Features Overview

Engage Art Studios are delighted to announce the official launch of our new facility in Churchfields, Salthill. Saturday 25th May from 1pm. This day long celebration will include Open Studios and tours of the facility (1pm-4.30pm) where the public will get rare access to the Artist Studios, to see the how artist work and gain an insight in to the creative process. There will be free art demos for all ages in our workspace.

This will also see the opening of our new Gallery at 5pm. Our inaugural exhibition Where you are lost, we are Sídhe- will feature work by artists Monique Blom, Zara Lyness, Ilaria Pellizzaro Anushiya Sundaralingam and Ruby Wallis. This exhibition is exploring ideas between those of land art practice, traditionally-feminine creative crafts, and contemporary art practice. Each of the artwork presented is rooted to an action that began outdoors. The artists look at natural landscapes and social structures and explore their place within them as women, as artists, as occupants of space. Their actions are different from those of men artists who work with landscape: They do not conquer, they do not reshape, displace, or replace. They place a body or a texture, they harvest to create.

By creatively acting outdoors, indoors, and filling the space with their work, these artists are constituting a reality in which land art means placing and creating rather than displacing and reshaping. The idea of “constituting a reality” references Judith Butler’s ‘Performative Acts and Gender Constitution: An Essay in Phenomenology and Feminist Theory’ where Butler states that acting within public reality, unlike theatrical acting, potentially constitutes a changed reality. The work is rooted outdoors; it comments on the social structures that await us when we walk outside; it represents a creative relationship with land.

The day will conclude with a performance by artist Zara Lyness at 5.30.
Engage Art Studios gratefully Acknowledges the support of the Arts Council of Ireland and Galway City Council .