Artist Residencies
Cork-based artists Rebecca Bradley and Ida Mitrani were selected by open call for two-week residencies in Brittany in April and May 2024. Both artists explored the local landscape, visited cultural organisations, and networked with various artists identified by the residency host, Embardée. The aim of the residency in Brittany was to develop a body of work exploring the human’s relationship with their ‘natural’ environment for dissemination to audiences in the region and in Ireland on their return.
Brittany-based artists Caroline Boyfield and Laure Colomer travelled to Cork in May 2024 to undertake residency activity in Sirius Arts Centre and Uillinn West Cork Arts Centre, responding to their contexts, landscapes, culture, and history within their practices and presenting public events. The aim of the residency in Cork was to develop work in response to their experiences of the maritime journey and to the poetry and myths of the two regions to be presented in exhibitions in Ireland and Brittany.
In order to offer this residency programme a meaningful culminatory platform to celebrate and share the work arising from it, the Sample Triskel Project Space is hosting a summer group exhibition of work by Rebecca Bradley, Ida Mitrani, Caroline Boyfield, and Laure Colomer. Opportunities are currently being explored to enable this exhibition to tour to a gallery in Brittany in 2025.
The work presented for the exhibition in Triskel explores the artists’ multifarious responses to the coastal environments of Co. Cork and Finistère in Brittany. The four artists in turn express ideas about our encounters with landscape and place, highlighting the contrast between impermanent organic elements that will transform and decay, to more permanent materials that will remain, reflecting humanity’s legacy in the oceans. The physical and poetic space inherent in the boat and in maritime journeys is also explored, as well as our relationship with myths, language and the sea.
‘It was by the water that I best understood that reverie is a universe in emanation, a fragrant breath that comes out of things through a dreamer.’
Water and Dreams’, Gaston Bachelard (1942)
About the Artists
Rebecca Bradley
Rebecca Bradley is an Irish visual artist. She holds an MA (Art and Process) & BA Fine Art, Crawford College of Art, & BA Sociology (Kingston University) and an Hdip from UCC. She received the Arts Council Agility Award in 2021 and was selected for the Mark Rothko Residency in 2019. Her work is held in public and private collections in Australia, France, Germany, Ireland, Italy, Latvia, Switzerland, U.K., and U.S.A..
Recent exhibitions:
Hidden Pasts, Potential Futures, LMP Gallery, Cork; Where is This Place? One Space Culture (2023)The Irish Contemporaries (2022 and 2023), CIACLA, Los Angeles; Earth Rising, Irish Museum Modern Art (IMMA) (2022), Canvas and Clay, Lavit Gallery, Cork (2022), Annual, Sternview Gallery, Cork, (2022), Breaking Cover Performance, IMMA (2021); We Only Have the Earth, A4 Sounds, Dublin, (2021), Slip Stream, MTU Gallery, Cork (2021); Evanescent, West Cork Arts Centre (2021), Rothko Art Centre Collection touring ,National Library, Latvia, (2020); Stories From Lismore & Beyond, Lismore Castle Arts (2020); Athens Open, (2020); Rothko Painting Residency, Rothko Art Centre, Latvia (2019); This is A Painting Show, SternView,(2019); We Each have our own Landscape, Arthouse, London,(2019); Group show, Municipal Art Gallery of Piraeus, Athens (2018); Misc Arts, Romania (2018); Thresholds, Gonzo, Thessaloniki, (2018); Nostalgia, no.23, London, (2018); The More You See The less You Hold , Sternview, Cork,(2017); Art Works, Visual, Carlow Arts Festival, (2016); Utopia Dystopia, Fringe Arts, Bath; Vestige of Place, Seamus Ennis Art Centre, Naul (2016). Her work is held in public and private collections in Australia, France, Germany, Ireland, Italy, Latvia, Switzerland, UK and USA.
http://instagram.com/memorygram
Statement
Rebecca Bradley’s practice includes painting, installation, and performance to explore ideas about our encounters with landscape and place. Central to her approach is a concern for space, light, mark making, and the material substance of her surroundings which she sometimes incorporates into her work. Bradley’s painting practice occurs through periods of research by reading, writing, making, memory, and direct observation and a belief in paint as a medium that can communicate through suggestion, ambiguity and it’s very visceral presence. Her research reflects on painting’s place as an intermediary for broader concerns about the environment, and subjective perception and a mindful eye on the history of art and the tradition of painting. Past work has explored protest banners as a format for painting and train journeys as triggers for speculation and imaginings. An ongoing theme in her practice is a focus on places at intersections, edges, and boundaries as loci of fecundity and adaptation.
