Limerick proves a broad canvas

LIMERICK MAY NOT leap to mind as being a hub of the visual arts in Ireland but, somehow, that is what it has quietly become. And by design rather than by chance. There are several contributory factors.

One is the re-opening of the Limerick City Gallery with a new café/restaurant annex and other facilities, plus the appointment of a new director, Helen Carey. Another is the re-launch of Limerick’s once annual, now biennial exhibition of contemporary art, EVA International, due to open on May 19th. The show has a new director in Woodrow Kernohan and, for this year, a highly regarded curator in Annie Fletcher, who is based in the Netherlands.

There is also a blossoming of exhibition and events venues in the city, something that can largely be put down to the council’s Creative Limerick initiative. Under the scheme, landlords with vacant retail space agree to allow temporary, regulated occupancy to “creative practitioners and other start-up businesses”.

The rationale is partly that blank shopfronts deter visitors whereas cultural venues draw increased footfall. One indication of its success, notes the city’s arts officer Sheila Deegan: “Is the number of inquiries I’ve had from other local authorities about the scheme”. Notable alternative arts venues currently flourishing include the artist-led Occupy Space on Thomas Street, Ormston House on Patrick Street (overseen by director/curator Mary Conlon), and Limerick Printmakers on Sarsfield Street. All run very good, professionally-presented exhibitions and related events programmes that belie the underlying paucity of actual money. What they have, Deegan notes, is a young artistic population partly anchored to the city’s school of art and design (LSAD), exceptional energy – “and an extraordinarily co-operative spirit”.

A little further afield, Askeaton Contemporary Arts has, since 2006, been exploring “possibilities of how art might operate outside a city environment”, managing a series of projects with an international dimension under the guidance of curator Michele Horrigan (herself an artist and LSAD graduate). Opening on March 16th, Askeaton Arts’s next project is The Hellfire Club, in which several Irish artists address the subject of the remains of the Hellfire Club, which is dramatically situated on an island in the river Deel as it flows through Askeaton town. Linking back into Limerick city, Horrigan has also taken on programming the visual-arts space of the revamped Belltable Arts Centre.

There was a hiatus in EVA last year when the Arts Council looked for a restructuring of the exhibition as a biennial rather than an annual event. Since it began in 1977, EVA developed to become a remarkable international exhibition, forever associated with its former director, Paul O’Reilly. A different international guest curator was enlisted to choose the show each year, ensuring continual reinvention and no local bias. Restructuring addressed, Kernohan took up his position as director last September.

Irish-born Fletcher is currently curator of exhibitions at the Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven. She has built up a considerable reputation as an innovative facilitator in the international art world, mostly during her time as a freelance curator (she also worked at the Douglas Hyde Gallery and at Imma) and she has worked on many substantial projects in Ireland, or with Irish connections. “People’s response to her has been very positive, very encouraging,” says Kernohan. The end-ofJanuary deadline for EVA saw a bumper crop of about 2,000 submissions from 72 countries.

Previously, EVA distinguished between work selected from open submission and that by invited artists. Fletcher was uncomfortable with that distinction and has effectively scrapped it. “As a way of putting a show together it’s fine. It’s always good to test your own ideas, your own knowledge by opening things out. But I don’t like a two-tier implication, so the list of participating artists will be simply that. In other words, however it arrived, a particular work wouldn’t be in the exhibition if you didn’t think it should be there.”

In line with international exhibitions everywhere, over the years EVA found its way beyond the confines of the City Gallery into the fabric of the city. Fletcher is all in favour of that, but two factors have contributed to her specific strategy for EVA International 2012. “It’s a very tight timeline . Then, my experience of Limerick is that there’s a very impressive energy level in the visual arts.” She didn’t want to eclipse or stifle that energy. So EVA will consist of a central exhibition in probably two main venues, the City Gallery and one other city centre space.

Fletcher will harness the other existing venues and curatorial structures as a series of satellites around these central venues. “I’m not trying to colonise these spaces. I want them to fashion what they will do themselves.” Several networks of curators and artists will formulate their own contribution to the overall event.

Does it have an overall theme? Not exactly, Fletcher says, but she is thinking along the lines of ideas raised by the colourful Italian political theorist Franco “Bifo” Berardi in his book After the Future, a title she is very much drawn to. “Because we are, in a sense, living after the future. Suddenly the future we presumed was there isn’t anymore, and one thing I want to avoid is making the exhibition a lament. Rather it’s about what we do now, with what we have to hand.”

In many respects, making the exhibition happen falls to Kernohan. Born in Belfast, he grew up in France, then in England. He is both an artist and a curator. Prior to taking up his position in Limerick he was director of the Brighton Photo Fringe. He’s been impressed by Limerick’s cultural vibrancy. Was he aware of the city’s bad press before he moved there? “No. I suppose I’ve learned more since I’ve been here. Put it this way: I know the city has a certain reputation, but in my experience, the reality is very different.”

Part of the city’s strength, as he sees it, is that there is a strong sense of community among those in the arts: “We’re all working towards the same goals.” It’s a perception that is echoed by another newcomer to the city, Carey, who has just taken up her role as director of the City Gallery. She has extensive curatorial experience and has been director of the Centre Culturel Irlandais in Paris.

“There are places you go to and you think, oh, this is just politically gestural, they are not committed to the visual arts, but here in Limerick there’s a strong sense that the arts community is really in it for the long haul.”

She points to the new addition to the City Gallery, designed by architect John O’Reilly – a café/restaurant and a learning area that unobtrusively and cleverly brings the original building into the park on Pery Square. Less immediately apparent is the first-rate storage and conservation facility, a boon to the gallery and one that puts it ahead of many larger institutions.

Carey is enthusiastic about the quality of the City Gallery’s collection of close on 1,000 works (including the great Irish portrait painter Charles Jervas’s picture of a woman reputed to be Stella Johnson – Jonathan Swift’s Stella). Carey sees her role as looking to both this historical dimension and to the absolutely contemporary. She points as well to Limerick’s industrial-labour history.

Of her plans she comments: “I’d say that contemporary socially-engaged artwork will find a place here. In investigating the radical, I see no contradiction between using the existing collection and current projects.” In commenting on the vitality of the visual arts in Limerick, Deegan points to LSAD. “Not only do artists graduate annually, an art school also draws artists to teach.”

Recent graduates often linger and contribute to the cultural life of the city before moving on. “There are clear examples, such as Michael Fortune and Aileen Lambert, who eventually moved back to Wexford.” There is also, though, a significant core of individuals who have been consistently important in fostering visual culture in Limerick, including Deegan herself (she’s on the board of EVA as well as other arts organisations), Mike Fitzpatrick (director of LSAD and EVA board member), architect Hugh Murray (also on the EVA board), architect Elizabeth Hatz at the University of Limerick and many more, such as artist John Shinnors, who established the Shinnors curatorial scholarship.

The combination of the temporary and long-term arts population, plus something else, a pride akin to Limerick’s commitment to the Munster rugby team, and a sense of urgent civic concern – all somehow account for the current ascendency of the visual arts in Limerick.