Lying Fallow is an experiential intervention in response to the group show A Growing Inquiry – Art & Agriculture, reconciling values at the RHA Gallery, and is the fourth of five Angelica Interventions, run in collaboration with Angelica Network and funded by Creative Ireland.
Lying Fallow follows on from Samantha Brown’s collage and photographic online series Middle Passage, which investigates the slave trade from Europe to Africa and to the Americas, from various perspectives which encompass fiction, poetry, documentary and experiential art forms. Lying Fallow investigates whether the practices of enslavement – self-sufficiency and farming to create for one’s own needs – can be brought into the present. Within these practices, fertile land was rested, and with no over-production, every last nutrient was squeezed from the soil. In the context of today’s over-consumption, it is pertinent to consider the practice of Lying Fallow.
Attendees to this event will actively participate in this two-part intervention exploring fallowness. First, the group will partake in an imagining and dreaming experience, in response to a sound and vision installation.
Next will be an invitation to take the most humble of vegetables, the carrot, and share with us how you choose to use this nutritional food. What will you do with it? Feed it to a rabbit? Make a stir-fry? Perhaps a smoothie or a soup?
Please note participants will need to provide minimal materials to partake. Information will be provided in advance.
This event is for adults.
Artist Bio:
Samantha Brown is a London-born photographer and visual artist, now living in Ireland. Brown studied Fine Art Painting in Camberwell University of Arts, London. Her move to Ireland generated investigations of the landscape in her work, using photography and computer-aided design to create paintings that combined these media. Returning to education to study Multi-Disciplinary Design at Ulster University in 2008, she explored documentary photography, light installations, video and drawing. What Brown considers her collage practice, has expanded to combine photography with history, text, social media and archival source material, in order to explore various narratives and stories.
Middle Passage, hosted by the Centre for Creative Practices, draws on documentation into the slave trade, spanning works of fact and fiction. Recently, working within Covid-19 restrictions, Brown has photographed her local beaches, combining text and collage to create moving image work.
Angelica Interventions:
This is the fourth in a series of five Angelica Interventions at RHA Gallery funded by Creative Ireland. Angelica is a network of artists, that aims to amplify the voices of artists based on the island of Ireland who self-identify as women or minority gender, from underrepresented cultural or ethnic backgrounds.
This collaborative engagement programme between RHA and Angelica invites Angelica artists to respond, via an intervention, to one or more pieces in the RHA exhibition programme. Interventionist practices often enable opportunities to propose alternative perceptions on institutions and narratives, and may take the form of an artistic response, a talk/panel discussion or workshop and will be informed by ideas of representation.
Angelica was created to lead to fruitful relationships and new opportunities, designed to help curators and programmers to work with and nurture a more diverse art community; one which is built on care and accountability.
Previous interventions in 2021 include: Darling Don’t Turn Your Back On Me, an online screening of a performance work followed with a conversation by Thaís Muniz, which took place in response to Denis Kelly’s Ashford exhibition. Look, then Look Again; Would you not recall how your heart once beat for an ordinary Saturday calmness by Edy Fung, in response to Barbara Knežević’s exhibition pleasure ‘scapes, and The Tree of Life by Hina Khan, in response to Miriam O’Connor’s exhibition Tomorrow is Sunday.
