Triskel Sample Project Space is a new partnership between Triskel and Sample-Studios that will provide a visual arts project space for artists, especially emerging and mid-career artists, to test ideas and to develop new work that can be seen by the public. This offers tangible career development and audience engagement opportunities to artists on their ‘home turf’ where they have a safe space to develop new ideas, within which risk-taking is possible.
“Over the past few years, Triskel’s approach to visual arts has been one where we have worked with curators to programme the Gallery,” said Tony Sheehan, Artistic Director with Triskel. “Having consulted widely with artists, we are delighted that a new partnership with Sample-Studios will now utilise the Arts Centre as a residential space for experimentation, development and exhibition. Triskel has always had an important role in championing the visual arts in Cork, and we are delighted to work with Sample-Studios to create exciting opportunities for artists who live and work in the city, as well as artists nationally and internationally to engage with the city.”
Project-focused artist residencies will take place from March to May and September to December, offering artists a focused and intensive working space where they can develop and test their burgeoning projects in a hybrid workspace/public space. In some cases, artists will also present a culminatory exhibition, screening or performance. Over the course of their residencies, the artists will engage with audiences in Triskel. Additionally, the Sample Triskel Project Space provides a meaningful culminatory platform for ongoing artist-led projects including the ‘Maritime’ residency, an artist-led studio exchange residency between artists in Brittany France and Cork-based artists Ida Mitrani and Rebecca Bradley, who will exhibit the work arising from this exchange in the Project Space in the summer months. The programme will also platform new work by artist Paul McKenna, Cork County Council’s Dearcán Award recipient, as part of STAMP Festival in May.
Aoibhie McCarthy, Director with Sample-Studios, said, “We’re delighted to work in partnership with Triskel Arts Centre who, in developing their new Visual Arts Strategy, have focused on creating meaningful resources to enable local artists to sustain their practice. Ten artists will benefit from this provision of space and a bursary from Triskel Arts Centre. This initiative provides a unique resource in a Cork context – a hybrid residency and exhibition space – that will enable local artists to roadtest ideas, experiment with new mediums, get feedback from peers and engage new audiences.”
Sample-Studios Cork Midsummer Emerging Artist Awardee Residency: Riki Matsuda
4 March – 5 May
Riki Matsuda is a Japanese-Irish artist based in Cork. She received her BFA from CCAD in Ohio and relocated to Cork, Ireland in 2019. Her multidisciplinary practice centres around communication and how language serves and deserts us.
Through installations and interactive work, Matsuda creates a space for unlearning by playing with misunderstandings, the limitations of language, the complexity of feeling, and the need for physical communication. Matsuda has taken part in Cork’s STAMP Festival as well as the Cavan Arts Festival, Culture Night 2023, Sample-Studios Members Summer Exhibition and was included in The Irish Contemporaries {ii} based in L.A.
In 2023, Riki was awarded the 2nd Sample-Studios Cork Midsummer Festival Award which includes a €2000 bursary, membership of Sample-Studios and production supports from Cork Midsummer Festival to present new work as part of the Festival in 2024. In advance of presenting her multidisciplinary installations and pop up performances at Cork Midsummer Festival in June 2024, Riki Matsuda will engage in a focused residency in Triskel, exploring her materials, methodology and testing her ideas with Triskel audiences.
Etaoin Melville, Silent Voices
Cork Harbour Festival, 1-10 June
Featuring the artist herself, her daughter and mother, this film project by local artist Etaoin Melville investigates matrilineal lines, patterns that are passed from one generation to another and mothers’ primal instincts as protectors. The vast ocean background mirrors our cycles with its tides, the passing of time and the inherent strength of these bonds.
Etaoin Melville is a visual artist based in Cork. She holds an Honours Degree in Visual Art, (TUD, Sherkin Island) and studied Film and T.V production in St. John’s College, Cork. She is a recipient of two Arts Council of Ireland Agility Awards and is a studio-based member of Sample-Studios.
