Image 1: Fuzzy Aggregates. Video still. Elaine Reynolds, 2014. Image 2: Bogbutters – Bellanagare, Co. Roscommon, discovered 1961; Gneeveguilla, Co. Kerry buried 2011. Gareth Kennedy, 2012. Image 3: Risk. Michelle Browne, 2011. Image – Science Gallery

The Workers, an exhibition by Michelle Browne, Gareth Kennedy and Elaine Reynolds. Each of these artists have participated on Art@Work, a collaborative, residential art project that was initiated by Roscommon Arts Office to bring artists and their processes closer to the public through the production of works motivated by the materials and practices of businesses located in the County and has supported over 60 artists working in over 40 businesses.

This exhibition features recent works by past participants of Art@Work, Michelle Browne, Gareth Kennedy & Elaine Reynolds and explores how their practice has developed since their residency.

Created during a residency at Leitrim Sculpture Centre, Michelle Browne’s two channel film Risk engages with the risk takers in society who invested their lives and family’s future in property and precarious business transactions. In this piece the artist situates herself and a number of wealthy men around a poker table and proceeds to query, question and interrogate their working practices and decision making when risk is involved. Concerned with the physical and emotional response to risk, Michelle deftly asks the questions society has failed to, leading to responses and reflective conversations that perhaps say more than the participants intended.

Gareth Kennedy’s IKEA Butter Churn for Gneeveguilla considers traditional working processes and relationships to work. As part of a public art commission in 2011, Kennedy created a fictional custom or folk rite for the village of Gneeveguilla (pop. 500), Co. Kerry, Ireland. Over the Summer of 2011 Gareth worked with the people of Gneeveguilla to develop and enact an invented tradition for the village. Drawing on local knowledge and skills around butter production, each inhabitant of the town was invited to participate in the creation of a large pat of butter that was then packed in a “firkin” handcrafted from IKEA products. The butter churn crafted by inhabitants of Gneeveguilla will be exhibited in Roscommon Arts Centre along with a Super8 film that documented the process, borrowing from the style of the television series Hands produced during the late 1970’s and ran until the early 80’s.

On first viewing of the video Fuzzy Aggregates by Elaine Reynolds, we appear to be presented with a personal account of migration from rural Ireland, but sadly it brings together the voices of multiple migrant workers seeking their fortune in isolated, barren, mining regions of Western Australia working in harsh and physically difficult conditions. Footage of family and friend’s experiences working the mines are merged with and subsumed into recollections by complete strangers in similar situations that are reappropriated from YouTube, reflecting current global networks of exchange and how labour flows in the market economy.