Member of the Month | Luke McClean

We are delighted to announce that our July Member of the Month is Luke McClean.

Obstinate, Audio/Performance, 2021

Luke is a multi-disciplinary artist based in Belfast, N.I.

Working between audio, performance, written word and film, his practice researches the slippery space between intention and outcome, an ever-repeating field where curiosity and creative compulsion are examined as frustrating urges rather than choices.

His work typically involves multiple responses to a selected location, reflecting on compromise and redundancy as balance to the in-person itch of tactile interaction, with each response over time finding itself a translation between the undisturbed site and the change of presence within it. 

Luke recently graduated from BA Fine Art at Ulster University and will be joining the MFA course at Ulster University in 2021.

Image 1: A Reply In Kind, Audio/Performance, 2021

Image 2: Obstinate, Audio/Performance, 2021

On Death Reading Group with the Department of Ultimology - 'Concealed in the half-light'

On Death Reading Group with the Department of Ultimology

Thursday 26 August, 6.30pm

Book via Eventbrite

"Dust is the opposite thing to Waste, or at least, the opposite principle to Waste. It is about circularity, the impossibility of things disappearing, or going away, or being gone. Nothing can be destroyed."

Carolyn Steedman, Dust, Manchester University Press, 2001

Excerpt from Chapter 8: The story of the dust

In this reading group we will look at a chapter from the book of essays Dust, by Carolyn Steedman. This book offers a fascinating perspective on endings and death, through an account of the development of modern history writing and the practice of archivisation. Drawing our attention to the matter of dust, Steedman describes the legacy of the work of nineteenth century historian Jules Michelet, who described how his inhalation of the dust of the French Archives Nationales ‘gave life’ to the dead whom he studied. Knowing 'that the material presence of their dust, the atomistic remains of the toils and tribulations, the growth and decay of the animal body, was literally what might carry them, through his inhalation and his writing of History, into a new life. He knew that they were 'not capable of loss of existence'.'

In this session we will read through the chapter together and then hold a collective discussion and reflection on the text. The excerpt is available as PDF here.

Everyone is welcome to join the online reading group discussion. As always, we hope to create a shared, open and intimate space in which to discuss this text. We will record the audio of this session for our research archive, and will note this in the introduction. The audio recorded will be stored by us and we may transcribe it at a future date, and use anonymous extracts or quotes in published texts. Please note, from now on we will be subscribing to the Chatham House Rule in our documentation of these sessions, meaning "When a meeting, or part thereof, is held under the Chatham House Rule, participants are free to use the information received, but neither the identity nor the affiliation of the speaker(s), nor that of any other participant, may be revealed." You can read more about this here.

If you would prefer not to be recorded, please let us know in advance. Please don't hesitate to get in touch should you have any questions or suggestions, you can contact us by email at info@departmentofultimology.com

About: 

The Department of Ultimology is a collaborative project by artist and researcher Fiona Hallinan and curator Kate Strain. Established in 2016, the Department considers endings, or that which is dead or dying as an entry point for transformative encounter. Ultimology responds to a contemporary environment of anxiety around endings; a time of apocalyptic climate events and turbulent political change, threats of resurgent populism, depleted resources, rapid obsolescence and technological changes that are shifting society. With satellite studios in Brussels, Cork, Graz and Wicklow, the Department of Ultimology is part of the Orthogonal Methods Group (OMG), a research group based at CONNECT - the Science Foundation Ireland Research Centre for Future Networks and Communications, headquartered at Trinity College Dublin. 

www.departmentofultimology.com

The Artist-Led Archive Talk - 'Concealed in the half-light'

The Artist-Led Archive Discussion

Wednesday 18 August, 6.30pm

Book via Eventbrite

The Artist-Led Archive, an artist-led initiative began in 2006 by artist/curator Megs Morley, is home to materials relating to over 120 artist-led organisations groups and collectives working in Ireland (North and South) from the 1970s to the present day. 

In advance of a major new publication by Durty Books in 2022, (supported by the Arts Council of Ireland. The Artist-Led Archive invites writer and artist Daniel Jewesbury to explore his current research and thinking on heritage, gentrification and resistance in relation to Belfast, in conversation with artist collective and duo BROWN&BRÍ. 

This talk will be hosted online using Zoom and the link will be sent in advance.

