Major Public Art Commission Announced for Docklands Area
Details of a significant public art commission for Dublin’s Docklands have been announced by the Dublin Docklands Development Authority. One of the largest public art commissions ever undertaken in Ireland, this project is one of the first initiatives in the roll out of an Arts and Culture Strategy for the Docklands area.
It is envisaged that this public art commission will stimulate fresh perspectives on Dublin’s Docklands area by inviting artists to respond to the many aspects of the area, contemporary or historic.
Following an initial approach from the Docklands Authority, six invited Irish and international artists have visited the Docklands area and confirmed that they will progress to the next stage of the competition. A process has been established whereby artists can actively engage with the Docklands Authority in the development of their concepts
The six shortlisted artists are: Dorothy Cross (Ireland); Antony Gormley (UK); Luis Jimenez (USA); Andrew Kearney (Ireland); Thomas Schutte (Germany) and Grace Weir (Ireland) Biographical notes attached
Paul Maloney, Chief Executive of the Docklands Authority said that the Docklands area had huge potential for the development of arts and cultural uses. “Through this public art commission, and other initiatives, we want to maximise the opportunities for artists to engage with us in meaningful ways.
Mary McCarthy Arts Manager of the Docklands Authority said “specifically, we want to animate public space in Docklands; make space for the arts and artists in Docklands; and build artistic and cultural connections between the Docklands and elsewhere. While this is one of the first significant projects, several other opportunities will be created across various art forms for new site specific work in Docklands over 2007/08”.
The selected artists have been asked to develop proposals to create works that will be meaningful in the present but also have the capacity to hold interest into the future for the various communities of the Docklands. In terms of location, artists can consider any available site or series of sites within the inner Docklands area – (the Section 25 Planning area as covered in the Docklands Masterplan).
The artists have already visited the site and will make their submissions by Autumn 2006.
The Steering Committee for the project has been selected to represent the arts, the local community, the city authority and the Docklands Authority. Its members are:
Patricia Quinn, Chair -Independent Consultant and former director of the Arts
Council of Ireland
Betty Ashe, St Andrew’s Resource Centre; Pearse Street
Miroslaw Balka, Artist, Poland
Jack Gilligan, Arts Officer, Dublin City Council;
Seanie Lambe, Inner City Renewal Group;
Declan McCourt, Board Member, Docklands Authority;
Declan MacGonagle, INTERFACE, School of Art and Design, University of
Ulster and former director of the Irish Museum of Modern Art
John McLaughlin, Director of Architecture, Docklands Authority;
Annette Moloney, Independent Consultant and formerArts Council, Public
Art Specialist;
Patrick Murphy, Director Royal Hibernian Academy, Dublin
Niamh O’Sullivan, Board Member, Docklands Authority
The project will be co-ordinated by Mary McCarthy, Arts Manager, Docklands Authority and Cliodhna Shaffrey, Project Manager.
For further information please contact:
Mary McCarthy, Arts Manager, Docklands Authority - Tel 086 387 4988 or 8183300 mmccarthy@dublindocklands.ie
Loretta Lambkin, Docklands Authority, 01 818 3300, llambkin@dublindocklands.ie
Sheila Gahan/Christine Lydon, WHPR, 01 669 0030 or 087 234 2409 sheila.gahan@ogilvy.com/christine.lydon@ogilvy.com
Biographical Notes on Artists
DOROTHY CROSS Born 1956 in Cork, Ireland. Lives and works in Co Galway
In Cross site-specific projects, the repressed inevitably returns in the form of historical traces, but also in the form of impossible desires…at once intensely sensual and deeply intellectual, Dorothy Cross’s aesthetic of desire brings together the world of ideas and the world of sight, sound and touch. Robin Lydenberg
Dorothy Cross’ work employs sculpture, video photography, performance and installation often in unexpected combinations that traverse traditional practice boundaries. In 2004 she collaborated with Dublin-based Opera Theatre Company to direct a live performance of Pergolesi’s Stabat Mater in a remote slate quarry on the Western edge of Valentia Island. In 1999, she completed Chiasm, a combination of film projection and live opera performed in two handball alleys overlooking Galway Bay on the Irish coast. Also in 1999, Cross was awarded the NISSAN Public Art Prize, resulting in her production of Ghost Ship – a decommissioned lightship, painted in a luminescent paint, and moored off Scotsman’s Bay, Dun Laoghaire Harbour.
She has exhibited throughout Europe and USA. She represented Ireland at the 1993 Venice Biennial and has participated in both Liverpool and Istanbul Biennials. In recent years, she has had a number of solo exhibitions including a major retrospective in IMMA 2005; the Arnolifini, Bristol in 1996; Camden Arts Centre London 1992; the Douglas Hyde Gallery, Dublin 1988.
ANTONY GORMLEY Antony Gormley was born in London in 1950. Upon completing a degree in archaeology, anthropology and the history of art at Trinity College, Cambridge, he travelled to India, returning to London three years later to study at the Central School of Art, Goldsmiths College and the Slade School of Art.
