Local artist Indigo Azidahaka is on a mission to get the people of Derry thinking, learning and talking about their human rights…but Indigo needs the help of our city’s children to do so!
Indigo is inviting children aged 4-14 years old along to a fun filled workshop at Void Art Centre on Saturday 7th October to learn about their human rights and make their own activism posters which will be displayed on the gates of St Columb’s Hall in Derry City Centre for two weeks after the workshop, sharing their perspectives on human rights with the public!
Broaching the subject of human rights with your little ones can be tricky when faced with the reality that not everyone is having their human rights met. In this workshop Indigo breaks down what human rights are and why they’re important in a way that’s easily digestible, fun and interesting to children and young people. Indigo will then support each child in making a poster, as an exciting and creative opportunity to share their new knowledge and thoughts around the Universal Declaration of Human Rights with the people around them.
The day will be split into two age appropriate workshops:
– Workshop 1 (aimed at ages 4-8) – 10:30am-12:30pm
– Workshop 2 (aimed at ages 9-14) – 2-4pm
If your child is under the age of 8, parents/guardians are asked to remain in the building throughout its duration of the workshop. If your child is above the age of 8, you have the option to remain in the space or leave your phone number with Void staff and head out locally to spend some well needed ‘me time’ whilst your little monkeys learn all about human rights, if you wish. Tea, coffee and seats will be available in Void Art Centre’s foyer space.
These free workshops are for all abilities. Wheelchair access, a disabled bathroom, a sign translator and a quiet space are all available to make this a great time for everyone. Indigo also has many years of experience working with children and with those with additional needs.
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Indigo Azidahaka (they/them) is a multi-disciplinary artist currently based between Derry and Belfast. Azidakaka’s practice is informed by queer identity, disabled bodies and displacement. Within the work they explore society and the human condition, isolating key behaviours and rituals and analysing their cause and affect through absurdity. As part of this, within the making, Azidahaka carefully considers a message, levels of immersion and the audiences reaction.
Funded by The University of Atypical, Bounce Festival.
Mujeres Disruptivas arpillera exhibition, on display in three locations: Ulster Museum Belfast; Ulster University Magee Campus Library, Derry; and Flowerfield Arts Centre, Portstewart, introduces us to women who have pushed the boundaries and challenged human rights abuses. It is a collaborative initiative between Conflict Textiles and Fundació Ateneu Sant Roc, Catalonia.
In this workshop you will gain an insight into some of these arpilleras (three dimensional textiles originating from Latin America which became a tool for Chilean women to stitch their lived experiences of the Pinochet dictatorship – 1973 – 1990). The workshop will start with a short visit to the arpilleras on display. You will then have an opportunity to make an arpillera doll in response to the arpilleras viewed.
Facilitators: Arpilleristas, Manoli and Pilar from the Fundació Ateneu Sant Roc group will facilitate the workshop. This is part of their wider visit to Northern Ireland to share their expertise in arpilleras and visit the ‘Mujeres Disruptivas’ exhibition venues where arpilleras from the Fundació Ateneu Sant Roc and Conflict Textiles collection are on display. They will also facilitate a workshop in Ulster Museum, Belfast.
Basic materials will be provided and the emphasis is on working with scraps/recycled material.
Please bring a scrap of fabric which has a special significance to you.
No sewing experience is needed.
Details: 2-4.30pm, Thursday 27th April, Void Gallery, Derry/Londonderry
Acknowledgements
Void Gallery is supported using public funding from Arts Council Northern Ireland, Arts Council National Lottery Fund, All Island Fund, Austin and Hope Pilkington Foundation, Arnold Clarke Foundation, Bank of Ireland Begin Together Arts Fund, Community Foundation Ireland, Derry City and Strabane District Council, Enkalon Foundation, National Lottery Community Fund, The Ireland Funds, Ragdoll Foundation.
Void Gallery is supported using public funding from Arts Council Northern Ireland, Austin and Hope Pilkington Foundation, Arnold Clarke Foundation, Derry City and Strabane District Council, The Ireland Funds, Ragdoll Foundation, Art Fund, Halifax Foundation, The Arts Society.