About:

Durty Books is an independent publishing initiative co-produced by artist Kate O’ Shea (Spare Room, Just City Collective) and designer Victoria Brunetta (Piquant Media) that explores the creative potential of print and publishing and provides a critical space for voices across art, design, academia and activism. Recent publications include Durty Words a major publication including 134 international contributors exploring through design, photography and text, the relevance of anarchism today and the philosophical provocation Direct Democracy, Context, Society, Individuality by Yavor Tarinski (2019)

Daniel Jewesbury is an artist, a writer and researcher, and a curator. His wide-ranging, eclectic research includes enquiries into the use of public art commissioning in urban branding and social cleansing; the ways that personal experience collides with the capitalist reinscription of public space; how sexual violence and fetishism become normalised in visual art; and the material cultures of nationalism and colonialism. These topics are explored in films, artist’s books, performance and in critical writing. Daniel is based in Gothenburg, Sweden, and teaches on the MFA Fine Art course at HDK-Valand Academy of Art & Design at the University of Gothenburg.

BROWN&BRÍ 

We are interested in methodologies and ways of thinking, changing our approach, materials, outputs and role to suit a particular line of enquiry.

Most recently we’ve been focused on making work as artists, presenting new writing and performance within installations of light, sound and sculpture. Subjects include city development, general relativity and traditions of still life painting, and the gap between classical and quantum mechanics.

Rachel Brown and Brighdin Farren began working collaboratively in 2009 after they had both been directors at Catalyst Arts in Belfast. Rachel studied Photography and works as the Seamus Heaney Centre Coordinator at Queen’s University Belfast, and Brighdin studied Sculpture and Contemporary Dance and works as a city regeneration and development officer at Belfast City Council.

www.brownandbri.com


The Artist-Led Archive is currently open for new submissions from past and present artist-led initiatives in Ireland (North and South)please see www.theartistledarchive.com or email submissions@theartistledarchive.com 

Digital Archive of Artists’ Publishing Workshop - 'Concealed in the half-light'

Digital Archive of Artists’ Publishing Workshop

Tuesday 10 August & Wednesday 11 August, 6.00pm - 8.00pm

Join us for a two-part workshop to learn how to upload your own books and publications to the Digital Archive of Artists’ Publishing.

Before the workshop select your own Artists’ Publications - zines, artists’ books, and other experiments in artists’ publishing - ready for upload, alongside data about the items, and any anecdotal histories you wish to share.

In the workshop, participants will get an introduction to linked open data and key features of the database software. A demo followed by a hands-on participatory session will show the steps necessary to get started adding and editing materials. The workshop will also open up the strategies that the DAAP team have developed, with a focus on the software applications developed by the Wikimedia Foundation, and how these can contribute to a more ethically driven archival process. 

Throughout the workshop there will be time for questions and discussions, particularly focusing on the ethics and biases which may be explicitly or implicitly embedded in database and archive infrastructures.

Places are limited due to the group dynamics of online learning, so please book through Eventbrite. A Zoom link will be sent out via email in advance. 

About the DAAP

​Inspired by the site of Banner Repeater’s Archive of Artists’ Publishing on Hackney Downs train station, with over 11,000 passengers passing a day, the Digital Archive of Artists' Publishing (DAAP) has been developed in response to the need for similar accessibility in an online context, for a growing community of people engaged with Artists publishing. 

The DAAP is an interactive, user-driven, searchable database of Artists’ Books and publications, that acts as a hub to engage with others, built by artists, publishers, and a community of producers in contemporary artists’ publishing. With an emphasis on inclusivity from the start, anecdotal histories and multiple perspectives are privileged alongside factual data, establishing an important new precedent in digital, as well as analogue archival practice. The wiki style approach means that users can upload their own material, single items, or entire collections, choosing appropriate sharing permissions at time of upload. 

The archive project is committed to challenging the politics of traditional archives regarding inclusion and accessibility, from a post-colonial, critical gender and LGBTQI perspective. The project aims ensure an equitable and ethical design process occurs throughout the archive lifecycle. You can read our Code of Conduct here.

‘Concealed in the half-light’ | Upcoming Exhibition

5 August - 2 September 2021

Catalyst Arts, Belfast

“A suitcase lives undisturbed in a cardboard box, a human-sized pair of yellow scissors hang on the wall, to-do lists in chalk are suspended in time, a jar of pickled carrots sits on top of the CCTV screen and a bow, without a fiddle, is constantly being moved around the room.”

​​Concealed in the half-light disrupts the idea of the archive as a collection of ‘inanimate fossils’, where even in its entirety is only an illusion of history and presents just traces of reality. By looking at the Catalyst Arts archive and its unruly nature, there is potential to challenge the politics and power dynamics of the traditional archive which rigidly depends on data organisation such as standardisation and categorisation. These are systems put in place to streamline the varied and eradicate difference, which ultimately erases the value of difference. So when there are multiple histories and no agreed narratives, there is a possibility to offer archive alternatives, by acknowledging the subjective, intimate and personal, essentially the ‘unarchivable’.