Over the last 25 years Antony Gormley has revitalised the human image in sculpture through a radical investigation of the body as a place of memory and transformation, using his own body as subject, tool and material. Since 1990 he has expanded his concern with the human condition to explore the collective body and the relationship between self and other in large-scale installations like Allotment, Critical Mass, Another Place, and most recently Domain Field and Inside Australia.
Antony Gormley’s work has been exhibited extensively, with solo shows throughout the UK in venues such as the Whitechapel, Tate and Hayward Galleries, the British Museum and White Cube, and internationally at museums including the Louisiana Museum in Humlebaek, the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington DC, the Irish Museum of Modern Art in Dublin, and the Kolnischer Kunstverein in Germany.
He has participated in major group shows such as the Venice Biennale and the Kassel Documenta 8. His Field has toured America and Europe, and will tour Asia until 2006. Angel of the North and, most recently, Quantum Cloud on the Thames in Greenwich are amongst the most celebrated examples of contemporary British sculpture.
He was awarded the Turner Prize in 1994 and the South Bank Prize for Visual Art in 1999 and was made an Order of the British Empire (OBE) in 1997. He is an Honorary Fellow of the Royal Institute of British Architects, Trinity College, Cambridge and Jesus College, Cambridge, and has been a Royal Academician since 2003.
A special display of his work is currently on show at Tate Britain. One of his major installations, Another Place, is at Crosby Beach, Merseyside until November 2006.
LUIS JIMENEZ Born El Paso, Texas 1940. Lives and works I Hondo, New Mexico
‘In Luis Jimenez’s work everything is in ‘heat’ or on ‘fire’ in all possible senses… The perception of heatwaves, of meltdown, is reinforced in implications of movement in his work an amazing accomplishment for static body. His figures imply action in the way they are modelled. Their bodies act against gravity and respond to the forces of time and weather’.
Luis Jimenez’ sculptures of uniquely American subjects adorn public spaces and parks from San Diego to Washington D.C. to Fargo to El Paso. “I want my work to become an integral part of the society that surrounds it; to generate a meaningful dialogue among members of the diverse community.’ Jimenez’ sculptures, drawings and prints are inspired by the popular graphics and folk art tradition of his El Paso childhood, Pop Art, WPA murals and the Baroque art of Europe.
ANDREW KEARNEY Born 1961 Limerick. Lives and works in London
‘At the core of Kearney’s work is a tension between private language and public display, between hermeticism and deduction; the echoes of artists as diverse as Christian Boltansky, Tatsuo Miyajima and Robert Gober merely enhance this sense of a ceaseless, melancholic shuttling between personal reverie and something approaching communal memory’ 2002 Artforum International Magazine, Inc.
Andrew Kearney creates large-scale complex conceptual sculptural installation works that examine personal history as well as issues of identity and sexuality. Using photography, computers, strobe lighting and found objects, he has exhibited extensively throughout Ireland and Europe. He has worked in collaboration with architects and designers in London and has received several public art commissions. He is also represented in public and private collections throughout Britain and Ireland.
THOMAS SCHUTTE Born 1954, Oldenburg, Germany. Lives and works in Germany
Thomas Schütte studied fine art at the Düsseldorf Art Academy with Fritz Schwegler and Gerhard Richter. Since his first solo shows in 1979 Schütte has exhibited widely in Europe and elsewhere. A large touring exhibition of his work, titled “Thomas Schütte” recently travelled to London, Tilburg and Oporto. Among many group shows he participated in Documenta 8, 9, and 10 (1987, 1992 & 1997); the Munster Sculpture Projects in both 1987 and 1997 and Venice Biennial in 2005.
A deeply felt yet understated ethic informs Schütte’s engagement with the subject of the contemporary monument. The problem, in his view, is not only one of devising a suitable language that bypasses the vacuity into which abstraction has now fallen and the banality of naturalistic representation, bus is inherent in the very genre itself, since the foremost role of the monument, he argues is to fulfil spiritual needs rather than strictly functional ones.
GRACE WEIR
Grace Weir studied at the National College of Art and Design from 1980-84 and also at Trinity College Dublin, where she won an award for her Masters graduation project in 1997. She co-represented Ireland at the 49th International Venice Biennale in 2001. She has exhibited widely both nationally and internationally, most recently seen in 2005 at ‘Biennale! Artist film and video’ at Temporarycontemporary in London, ‘Red White Blue’ at the Spencer Brownstone Gallery in New York, ‘Himmelsbilder’ in the Dommuseum zu Salzburg in Austria, 'Tir na nOg' at the Irish Museum of Modern Art Dublin, ‘Missing Time’ at the Agnès b. Cinema in Hong Kong, 'Flights of Reality' at Kettles Yard Cambridge, 'Are we there yet?’ at Glassbox in Paris. Solo exhibitions include ‘a fine line’ at Cornerhouse in Manchester in 2003 and touring to London and Penzance, Meanwhile Elsewhere at the Percy Miller Gallery in London, ‘around now’ at the John Curtin Gallery in Perth, Australia and at the RHA Gallery in Dublin in 2000. In 2002 she was commissioned by NIFCA, the Nordic Institute of Contemporary Art in Helsinki Finland to make an interactive work ‘Little Bang’ for their online gallery at www.ionic.nifca.orgShe was awarded several Arts Council of Ireland Awards including a Projects Award in 2005.