Part of our Void Explorers programme of bookable workshops aimed at children and young people aged 4-14 years old.
Join Tori McNeill on Saturday 3rd December from 2-3pm for a sunset painting demonstration and workshop. During this session participants will have the opportunity to work alongside Tori to create their own canvas sunset masterpiece to take home!
Tori McNeill is a 23 year old artist based in Derry whose work focuses on the use of bright colours and strong bold shapes. Tori has exhibited throughout Derry over the last couple of years and has facilitated workshops with a number of different groups. She was born with Down syndrome and diagnosed with Autism when she was 18 (the same week as her first exhibition!) – Tori’s Autism has aided her art and helped her develop her unique style, seeing the world through a spectrum of colours. She is very keen to inspire other people with disabilities not to be held back by them but to move forward, be positive and reach for their dreams.
Presented as part of Disability Awareness Week 2022.
Acknowledgements
Image courtesy of Tori McNeill.
Void Gallery is supported using public funding from Arts Council Northern Ireland, Austin and Hope Pilkington Foundation, Arnold Clarke Foundation, Derry City and Strabane District Council, The Ireland Funds, Ragdoll Foundation, Art Fund, Halifax Foundation, The Arts Society.
Void Gallery is delighted to present flotsam, jetsam, lagan and derelict, a solo exhibition by Dublin-based artist Isabel Nolan. The exhibition comprises paintings, drawings and objects, reflecting Nolan’s ongoing interest in modes of human organisation, the shifting status of artefacts and images over long periods of time.
The preview will commence with an in conversation between Isabel and Declan Long, art critic and Course Director of the MA Art in the Contemporary World at NCAD Ireland. Booking can be made by visiting this link.
The experience of lockdown during Covid-19 and the slowing down of time has a resonance in this exhibition. Often working at home, drawing, an important element of Nolan’s practice, became the sole conduit of how she made ‘meaning’ happen and manifested a response in a time of huge uncertainty.Drawing is integral to her studio practice, it is a means to conjure new representations of the world, of making it legible. Sketching, scribbling, note-taking, erasing and sometimes simply expending nervous energy is fundamental to the way Nolan draws. Often made without the intention of being exhibited, pages absorb ideas and begin to suggest material ways to formulate and give shape to often abstract ideas. The line, colours, patterns and forms are a starting point for her expanded practice; from there she transfers this mode of working to encompass painting, sculpture or tapestry.
The paintings have an ethereal and otherworldly quality stemming from years of reading and harvesting ideas from diverse fields; philosophy, archaeology, physics and theology. The figures in the paintings, such as shadowy St. Jerome, the patron saint of archaeology, known for his translation of the bible, and St. Columba, the patron Saint of Derry, who is credited with spreading monastic Christianity Christian culture in Ireland, and Scotland (and overseeing the emergence of an Irish historical record,) reflects Nolan’s love for elaborately honed narratives that become the channel for disseminating both troubling beliefs and great spirituality.
The paintings have an energetic quality to them, a hum, a liveness through her use of colour and motifs that recur throughout her work; suns, spirals, and waveforms give this sense of momentum. These forms also express the macro and the micro, the cosmic to the cellular.
Her works are revealing; representing the unseen, a fluid version of the world that continues to explore the periphery, the otherworld, and questions of ‘meaning’. As we have returned to the everyday, and things are as they were, and we are overloaded with quotidian concerns, those philosophical questions concerning the nature of the human condition have receded. This exhibition is a reminder that existence is delicate, unfathomable and our vocabulary often struggles to encapsulate the profundity and strangeness of being alive. In a time where the world feels as if it is teetering on a precipice of cumulative disasters Nolan provides a provisional space for us to occupy and ruminate on the nature and beauty of existence.
Isabel Nolan Biography
Isabel Nolan’s work includes sculpture, textiles, paintings, drawings, photography and writing. Her work responds to the fundamental question of how humans bring the world into meaning. How we make, (through science, politics, agriculture, religion, etcetera), reality happens. Whether examining the knees of a 17th C sculpture, perceptions of a Neolithic artefact, the shifting symbolic status of a donkey or images of distant galaxies, Nolan looks for the ways we can like, or even love, the difficult and complex human world we’ve made.
