Still from Máthair by Keira Greene, presented at aemi’s Rough Cut event on January 31st 2024
The first of three Rough Cut events that aemi will present across 2024 took place on January 31st in Studio 6 at Temple Bar Gallery + Studios. Rough Cut sessions offer film artists the opportunity to share and discuss works-in-progress in a supportive peer environment and they form a vital part of our Artist Support programme.
Two artist-filmmakers present work at each event and we invite a guest curator, programmer, critic or producer to lead the event by offering feedback and responses to both projects. The topics discussed are specific to each presentation, ranging from concept development and production methodology to exhibition strategy. These events are not open to the public; instead the audience is made up of a small group of peers who are invited to actively participate in the conversations about both works. Because the works being presented and discussed are still in process, Rough Cut events are not recorded for public presentation.
Film artists Keira Greene and Deirdre O’Mahony presented work at Rough Cut on January 31st and Mark O’Gorman, Visual Arts Manager at The Complex was invited to lead the responses to both projects.
In Máthair Keira Greene explores a journey made by an Irish woman to England to give birth in a Catholic-run workhouse and Mother and Baby Home, returning home without her daughter. This journey and the legacy of its act is the origin story of the artist’s family, her mother and biological grandmother. A visual image art work incorporating text, archival material, visual effects and performance, Máthair is occupied with the gaps in a narrative, a portrait of the complexity and incoherence of tracking experiences shrouded in secrecy, fear and shame. This work unfolds through an accretion of fragments, and is an act of solidarity to fill holes in a story that cannot be repaired.
Keira Greene is an artist working across film, photography, performance and text. Her work is preoccupied with the social and organic life and landscape of specific environments. Her work is produced through a collaborative and conversational practice of looking, writing and forming enduring relationships. Recent works are concerned with ideas of the body and the experience of emotion, in dialogue with an embodied filmmaking practice. Moving image works by Greene are distributed by LUX. Recent exhibitions include Site Gallery, Sheffield (2023), La Chapelle de l’Oratoire – Musée d’arts de Nantes, Nantes (2023), Arcade, Brussels (2022), Kelder, London (2022), Arko Art Center, Seoul (2022), Arcade, Brussels (2021), Sofia Art Projects, Sofia (2021), Café Oto, London, (2020), Stanley Picker Gallery, London (2019), LUX, London (2019), Cubitt, London (2018), Jerwood Space, London, (2018). Her films have been screened internationally in film festivals, museums, galleries and artist-run spaces. She often collaborates with/performs with, dance artists and musicians. She is co-editor of the journal Metaphor as Metamorphosis, and guest editor with the journal Fieldnotes. She is a Lecturer in Fine Art at Chelsea College of Art. keiragreene.com
The Quickening is a major new film and sound installation by Deirdre O’Mahony opening at the Douglas Hyde Gallery, Trinity College Dublin in March 2024. The artwork urgently considers the actions that must be taken concerning farming, food production and consumer behaviour in the face of the biodiversity and climate crises. Developed through recorded feast events for farmers, scientists and policy makers, the conversations were transcribed and edited into a libretto and voiced by five singers/musicians, each with a distinctive pitch, style, pace and vocabulary. The complex sound and imagery communicates entangled human and more-than-human land-based activities; farming life, attitudes to food production and consumption, changing weather, the volatile demands of the market and anxieties about food quality. The overall length of the film will be around 35 minutes.
Deirdre O’Mahony is a visual artist whose practice is informed by over thirty years research into rural ecologies, farming, food security and climate change. Her major commissioned solo exhibition, The Quickening, opens at the Douglas Hyde Gallery, Dublin, in March 2024. Awards include Project Awards Arts Council of Ireland (2021/23) and bursaries (2021/2/3), Fire Station Artist Studios Residency & Sculpture awards (2022/21) and UCD Earth Institute, Parity Studios Residency Award. Her work is in the National Collection of the Irish Museum of Modern Art and the Arts Council of Ireland. https://deirdre-omahony.ie
If you’re a film artist, producer or curator and have an interest in attending Rough Cut in the future, contact us at [email protected].
Our sincere thanks to TBG+S for generously hosting us for this event.
This event is supported by Free Space at Temple Bar Gallery + Studios. Free Space at Temple Bar Gallery + Studios creates the opportunity for artists to access space in the city for peer learning, artist exchanges, project development and presentations.
The Quickening by Deirdre O’Mahony, production still. Photograph Tom Flanagan 2023
SEE: Temple Bar Gallery + Studios Free Space Programme HERE
More information on Deirdre O’Mahony’s work HERE
More information on Keira Greene’s work HERE
More information on The Complex HERE
More information on Mark O’Gorman’s work HERE
