Background to The Future is Domestic!

“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.