This is an exhibition of many voices with invited artists Alice Rekab, artist-in-residence Nollaig Molloy, Matthew Wilson, the Department of Ultimology, the Digital Archive of Artists’ Publishing (DAAP) with Frances Whorrall-Campbell and the Artist-Led Archive.

The associated programme for this exhibition will soon be announced.

This programme is supported by the Arts Council Northern Ireland and Art Fund.

Memory Call Out

Often when we try to recount an experience it is in threads or pieces – never a fully formed or definite thing – but frayed by time. As part of the upcoming exhibition Concealed in the half-light we invite you to share a Catalyst Arts memory, it could be of an exhibition, artwork, happening or performance. A memory that left an impact or summons a giggle, all profound and silly are accepted. 

To share your memory please fill out the Google Form to include a sentence or a paragraph, and/or the option to upload a photograph, video, note, drawing or a piece of ephemera that relates to your memory.

This is a public-led project as part of the upcoming exhibition Concealed in the half-light running 5 August - 2 September 2021. Submitted memories will be shared on our website, Instagram, Facebook and Twitter during the exhibition. 

Please submit your memory by Thursday 5 August in order for it to be included. If you have any trouble with the Google Form please feel free to email Rachel at catalystarts@gmail.com. 

Member of the Month | Katrīna Tračuma

Introducing our June Member of the Month, Katrīna Tračuma

Born in 1993 in Latvia, Katrīna Tračuma grew up traveling extensively throughout Europe as a member of a multicultural family. With Mongolian ancestry, she considers herself to be a citizen of the world and is fluent in Latvian, Polish, Russian and English. After completing her BA Honours Fine Art degree at CIT Crawford College of Art and Design in 2018, she received the Joan Clancy Gallery Prize for her degree show work titled "Fred, the unholy cow" and was awarded the Backwater Artist Residency and the Visual Arts Award at the Galway Fringe Festival that same year. As a professional member of Visual Artists Ireland, The Art of Compassion Project and Nua Collective (@nuacollective.ie) her work is in many private and public collections worldwide. While completing her MFA studies at Belfast School of Art, Ulster University in 2021 she has also had her first Solo Show, titled "Beasts" - at Studio 12 in Backwater Artists Group, Cork; which has been the first Animal Rights themed solo exhibition on the entire island of Ireland, and a first coming from a Latvian artist as well.

The prevailing theme in the work is human-kinds estrangement from nature, as viewed through the lens of our relationships with other species. While having a multidisciplinary practice – grounded in painting and drawing – attention is called to urgent matters of our current epoch of the anthropocene. Through the use of bold brush strokes, balanced with intricate details in a language of symbolic imagery and metaphors, bright pigments are utilised along with striking colour combinations. Staying true to an ethical environmental responsibility is an important aspect of the art making process, thus there is a complete abstinence from using virgin materials. While constantly reflecting on the sense of overwhelm and frustration felt in regards to our current impact on the environment and all fellow earthlings, found objects and plastic trash are transformed in inventive ways through a process termed plork: a combination of play and work.

Research includes animal rights literature, a variety of scientific journals and texts concerning zoology, biology and the psychology of compassion, as well as the concept of animality – a construct that oppresses anyone who deviates from what our culture considers to be an ideal human, and how this is an integral part of all of the oppression experienced under patriarchal rule. Within the context of art history, emphasis is placed on the process cantered practice of Robert Rauschenberg who embraced play with materiality and the use of found objects in his work. The work of animalière Rosa Bonheur – through skilful painting and realist sculpture – inspires to place utmost importance on sustaining a daily art practice, to continuously develop authentic observational skills.

Member of the Month | Lucie McLaughlin

We’re delighted to introduce Catalyst Arts’ Member of the Month - Lucie McLaughlin

Lucie is a Belfast born artist, writer and critic, currently based in Glasgow.

She is interested in working across disciplines, exploring writing as studio practice and new and experimental forms of criticism. She often works with sound, moving image, drawing and performance.

Her research is grounded in thinking around the entangled relationship between world and word, where language and poetics are not limited to the page, but might become images and ideas, made unfamiliar by a collapse in distance between the ‘ordinary’ and the imaginative. Political atmospheres and socio-psychological states are explored in her work by embracing the oxymora of the creative and critical.

