“The Future is Domestic!”
Clare County Council and Outrider Artists propose to host an
8 day Episode: A workshop-led exploration of the theme “The Future is
Domestic!” with artists from MoKs (EE), SERDE (Lv), Outrider Artists, Clare,
and others in a rural domestic setting in Ennistymon, Co.Clare.
Outrider Artists
is a collaborative practice involving a core group of artists based in
rural North Clare, supported by
the County Arts Office. They have a history of conflation of domestic &
public spaces, situating that
impulse in a historical and activist trajectory. They now wish to research and
develop this further through collaboration with previously established European
partners in creating new innovative art.
Their work takes the form of Episodes, social choreographies
that merge domestic & public space. Outrider Episodes are organised around
transnational movement & immaterial exchange with Liquid (Estonia), Ian
Tully, (Australia), Dr Igor Calzada, (Basque Country). They have had residencies
and participated at international presentations in Estonia and in seminar
workshops with SERDE & MoKS in Lithuania.
Their experience of hosting
residencies/workshops/collaborations with artists from abroad has presented a
mirror to their own art practice: naming and highlighting their strengths,
boosting their confidence to make art:, stimulating new ideas and resurrecting
old ideas for making work. It has also offered them exhibitions abroad, developed collaborations with
transnationally talented artists and pitched them into a position to help them
sustain their rural art practice, a long standing area of interest with Clare
County Arts Office.
Outrider Artists now wish to continue that positive creative
empowerment through collaborating with Moks and SERDE. They have chosen shared
work-shops & public presentations as the formats to explore the theme &
acquire new artistic skills through the process of making.
The unique creative team of Evelyn Muursepp and John
Grzinich, from MoKs, both internationally recognized artists in their
individual fields of drawing & sound have constructed a workshop that also
has a level of social consciousness to be explored in its realization.
SERDE are
offering two workshops; gathering herbs and making vodka. In a country where
alcohol abuse is rampant, this workshop should provoke intense discourse.
Techniques of distillery and fermentation are new to Outrider artists and
welcome as new methodologies for making & creating. Herb gathering has
obvious rural connotations.
Outrider Artists, Moks and SERDE will give public
presentations at the beginning & at the end of the week, in the Courthouse
Gallery, Ennistymon, to a public audience, so to widen the contact
opportunities with other members of the locality.
All partners recognize that
this proposal offers future opportunities to expand individual arts practices
as well as potential for future international collaborations.