Developers | Alice Lyons & Orla Mc Hardy

Image 1, 2 & 3: Developers (installation view). Roscommon Arts Centre, April – May 2014.

Through the support of the Arts Council of Ireland’s Curatorial Residency scheme, a series of exhibitions and events have been developed that respond to the period of intense change being experienced in Co. Roscommon. These responses will unfold in multiple acts and through a range of activities including exhibitions, events, talks, symposium and commissions.

The first event being the exhibition Developers. Using tropes and devices that reflect the development of contemporary rural society, Developers strives to portray what is often difficult to decipher or goes unseen.

Developers is a project about trying to see rapid change as it is ‘developing’, in the hope that clear seeing might be its own reward. Cootehall, my home for fifteen years, has been in the midst of a great upheaval in recent years. I wanted to approach the particularities of those changes; to see, to listen, to ‘snatch out of time’ moments that might offer some clarity in a period when clarity was hard to come by, when freezing fog – literally and figuratively – descended on the village.  A big mirror often seemed the best tool to use. Film, speech and poems were employed as tools of reflection, too. This is a display of what they yielded.

  –Alice Lyons (writer/director, Developers)

Developers was produced through the assistance of the Arts Council of Ireland Project Award.

Alice Lyons and  Orla Mc Hardy have co-directed The Polish Language (2009), which was nominated for an IFTA, received Best Irish Animation Awards at the Galway Film Fleadh, the Kerry Film Festival and a jury citation from Expresion en Corto in Mexico. It has screened in competitions in 30 film festivals worldwide and was recently part of a major exhibition,‘Script films: Script as a moving image: A dynamic archive’ at the Center for Art and Media (ZKM),Karlsruhle, Germany & FACT (Foundation for Art and Creative Technology), Liverpool.

The visual arts programme is supported by Roscommon County Council Arts Office. and curated by visual arts curator in residence Linda Shevlin.

This curatorial residency is kindly supported by the Arts Council of Ireland.

Info

Biography

Linda Shevlin has curated, facilitated and managed both large and small-scale visual arts projects including the 53rd Venice Biennale where she was project manager for the representative artists Gareth Kennedy & Sarah Browne and is Tulca Festival curator for 2018.

In 2017 she was the invited curator for the Hennessy Art Fund, purchasing new works for the IMMA collection and also curated the visual art programme for Bealtaine Festival 2017/2018 where she developed projects, commissions, residencies & exhibitions. with numerous Irish artists including Vivienne Dick, Kathy Prendergast, Kevin Gaffney, Pauline Cummins and Frances Mezzetti.

In 2016 she curated Radical Actions at RMIT Galleries, Melbourne as part of Culture Ireland’s 2016 International Programme ‘I Am Ireland’. The exhibition featured works by Duncan Campbell, Jesse Jones, Kennedy Browne and Seamus Nolan.

Other recent independent curatorial projects include Americana: Future Rural featuring John Gerrard (IE), Brian Duggan (IE), Kim Shively (USA) and M12 Studio (USA) at The Dock, Leitrim and Amharc Fhine Gall X commissioning Ella de Búrca, Ruth Clinton and Niamh Morriarty.

She has been awarded the Arts Council of Ireland’s Visual Arts Curatorial Residency award for three consecutive years (2013 – 2016) and in that time has produced a series of events and exhibitions in County Roscommon including newly commissioned works by Maria McKinney (IE) and Sean Lynch (IE); public art projects by Sean Rafferty (AUS), Ruth E. Lyons (IE) and Deirdre O’Mahony (IE), exhibitions by Martin Parr (UK), Duncan Campbell (IE) & Eamon O’Kane (IE) and a symposium titled The Workers with contributions from Adam Sutherland of Grizedale Arts (UK) & M12 Collective (USA) among others.

Shevlin is currently curator in residence with Roscommon Arts Centre & Solstice Arts Centre.

Contact

Linda Shevlin
Tivanagh School
Cloonloo
Boyle
Co. Roscommon
Ireland
 
linda@lindashevlin.com
+353 86 605 2571
+353  71 966 4606