Her book, Suppose A Collapse, was released in May 2021 with JOAN, a new publishing project for interdisciplinary artists’ writing. The book arranges moments between two cities, each viewed through the lens of the other, intimately mapping the interiors of a fourth floor flat in Madrid and the childhood bedroom of a three-bed semi in Belfast. Autobiographical-fiction, prose poetry and essay combine to form a collection of texts informed by the movement between film and art criticism, lucidity and a fracturing present. 

Lucie is also one of the writers responding to Catalyst Arts’ current exhibition, And, if we observe the present.

Follow Lucie on Instagram at @herelucie and Twitter @herelucie_

Image 1: Suppose A Collapse, 82 pages, JOAN Publishing, 2021

Image 2: Santa Eulalia del Rio (Hot Drops of Rain On A Car, In The Sun) pencil on paper, 2021

April Member of the Month | Maria Del Buey

We are so honoured to have had support from the wonderful María del Buey over the past months. María has been an amazing help at Catalyst during busy funding periods and event programmes. We’ve learnt so much from María’s time and hard work at Catalyst, and thank her endlessly for sharing her knowledge with us. 

As María moves onto greener pastures, we look forward to seeing what she gets up to next and wish her the very best in future endeavours. 

María del Buey is a Spanish artist based in Ireland since 2018, and she recently completed the MFA Art in the Contemporary World, run by NCAD. Her art practice engages space as the primordial element in the production of her work, being also the gravitational point around which to reflect and experiment with possible and desirable landscapes of existence. Del Buey mostly works with sound and digital image, and uses writing to experiment with speculative horizons of experience, focusing on the creation of speculative spaces  - textual, sonic, or visual spaces - from where to imagine new spatial agencies, or orientation techniques. As a foreign and displaced element to different urban landscapes, her art practice attempts to go unnoticed within them, avoiding to step out from the background. Based on the belief that the space - urban space, academic space, affect space - is the basic condition to any kind of agency - social agency, artistic agency, political agency - her work tries to encapsulate the dichotomy between what happens inside the studio, and what can be found beyond it. 

She has exhibited her work at Ormston House in Limerick, at the Goethe-Institut in Dublin, and at MediaLab Prado in Madrid, among others. She is a regular collaborator and member of the Spanish Association of Sound Art and Electroacoustic Music of Spain (AMEE). 

Director Call Out | Spring 2021 | CLOSED

Hope is on the horizon - fingers crossed - that our doors will be re-opening soon and that we can have even a small degree of normality now that the weather is getting warmer. In light of this, we are looking for some new recruits to join the Catalyst family! 

We are looking for hardworking and passionate individuals who are interested in accelerating their career in a range of skills and opportunities. If you have experience (or would like to gain some) in arts administration, curation, production, project management, research, networking, we encourage you to apply.

This is a voluntary position with a two-year commitment following a successful trial and training period where you will have firsthand experience of how this art machine ticks over. Due to current Covid-19 restrictions, the team are working remotely so applicants are asked to be prepared for a virtual interview if limitations continue. 

Applicants don't have to be based in Belfast to apply or be shortlisted, however; you must be able to travel to the city for weekly meetings, monthly events and gallery invigilation.

Catalyst Arts is a registered charity, artist-led space and members based organisation that seeks to represent and push forward the middle ground of experimental and innovative art practices from all disciplines through engagement, acceptance and sheer nerve.

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Deadline for the next review of applications is Monday 3 May at 11.59pm

The full job description can be found here.

The job application form can be found below:

PDF Format

Word Format

Please email your completed application form to catalystarts@gmail.com

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If you would like to apply, but have particular access needs or submitting a written application is difficult for you, please get in touch with Catalyst at catalystarts@gmail.com by email and we can arrange an alternative application method.

Catalyst Arts strives to be an Equal Opportunities employer, and we particularly encourage applications from those who identify as underrepresented in the arts, for example Black and POC artists, artists from lower socio-economic backgrounds and artists from the traveller community.

New Catalyst Co-Director | Kate Murphy !

We’re starting the week with some good news - an introduction to the most recent addition to the Catalyst Arts team of Co-Directors. 

Please join us in giving a warm welcome to the amazing Kate Murphy 🎉 

Kate Murphy is a visual artist-curator from Co. Kildare. She received her BFA degree from TUD, Dublin in 2019 and was the recipient of the Fire Station Artists Studios ‘Graduate Residency & Bursary’ Award in Sculpture. Kate enrolled in an International Curatorial Programme with NODE, Berlin and worked under the Director of the Sarah Walker Gallery, Cork in 2020.

