All levels welcome. Come along for a chat and a sketch.
This is a free event. For more information: @visual_artist_collective
If you require any more information please email hello@derryvoid.com
Hosted by Visual Artist Collective in collaboration with Foyle Pride, this sketchbook meet-up is a relaxed break from the Pride festivities where you can create in a low-pressure environment. We invite all LGBTQIA+ artists to come along to Void Art Centre with their sketchbooks for a cup of tea, a few hours of sketching and a chat with fellow queer creatives in a safe, welcoming space, before the week culminates in the annual parade.
This is a free event. For more information: @visual_artist_collective
If you require any more information please email hello@derryvoid.com
All levels welcome. Come along for a chat and a sketch.
This is a free event. For more information: @visual_artist_collective
If you require any more information please email hello@derryvoid.com
All levels welcome. Come along for a chat and a sketch.
This is a free event. For more information: @visual_artist_collective
If you require any more information please email hello@derryvoid.com
Join artist Cara Donaghey and model Mel Bradley for an exploratory life drawing session using Banu Cennetoğlu’s exhibition right? as a backdrop on Thursday 7th September, 7-8:30pm.
No prior experience required – just come along and give it a try!
£8 per participant.
Materials and refreshments will be provided.
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 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’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
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.
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’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 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.
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.
The REWIND<<FASTFORWARD>>RECORD (RFR) initiative is hitting Derry with an exciting programme of events aimed at exploring the rich history of Foyle Pride and LGBTQ+ activism in the city.
Coordinated by artist and curator Brendan Fox and GCN’s editorial assistant Han Tiernan, the RFR initiative is a national touring project aimed at exploring local LGBTQ+ histories and representation to expand their retelling and relevance through artistic expression.
Following the success of its residencies in IMMA, Tullamore, Dublin Pride Hub, and West Cork Arts Centre, RFR will take up its 5th residency at Void Gallery.
The dynamic programme of events will see RFR host three original workshops, a rainbow walking tour, a display of protest banners, and a fabulous launch night to celebrate and pay homage to Foyle Pride. The programme will cater for all ages and all artistic levels.
Book your free place today – click here!
“It is not the place of the theatre to show the correct path, but only to offer the means by which all possible paths may be examined” – Augusto Boal.
This workshop will draw on each participants immediate responses to the unofficial Foyle Pride Archive in the care of the Rainbow Project. Activating a series of techniques and exercises we will locate commonalities and intersections within their formed perspectives. Through the consideration of our bodies as both subjects and sculptural objects, participants will have the opportunity to physically manifest their ideas and concepts. This new manifestation may allow us to elaborate on how we may perceive or locate ourselves, the viewer, in this exchange of ideas. As we physically occupy the triangle of Viewer, Artist and Art-object we may attempt to develop a new line of collective questioning. Considering ideas around art, protest and our place within this sphere. A series of meditations and responses will take place offering a new ‘way in’ to the archive activating the space as a discursive platform and crucially an intergenerational place to belong.
Places are limited, so please book a ticket and if you need to cancel let us know.
Rewind Fastforward Record (RFR) is undertaking a three-week residency at Void Gallery, Derry, creating new work with local LGBTQ+ community groups and artists. Images of this workshop may be exhibited as part of the final RFR exhibition with your permission.
Book your free place today – click here!
In this workshop, artist and researcher Hannah Tiernan will deliver a short introduction to the history of modern Irish LGBTQ+ Activism and a selection of placards and banners that have been used during various LGBTQ+ protests. This will be followed by a placard-making workshop facilitated by artist and educator Sarah Edmondson, where participants will be guided through a process of combining typography with line drawings to create strong visual statements.
Book your free place today – click here!
Facilitated by Eimear Willis.
Join Eimear Willis of Rainbow Project for a fascinating stroll through Derry where you will encounter some of the founding members of Foyle Pride and other LGBTQ+ activists who will share historic stories of the city and their own experiences along the way. Meeting at 6.30pm at Void Gallery.
Book your free place today – click here!
“It is not the place of the theatre to show the correct path, but only to offer the means by which all possible paths may be examined.” – Augusto Boal.
Re-visions: Your Practice, My Body. Experimental workshop drawing on each artist’s area of research and studio practice through Augusto Boal’s Image Theatre techniques.
This workshop will draw on each artists area of interest and through a series of techniques and exercises we will locate commonalities and intersections within their practices. Through the consideration of our bodies as both subjects and sculptural objects, artists will have the opportunity to physically manifest their ideas and concepts. This new manifestation may allow us to elaborate on how we may perceive or locate the viewer in this exchange of ideas. As we physically occupy the triangle of Viewer, Artist and Art-object we may attempt to develop a new line of collective questioning.
The cumulative artistic outcomes of each workshop will be displayed alongside RFR’s series of vibrant protest banners created with the Out South Central group and Tullamore LGBTQ+ Youth to be launched at an open event on Tuesday, August 23 at 6.30pm, signalling a great week of celebrations ahead of the Foyle Pride parade.
Void Gallery is supported by Arts Council Northern Ireland, Derry City and Strabane District Council, Halifax Foundation, The Ragdoll Foundation, The Ireland Funds, Austin and Hope Pilkington Foundation, and Arnold Clarke Foundation.