Ida Mitrani
Ida Mitrani is a French visual artist and art facilitator living in Ireland since 1997. She received a First Class Honours Masters degree in Art and Process from the Crawford College of Art and Design in 2021. Mitrani was recently awarded the inaugural P.N.O’Gorman Auctioneers prize for a work on paper at the 194th RHA annual exhibition in Dublin. She was long listed by Dublin City Climate Action office for their first Biodiversity Artists in Residence. Other awards include the Arts Council Agility Award (2022), Dublin Arts Office residential space (2022), and the Arts for Health residency award at Uillinn West Cork Arts Centre (2021). Her work is now part of the HSE public collection, Crawford MAAP Graduate Collection, the public collection in the National Library in Dublin, the National Archives of Ireland, and the Arts Office in Dun Laoghaire-Rathdown.
http://instagram.com/idamitrani
Statement
Mitrani’s multidisciplinary practice explores concepts of social ecology and critical plant studies including the phenomenon of plant blindness whereby people are unable to notice or focus their attention on plants in their own environment and to emotionally connect with them. The act and language of drawing is essential to her practice. She gets inspiration from careful observations of plants entangled with plastic litter, and from a constant flux of images that are digitally manipulated, reproducing the natural biorhythm of creation and destruction through technology. The more traditional approach is used as a starting point in creating a continuity and connection between the various elements and materials found during her walks. Her aim is to highlight the contrast between the impermanent organic elements that, over time, will transform and decay, and the more permanent materials that will remain, reflecting humanity’s legacy on earth. The work presented for the exhibition is part of an on-going research process focusing on plant adaptation in hostile environments and on the impact of marine debris linked to human activity and to the devastating effect of plastic consumption.
Caroline Boyfield
Caroline Boyfield is a French visual artist and teacher who studied at Cardiff College of Art (University of South Wales) and De Montford University in the UK. She has lived in St Pol-de-Léon in Brittany since 2018. She holds a BA (Hons) in Fine Art and a PGCE in art & design education. Caroline taught Art and Design between 1990 and 2016 in the UK. She has been a full-time art practitioner since 2017.
Recent solo exhibitions:
THE FROE ALMANACK (2023) at Swerve Gallery and Project Space, Skibbereen, Co. Cork; SILLONS (2022) at Galerie Couleurs des Arts, Morlaix, FR and FLORIBUNDA (2021) at Bazar Saragoz, St Pol-de-Léon, FR.
Group exhibitions:
QUATRE FEMMES (2023) at La Maison Prébendale in St Pol-de-Léon, a project which Caroline coordinated with three other women artists; EXPO D’HIVER (2022) at Galerie Différence, Carantec, FR; INDIGO (2020) with the collective Courant d’Artsat La Tannerie, Plourin-les-Morlaix, FR; OPEN-UPP (2019), a pop-up exhibition in Uppingham, UK.
Her paintings are in the collections of several private individuals in France, Ireland and the UK. She also has work archived with Art Uk (www.artuk.org)
http://carolineboyfield.com
http://instagram.com/carolineboyfield
Statement
Caroline favours a multi-disciplinary approach to a range of subjects. She incorporates mono printing and collage elements into her two dimensional work and uses layers to create visual depth and to suggest meaning. Intuitive mark making and accidental effects are integral to her practice, with further painted and/or drawn elements worked in to create multi-layered surfaces, which reveal themselves during the creative process to unveil transient meaning. A keen sailor, Caroline is inspired by the ‘boat’ as an insular closed space, which exists in between two places and is closed-in on itself, whilst at the same time given over to the infinity of the sea. The boat becomes the metaphorical space for journeys through life, time and space. The work presented in this exhibitionexplores maritime journeys, navigation, points of departure and arrival between physical and poetic worlds.
Laure Colomer
Laure Colomer studied at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris, learning sculpture in the studio of Richard Deacon and video with Dominique Belloir. Following her studies in Paris, Laure embarked on trips between Australia, New Zealand and Canada through artist residencies. Today she lives and works in Morlaix in Brittany.
http://instagram.com/laurecolomer
https://laurecolomer.wixsite.com/site
Statement
“Laure Colomer is interested in the borders between realms: the border between animal and human, the passage between night and day, Sea and land. In her work there is a paradoxical encounter between a piercing light and a disconcerting darkness. They are images made up of words, of magic, of history recollected and transformed. She likes to talk about the heavy waters of Bachelard and Poe, as well as poetry by Yves Bonnefoy and William Blake. Thus in her work literature is embodied in sculpture.”
Translated from a text written by Léa Bismuth, art curator.
For this exhibition, Laure Colomer sculpted a pair of ceramic hybrid walrus tusks / deer antlers, next to which is a ball of wool. The three objects are presented on a fine layer of sand on top of an iron plinth. In this installation Laure was inspired by tales of the sea and Françoise Morvan’s research of the numerous Tales chronicled by Paul Sebillot in 1920 while traveling around Brittany. She describes a recurring figure, the Groac’h (old woman in the Breton language), a magical creature who lives in a sea cave and goes through a quick metamorphosis from a young to an old woman, following the rhythm of the moon and tides. During this aging process long walrus tusks grow and naturally shed like antlers. The wool that never ends is one of the magical objects that the Groac’h can decide to offer to a woman. The Groac’h strongly relates to the archetypal image of the crone, as analysed by Joanne Sienko Ott in The Crone Archetype: Women Reclaim Their Authentic Self by Resonating with the Crone Image. She discusses the emerging voice in a feminine symbolic discourse and explores portrayals of old women in samples drawn predominantly from French and American literature, using myth, folklore, psychological and feminist theories to examine, compare and contrast depictions of this figure through close textual analysis.