“The arc of almost every little thing I’ve proffered in public, in exhibitions or texts is quite similar. It goes as follows: Life is often hard and without meaning in any grand, a priori sense. Art is a good way to find meaninglessness beautiful. Meaning must be invented. And those inventions must be contested and questioned, and never taken for granted.” Isabel Nolan
Curling up with Reality, 2020, is a monograph featuring select work and writing from 2011 to 2020, published by Launchpad, London; Kerlin Gallery, Dublin, in association with DHG, Dublin. Recent exhibitions include A delicate bond that is also a gap, Solstice Arts Centre, Navan, 2021; Spaced Out, Kerlin Gallery, Dublin, 2021; a two-person show (with Stephen McKenna), Boxes Art Museum, Shunde, China, 2019, and solos at Kunstverein Langenhagen, 2018; Grazer Kunstverein, 2017-18; Douglas Hyde Gallery, Dublin, 2017; London Mithraeum/Bloomberg Space, 2017; Mercer Union, Toronto, 2016; Irish Museum of Modern Art, 2014. Isabel Nolan represented Ireland at the 2005 Venice Biennale in a group exhibition. Her work has featured in EVA International, Limerick; LIAF biennial, Norway; Artspace, Sydney; Palais de Tokyo, Paris; Beijing Art Museum, and Glasgow International.
Image credit: Eurydice (dead again…) and Orpheus, 2022 water-based oil on canvas, 70 x 60 cm / 27.6 x 23.6 in
Acknowledgements
Void Gallery is supported using public funding from Arts Council Northern Ireland, Austin and Hope Pilkington Foundation, Arnold Clarke Foundation, Derry City and Strabane District Council, The Ireland Funds, Ragdoll Foundation, Art Fund, Halifax Foundation, The Arts Society.
On Saturday 19 November at 5:30pm, join us for a special in conversation at Void, between artist Isabel Nolan and art critic Declan Long, in response to Isabel’s solo exhibition flotsam, jetsam, lagan and derelict. The exhibition will open to the public at 6pm and drinks will be served, provided by Northbound Brewery.
This is a FREE event but booking is advised.
About the exhibition
flotsam, jetsam, lagan and derelict is a solo exhibition by Dublin-based artist Isabel Nolan. The exhibition comprises paintings, drawings and objects, reflecting Nolan’s ongoing interest in modes of human organisation, the shifting status of artefacts and images over long periods of time.
The experience of lockdown during Covid-19 and the slowing down of time has a resonance in this exhibition. Often working at home, drawing, an important element of Nolan’s practice, became the sole conduit of how she made ‘meaning’ happen and manifested a response in a time of huge uncertainty.Drawing is integral to her studio practice, it is a means to conjure new representations of the world, of making it legible. Sketching, scribbling, note-taking, erasing and sometimes simply expending nervous energy is fundamental to the way Nolan draws. Often made without the intention of being exhibited, pages absorb ideas and begin to suggest material ways to formulate and give shape to often abstract ideas. The line, colours, patterns and forms are a starting point for her expanded practice; from there she transfers this mode of working to encompass painting, sculpture or tapestry.
The paintings have an ethereal and otherworldly quality stemming from years of reading and harvesting ideas from diverse fields; philosophy, archaeology, physics and theology. The figures in the paintings, such as shadowy St. Jerome, the patron saint of archaeology, known for his translation of the bible, and St. Columba, the patron Saint of Derry, who is credited with spreading monastic Christianity Christian culture in Ireland, and Scotland (and overseeing the emergence of an Irish historical record,) reflects Nolan’s love for elaborately honed narratives that become the channel for disseminating both troubling beliefs and great spirituality.
The paintings have an energetic quality to them, a hum, a liveness through her use of colour and motifs that recur throughout her work; suns, spirals, and waveforms give this sense of momentum. These forms also express the macro and the micro, the cosmic to the cellular.
