts and Health and the National Lottery.

Find out more http://www.artsandhealth.ie/case-studies/110-skibbereen-girls/

Sarah Ruttle_Parachute in My Purse

September to October 2016

Sarah Ruttle, along with artists Colm Rooney in Dunmanway Community Hospital and Tess Leak and Liz Clark in Castletownbere Community Hospital  worked with participants to imagine Ireland in the future, casting their minds back and referring to influential and personal events from the last one hundred years.
Together the artists and hospital residents have travelled through a hundred years unfolding, seeing into the future and imagining how it might have played out differently. Being the children of Ireland following the years of the Rising, hospital residents told the stories of how historical moments affected their lives, families and communities.
Three workshops were held in each hospital with the artists and Sarah produced an art installation comprising of huge paper cuttings to represent the residents’ memories, stories and the dialogue they held with the artists. “One lady whispered to me during our first workshop, I have a parachute in my purse and hence the title of the art installation was born”, says Sarah.
Other residents at Dunmanway Community Hospital made references to; the introduction of rural electricity, to the men who cut the roads through the mountains to get the latest news on the Rising and all how important these were to the community. The large scale paper cut outs were constructed during a three week residency at Uillinn artists studios, the final cuts outs represented a dresser, a parachute, jars of jam and an accordion, were installed at each hospitals for three months to stimulate further conversations in hospital.
Director of Nursing at Dunmanway Community Hospital, Theresa Healy Kingston said, “The installation is a wonderful celebration of history between the residents and artists. It opens our minds to what our older people perceive as Ireland 2016. It’s great to see the art work that Sarah Ruttle produced after listening and chatting with the residents. Every one’s interpretation is different and the view developed with the artistic eye provides an exceptionally diverse product. One of our female residents spoke of the fact that “only for the boys of Kilmichael West Cork would have been wiped out .”

Find out more about this project in Sarah’s Case study on artsandhealth.ie

Amanda Jane Graham _Art and Illness

August to September 2016

Amanda Jane Graham was awarded the Cavan Arts/ Uillinn: West Cork Arts Centre Arts Residency 2016. Amanda’s intention of the residency was to address the fears, taboos and societal stigma that surround serious, terminal illness and palliative care.  Amanda approached this by creating a public space for discussion about how we collectively deal with illness, with the objective that individuals with a diagnosis are not defined by their illness but only by who they are. The residency involved working with HSE staff in West Cork and asking them, if they were to describe Palliative care by a colour what colour would it be? From Dulux paint charts, wool was matched to the chosen colours. The uplifting and vibrant colours that were chosen have been used to create a tapestry. One HSE staff member said, ‘Palliative care is not about dying, it’s about living. We want to help people to live’.

podcast from about the residency from both Shannonside and Northern Sound station

Toma McCullim_These Tangled Threads

November to December 2015

I am an artist working on the Art for Health Partnership Programme, West Cork. This means I am often making art work with people who are experiencing cognitive changes. I am also an anthropologist of art. I am interested in what art does. When I am making art I am thinking about thinking. When we make visual an idea, we communicate in the grammar of dreams. We sort these picture ideas into concepts which frame how we see our world. To find out more see Toma’s case study on artsandhealth.ie

For this residency Toma was picturing dementia. Endeavouring to translate, in the turns and twists, how it is to think through this different narrative structure, bringing into focus how adjusting our own way of thinking can help us to reconnect with people who we have stopped understanding.

Toma opened up her studio on Fridays and welcomed visitors to come and talk about how we can use art to communicate with our loved ones. Toma was listening, prompting and working to create a participative art piece.