Caroline Boyfield and Laure Colomer travelled to Cork in May 2024 to undertake residency activity in Sirius Arts Centre and Uillinn West Cork Arts Centre, responding to their contexts, landscapes, culture and history within their practices and presenting public events. Cork-based artists Rebecca Bradley and Ida Mitrani were selected by open call to engage in two weeks residencies in Brittany in April 2024 and work with both Caroline and Laure during their time in Cork, to enable creative exchange and peer learning.
In order to offer this residency programme a meaningful culminatory platform to celebrate and share the work and learnings arising from it, Triskel Sample Project Space hosted a summer group exhibition of work by Rebecca Bradley, Ida Mitrani, Caroline Boyfield and Laure Colomer. Opportunities are currently being explored to enable this exhibition to tour to a gallery in Brittany in 2025.
Read this Irish Examiner article by Marc O’Sullivan Vallig about the exhibition.
About the Artists
Rebecca Bradley’s practice includes painting, installation and performance to explore ideas about our encounters with landscape and place. Central to her approach is a concern for space, light, mark making and the material substance of her surroundings which she sometimes incorporates into her work.
Bradley’s painting practice occurs through periods of research by reading, process, memory and direct observation and a belief in paint as a medium that can communicate through suggestion, ambiguity and its very visceral presence. Her research reflects on painting’s place as an intermediary for broader concerns about the environment, and subjective perception and a mindful eye on the history of art and the tradition of painting. Past work has explored protest banners as a format for painting and train journeys as triggers for speculation and imaginings. An ongoing theme in her practice is a focus on places at intersections and boundaries as loci of fecundity and adaptation.
“The TRISKEL SAMPLE Project Space provided a space for exhibiting and considering the first phase of the Brittany-Cork Maritime residency exchange. It brought new audience engagement to work made during residencies in Brittany and Cork. The opportunity to exhibit together in the space cemented our own development as an artistic collective and gave a strong visual context for exploring our collaboration and a place to document our journey to date. We are now pursuing new opportunities for disseminating this and new work through exhibitions, residencies and partnerships in Ireland and throughout Europe whilst continuing to research and make meaningful, artistically excellent work within our individual practices.” – Rebecca Bradley
Ida Mitrani’s multidisciplinary practice explores concepts of social ecology and critical plant studies including plant blindness, post-naturalism, hybridity and the notion of human and plant displacement. She gets inspiration from careful observations of plants, and from a constant flux of images that she digitally manipulates, reproducing the natural biorhythm of creation and destruction through technology. Collages of digitised images and plant-shaped plastics evoke the notion of mimicry in which organisms simultaneously evolve to resemble and compete with one another.
The act and language of drawing is essential to her practice in creating a continuity and connection between the various elements and materials found during her walks. The work generated represents other realities of a world where the entangling of various forms, human and non-human, brings the conception of new life.
She has taken part in several group exhibitions including Droichead Arts Centre, Roscommon Arts Centre, Visual Carlow, GOMA Waterford, Lexicon Gallery, Temple Bar Gallery & Studios, Oonagh Young Gallery, Cross Gallery, and a solo show in NAG in Dublin.
Awards include the Arts Council Agility Award (2022), Dublin Arts Office residential space (2022), and the Arts for Health residency award at Uillinn West Cork Arts Centre (2021)
Her work is now part of the HSE public collection, Crawford MAAP Graduate Collection, the public collection in the National Library in Dublin, the National Archives of Ireland, and the Arts Office in Dun Laoghaire-Rathdown.
“The residency in Brittany gave me the time and space to fully immerse myself into my artistic practice while exploring new territories. The coastal walks, the vastness of the landscape and the various encounters in urban locations opened up enriching internal and external dialogues further connecting me to the environment. The exhibition in Triskel highlighted the journey and connection between all the artists involved in the ‘MARITIME’ residency. An important journey strongly supported by Samples-Studios and other parties.” – Ida Mitrani
Caroline Boyfield is a French-British artist born in 1962 in Wales, who lives in St Pol-de-Léon, France. After graduating in 1989 in the United Kingdom, with a BA and studies in Fine Art at the University of South Wales, Caroline taught Art and Design between 1990 and 2016 in the UK. Since 2017, she has returned full time to her art practice. Recent solo exhibitions include: ‘SILLONS’,Galerie Couleurs des Arts, Morlaix, FR (2022) and ’FLORIBUNDA’,Bazar Saragoz, St Pol-de-Léon, FR (2021). Recent group exhibitions include the upcoming ‘Quatre Femmes’, La Maison Prébendale in St Pol-de-Léon (Feb. 2023), ‘EXPO D’HIVER’, Galerie Différence, Carantec (2022), ’INDIGO’ with Courant d’Arts, La Tannerie, Plourin-les-Morlaix, (2020) and ‘OpenUpp’, Uppingham, GB (2019). Her paintings are in the collections of several private individuals in France and Great Britain. She also has work archived with Art Uk (www.artuk.org)
“I am very grateful to the Triskel / Sample partnership for providing space for a culminating exhibition in Cork of our Brittany/Ireland residency project. This platform has enabled our collective work to come together in the Cork/Brittany ‘MARITIME’ exhibition and to reach out to curators and arts organisations in Ireland. It will also help take our project forward in France. Thank you to Triskel / Sample for this forward-thinking initiative, which I hope will benefit many others.” – Caroline Boyfield
Laure Colomer studied at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris, learning sculpture in the studio of Richard Deacon and video with Dominique Belloir. Following her studies in Paris, Laure embarked on trips between Australia, New Zealand and Canada through artist residencies. Today she lives and works in Morlaix in Brittany.
“Laure Colomer is interested in the borders between realms: the border between animal and human, the passage between night and day, Sea and land. In her work there is a paradoxical encounter between a piercing light and a disconcerting darkness. They are images made up of words, of magic, of history recollected and transformed. She likes to talk about the heavy waters of Bachelard and Poe, as well as poetry by Yves Bonnefoy and William Blake. Thus in her work literature is embodied in sculpture.” – Translated from a text written by Léa Bismuth, art curator.
“Participating in the maritime residency exchange and exhibition at Triskel has been an influential experience for my work. The opportunity to engage with a new community, explore new artistic themes, representation of magical objects found in tales and mythology, and showcase my work in such a dynamic space have deeply enriched my creative process. This experience has not only expanded my artistic practice but also fostered meaningful connections that will continue to influence my work moving forward.” – Laure Colomer