Her works are revealing; representing the unseen, a fluid version of the world that continues to explore the periphery, the otherworld, and questions of ‘meaning’. As we have returned to the everyday, and things are as they were, and we are overloaded with quotidian concerns, those philosophical questions concerning the nature of the human condition have receded. This exhibition is a reminder that existence is delicate, unfathomable and our vocabulary often struggles to encapsulate the profundity and strangeness of being alive. In a time where the world feels as if it is teetering on a precipice of cumulative disasters Nolan provides a provisional space for us to occupy and ruminate on the nature and beauty of existence.
Isabel Nolan Biography
Isabel Nolan’s work includes sculpture, textiles, paintings, drawings, photography and writing. Her work responds to the fundamental question of how humans bring the world into meaning. How we make, (through science, politics, agriculture, religion, etcetera), reality happens. Whether examining the knees of a 17th C sculpture, perceptions of a Neolithic artefact, the shifting symbolic status of a donkey or images of distant galaxies, Nolan looks for the ways we can like, or even love, the difficult and complex human world we’ve made.
“The arc of almost every little thing I’ve proffered in public, in exhibitions or texts is quite similar. It goes as follows: Life is often hard and without meaning in any grand, a priori sense. Art is a good way to find meaninglessness beautiful. Meaning must be invented. And those inventions must be contested and questioned, and never taken for granted.” Isabel Nolan
Curling up with Reality, 2020, is a monograph featuring select work and writing from 2011 to 2020, published by Launchpad, London; Kerlin Gallery, Dublin, in association with DHG, Dublin. Recent exhibitions include A delicate bond that is also a gap, Solstice Arts Centre, Navan, 2021; Spaced Out Kerlin Gallery, Dublin, 2021; a two-person show (with Stephen McKenna), Boxes Art Museum, Shunde, China, 2019, and solos at Kunstverein Langenhagen, 2018; Grazer Kunstverein, 2017-18; Douglas Hyde Gallery, Dublin, 2017; London Mithraeum/Bloomberg Space, 2017; Mercer Union, Toronto, 2016; Irish Museum of Modern Art, 2014. Isabel Nolan represented Ireland at the 2005 Venice Biennale in a group exhibition. Her work has featured in EVA International, Limerick; LIAF biennial, Norway; Artspace, Sydney; Palais de Tokyo, Paris; Beijing Art Museum, and Glasgow International.
Declan Long Biography
Declan Long is a lecturer at the National College of Art & Design in Dublin, Ireland, where he is Course Director (with Francis Halsall) of the MA Art in the Contemporary World, a theory-practice postgraduate contemporary art programme for critics, curators and artists (www.acw.ie). He is a regular contributor to Artforum and Source Photographic Review.
His book Ghost-haunted Land: Contemporary Art and Post-Troubles Northern Ireland, is available from Manchester University Press.
Acknowledgements
Void Gallery is supported using public funding from Arts Council Northern Ireland, Austin and Hope Pilkington Foundation, Arnold Clarke Foundation, Derry City and Strabane District Council, The Ireland Funds, Ragdoll Foundation, Art Fund, Halifax Foundation, The Arts Society.
Tap into your imagination, experiment with materials and create freely as a family or small group during Void’s Curiosity Club sessions this summer!
Inspired by Void’s current exhibition, flotsam, jetsam, lagan and derelict by Isabel Nolan, our winter Curiosity Club activities include jellyfish mobiles, make your own playdough and animal models, explorative painting, drawing booklets, and yarn painting. The Curiosity Club will be filled with various different materials, activity prompts and mediums for your little ones to self direct around, experiment with and unleash their inner artist.
Please note:
These sessions are self-directed so adults must attend with children; one parent/guardian may attend with their child or children.
If you or the child/children that you are attending with have any allergies or special needs requirements please do let us know by emailing learning@derryvoid.com.
Acknowledgements
Void Gallery is supported using public funding from Arts Council Northern Ireland, Austin and Hope Pilkington Foundation, Arnold Clarke Foundation, Derry City and Strabane District Council, The Ireland Funds, Ragdoll Foundation, Art Fund, Halifax Foundation, The Arts Society.