Kayleigh Maimaran Residency
10-23 June
Berlin-based artist Kayleigh Maimaran will take up residency in Triskel in June. With a particular interest in the concept of psychological space and architecture, her practice combines video, sound and sculptural elements as a form to explore physical and non-visual aspects of space. She graduated in 2021 from MTU Crawford College of Art and Design with a BA in Fine Art and was awarded a Graduate Studio Residency at Sample-Studios, where she has been a member since. Her work has been part of multiple exhibitions including her solo exhibition Beyond Liminal (2022) in the Lord Mayor’s Pavilion, Cork and her most recent solo exhibition Void Scape at GlogauAIR, Berlin in 2023. Kayleigh will create an immersive space during the two weekends of Cork Midsummer Festival where audiences can relax and reflect.
Cork/Brittany ‘Maritime’ Residency Exhibition
26 June – 2 September
‘Maritime’ is an artist-led residency exchange programme between artists based in Brittany, France and Cork, Ireland. Caroline Boyfield and Laure Colomer will travel 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 artist s Rebecca Bradley and Ida Mitrani were selected by open call to engage in two weeks residencies in Brittany in April 2024 and will 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, the Sample Triskel Project Space will host 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.
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 it’s 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.
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.
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)
Joseph Heffernan Residency
9 September- 6 October
Joseph Heffernan is a Cork-based visual artist, primarily a painter but also working in sculpture and assemblage. His work explores the ephemeral nature of memory, identity and fantasy and how these things are intertwined to form augmented fictions. It can best be understood as a mapping of interior mental spaces as well as an attempt to reconcile the real exterior world with those spaces. The work takes the philosopher Gaston Bachelardʼs seminal text ‘The Poetics of Space’ as a model through which to explore the ability of objects to act as totems of personal meaning. In 2023, he received an individual artist bursary from Cork City Council and presented a solo show “A Thousand Years” in Studio 12 Gallery, Backwater Artist Studio. He has exhibited extensively, including in the Lavit Gallery, RUA RED and RHA.
This residency will offer Joseph the opportunity to consolidate a new body of work in a new context and develop further solo exhibition opportunities, at a critical juncture in his career.
Etaoin Melville Residency
14 October – 10 November
Etaoin Melville is a Cork-based visual artist, specialising in video and installation. She has received two Arts Council Agility Awards since 2021, during which time, she has been mentored by artist Aideen Barry and is collaborating with Linda Cullen (aerial artist, writer and performer) on a project called Backbone. Focusing on issues around motherhood and the value we hold individually and as a society for this role, investigated through socially engaged co-created works.
She is currently exploring a new body of work ‘Ancestral Sap’ which combines film, stop frame animation, dry point print-making and painting and explores the complexities of women’s place in the world. By exploring our matrilineal lines, inherited trauma, and primal wisdom, this work seeks to provoke introspection and reconnection with ancestral knowledge.
This residency will enable Etaoin to develop these projects and bring them to a more resolved conclusion through further collaborations, in order to apply for future solo exhibition opportunities.
Grace Haynes Residency
18 November – 15 December
Grace Haynes is a visual artist and educator from the Cavan/Monaghan region and relocated to Cork City in 2023. She graduated with a BA honours in Illustration and Graphic Design. She is currently a socially engaged artist working in the community and works as a Creative Associate with the creative schools in initiative and an associate artist with Helium Arts in Cork.
Her work to date, is concerned with the natural world, taking inspiration from flora and fauna found natively in Ireland. She has recently begun to explore alternative process in eco arts, including in making and natural dyes which she then combines in her visual work. She is currently doing a certificate in Eco Arts Practice at the Crawford, Cork.
Grace Haynes has been collaborating with musician composer Lauren Mc Clean to develop an immersive multi sensory exhibition exploring diverse landscapes and the biodiversity within, aimed at young audiences.
This residency will enable Grace to consolidate this body of work in a multidisciplinary context, by creating a series of dioramas of each habitat, including woodlands and forests, the Burren, shorelines, sea cliffs and islets, marshland, bogs and wet lands, orchid-rich grassland and lakes and ponds.
Lauren Mc Clean will work with her to create a soundscape to complement the dioramas.
This residency will not only enable Grace to develop the work but to test the proposed exhibition’s muti sensory and interactive elements with audiences in Triskel.