She is currently curating and facilitating a site-responsive group project titled Non-Events, exhibiting in August 2021. Kate was invited to collaborate on a project titled Parallel [in]Between in 2020 under the Summer Commissions by The Dock Arts Centre. She is featured in the Speaking of Which interview series produced by The Lab Gallery and The Dock Arts Centre.

Kate’s practice is concerned with the artist's relationship to the construction of a built environment, how site and culture are re-framed through a process led practice, the material intervention in a space and artist collaboration. These concerns contribute to her current body of research being developed for her solo show in 2022.

Catalyst Arts Summer Online Residency: Litemba Mpambani

We’re delighted to announce that artist Litemba Mpambani has been selected for the Spring Edition of Catalyst’s seasonal Online Residency programme. Keep an eye on our channels for Litemba’s residency in July!

I am currently completing a BA in Fine Arts at the University of the Free State in South Africa. I believe that my feminist approach to artmaking was inspired by the fact that I was raised by very strong feminists. My grandmother taught me that I should never need anyone, my aunts taught me integrity and my mother, who has always been anchored only to the wind, taught me how to be free. I believe that all of these are important qualities for an artist to have. My work has been collected by both the National Workers Museum and the National Art Bank. I have participated in various group exhibitions including The Phatsoany & Henney New Breed Finalist exhibition in 2019 and The ArtEC Gallery’s Annual Exhibition. I have also been selected as part of the top 5 artist for the ORMS Circle Mentorship program in 2020. As an artist my work is centered on constructively retelling the narratives of black womxn in South Africa. I believe that an important aspect of narrativization is space. the research for my most recent work has been concerned with the spaces that black feminine bodies must occupy and the circumstances under which this occupation takes place, deconstructing some of these spaces and Creation of new, productive imaginative spaces.

This residency is supported by the Arts Council of Northern Ireland and Art Fund.

Catalyst Arts Spring Online Residency : Beau W Beakhouse & Sadia Pineda Hameed

We’re delighted to announce that artists Beau W Beakhouse and Sadia Pineda Hameed have been selected for the Spring Edition of Catalyst’s seasonal Online Residency programme. Keep an eye on our channels for Beau and Sadia’s residency in May !

‘the system of interspecies communication: all are systems of mourning' - Paul B. Preciado, An Apartment on Uranus

The decay of contemporary digital archives, in which connections break down and decompose, posits a new experimental form of ‘preservation’. Artists Beau W Beakhouse and Sadia Pineda Hameed explore alternatives to the hegemonic, colonial history of archives conceived as centres of power, instead forming linkages that are personal, fragile or unfinished. This decomposing digital space will be shaped by and through research, text art and essay, to form relational and associative pathways.

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Beau W Beakhouse is an artist, filmmaker and curator based in Cardiff. His artistic practice often returns to themes of language, land, the post-colonial, alternate histories and dreams via intersections and convergences. He has upcoming residencies with Tangent Projects and Jerwood UNITe (g39) and a forthcoming solo exhibition with Arcade/Campfa.

Sadia Pineda Hameed is an artist based in Cardiff, Wales. She works in film, installation, text and performance to explore collective and inherited trauma; in particular, the latent ways we speak about this through dreaming, telepathic communion and secrets as an anti-colonial strategy inherent to us. She has shown work with The Bluecoat, MOSTYN, HOAX, Peak and others.

Together Sadia & Beau run the small press and curatorial project LUMIN

The Online Residency is supported by Art Fund and Arts Council Northern Ireland.

February Member of the Month | Vasiliki Stasinaki

We are delighted to announce our February Member of the Month, Vasiliki Stasinaki!

Vasiliki is an artist working in the field of sculpture, video and audio installation, with a background both in dance and visual arts.

Through her practice she attempts to question and explore her place in the world from a social and political point of view, by creating performative interventions that take place in a defined space. She is interested in building environments and creating situations that induce a specific emotional state in the audience by prompting it to observe, question and participate.

In an ever-shifting world where we have to deal with significant political and social changes, an uncertain future of Europe as we know it and an immigration crisis, the question of how to talk about the present and how to engage with diverse social and political issues of urgent character has become central to Vasiliki’s work. By looking into the past and within the context of historical research she discusses the complex and intricate issues of national and cultural identity in their multifaceted expressions. This investigation of the past takes often the shape of archival research, collection of footage, photographs and historical accounts, scrutinizing her personal experiences, her immigration story and her national and cultural background.

Through the combination of these elements, she seeks to create work that offers new narratives, questions established concepts and re-tells stories.

Image: It Hurts My Elbows, courtesy of Vasiliki Stasinaki