In a Contrary Place
VISUAL ART | PERFORMANCE
In a Contrary Place
Ruth Clinton & Niamh Moriarty
Performance
Sat 02 July | 3pm
Exhibition
Mon 04 July – Sat 10 July | 11am to 4pm
In A Contrary Place (2022), by Ruth Clinton & Niamh Moriarty
Event Details
Time & Date:
Performance
Sat 02 July | 3pm
Exhibition
Mon 04 July – Sat 10 July | 11am to 4pm
Event Categories:
Visual Art | Performance
Admission:
Free
Advance booking necessary for performance
Venue:
Hyde Bridge Gallery
View on Map
A body of performance and video work, four years in the making.
Since 2018, Ruth and Niamh have been exploring the impact of American culture on Irish narrative identities. They began this process by walking long abandoned sections of the Western Rail Corridor between Counties Sligo and Limerick. Here, the railway acts as a line of thought, along which ideas of western identity, binary political thinking, power, ecology and ‘Wild West’ film history intersect. Going west is intrinsic to the Irish cultural narrative, from early American settlement through years of emigration. The artists take a long view of these complex tensions between progress and nostalgia, optimism and fear, as they play out both in our immediate present and throughout our history and culture.
Presenting their new short film and accompanying performance, Ruth Clinton and Niamh Moriarty, pursue an ongoing interest in the construction of official and folk records and how they can contribute to a collective sense of possibility or paralysis. Through a process of self-reflexive storytelling, Niamh and Ruth will inhabit narratives of progress and nostalgia, complicity and solidarity, in their search for moments of unrealised potential in Irish history.
Niamh Moriarty & Ruth Clinton are collaborative artists living and working between Leitrim and Sligo. They specialise in making performance, video and texts, informed by detailed site-responsive research, to convey visions of transience and resistance. A dialogue between the romantic and pragmatic is enacted both within their work and throughout the collaborative process. Often taking their own bodies and immediate surroundings as a starting point, Ruth and Niamh engage with local environments, histories and communities to open up spaces of renewed reflection.