Written by Stephen Mulhall on 25-01-10 | Categories:
Building Material
Corban Walker
Corban Walker (born 1967, Dublin) gained recognition for his installations, sculptures and drawings that relate to his perception of scale and architectural constructs. Local, cultural and specific philosophies of scale are fundamental to how he defines and develops his work. He received his BFA from the National College of Art and Design, Ireland in 1992. His first solo exhibition in 1994 was at City Arts Centre, Dublin. He has since shown regularly at Green on Red Gallery. Walker’s work has been the subject of many international solo shows and has been selected for group museums exhibitions. He has realised eight public commissions for important institutions including Mitsubishi Estate Corp, Ltd. Tokyo and Royal Bank of Scotland, Dublin. His work is part of numerous public collections in Ireland including the Irish Museum of Modern Art and many private collections throughout the world. Walker has been awarded a Visual Arts Bursary from the Arts Council of Ireland on four occasions since 1995. Corban Walker first exhibited with PaceWildenstein in 2000 and subsequently in the gallery’s Logical Conclusions exhibition in 2005, before his second solo show Grid Stack in 2007. Walker moved to New York in 2004 where he is now based.
Written by Stephen Mulhall on 25-01-10 | Categories:
Building Material
Excerpt from: Eye to Eye: An interview with Thomas Demand
“I like to imagine the sum of all the media representations of the event as a kind of landscape, and the media industry as the tour bus company that takes us through these colourful surrounds.” Thomas Demand
Subjects gain a new - if brief - life in the media, in a manner similar to that of the life of the mayfly: short and glorious, but soon fading to obsolescence. Thomas Demand is one of a growing number of artists addressing this phenomenon. Demand sifts through the media, selecting images that represent an important moment. His subjects are seemingly banal empty rooms: offices, auditoria, hallways, kitchens, bathrooms and staircases. He meticulously re-constructs the spaces shown using paper, from the vantage point of the original image. He then photographs and destroys it. His photographs offer a cleaner, neater vision of the world, the surfaces are smooth and the edges sharp. At first glance they appear to be straightforward records, but there is a palpable uncanniness inherent in them. His true talent is not as a sculptor or as a photographer, but as a detective: choosing material from newspapers and photo archives, looking for those seemingly neutral spaces in which wars are declared, bombs are designed and murders occur. Through the presentation of his images and work process, Demand encourages us to look more closely and assess the images presented to us, both their construction and their meaning. For Demand, looking at an image is not a purely visual experience, but a structural one.
...Read more in Building Material 19, Art & Architecture.
Biography: Thomas Demand
Thomas Demand is an artist based in Berlin. He documents our media worlds and is both a reproducer and an illusionist, making photographs of life-scale three dimensional models of rooms and spaces. The subjects depicted in Demand's photographs often bear cultural or political relevance. He was educated at Akademie der Bildenden Künste in Munich, Kunstakademie Düsseldorf and Goldsmiths College, London. His work has been exhibited widely, including the Fondation Cartier Paris, the Serpentine Gallery, London, and MOMA New York. He will exhibit at the Neue Nationalgalerie in Berlin in September 2009.
See: http://www.thomasdemand.de
Written by Stephen Mulhall on 25-01-10 | Categories:
Building Material
Excerpt from: A cloud, a house, from here to Mars.
In 1906, Albert Einstein, when defining a methodology for the system of co-ordinates, suggested that, if a cloud was hovering over Potsdamer Platz in Berlin, in order to measure its position we should erect a pole up to it. The length of the pole coupled with the position of the foot of the pole would then give us the exact co-ordinates of the cloud. He wrote that, while in practice, the rigid surfaces which constitute the system of co-ordinates were generally not available, this was an example of a distance AB.
I had spent some time filming clouds and knew them to be large chaotic systems constantly forming and dissipating. They had a surfacelessness that defied a point and therefore an order. They gave the lie to the possibility of definition. But I was so charmed with the idea of erecting sticks up to clouds in order to measure their height that I went to Potsdamer Platz and made a film which depicts a man carrying out the act of raising a walking stick up to a cloud. The stick appears to reach the cloud when seen from his point of view while lying on his back looking up at it. In 2001 I made another work where, using a helicopter, I flew a perfect circle around a cloud, filming both views, the view in towards the cloud and the view out into the surrounding skyscape. Projected simultaneously opposite each other on two screens, these films cause the viewer to float, turning in the in-between space of the two points of view.
...Read more in Building Material 19, Art & Architecture.
Biography: Grace Weir
Grace Weir is interested in aligning a lived experience of the world with scientific knowledge and theory, in making work that examines and transcends reason through rational means. She works mostly in film and video and is interested in making a critical appraisal of film through the actual making of film. Her work is wide ranging, from structural cinematic works to more personal experimental video works, installations and web projects.
Written by Stephen Mulhall on 25-01-10 | Categories:
Building Material
Toby Paterson
Toby Paterson was born in Glasgow in 1974. He studied at the Glasgow School of Art and the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, graduating from the former in 1995. In Glasgow he is represented by The Modern Institute and in London by Sutton Lane. Paterson won the 2002 Beck’s Futures prize and received a Creative Scotland award in 2006. Recent projects include solo shows in The Hague, London, Glasgow and Derry; group exhibitions in San Francisco, Belgrade, Madrid and Middlesborough; commission of permanent works at Tramway in Glasgow, BBC Scotland’s new headquarters and at Warwick University campus. He is also developing work for the seven stations that constitute the Docklands Light Railway’s Stratford International extension. Paterson’s interest in cities and their architecture is manifested in the form of painting, sculpture and photography. He currently lives and works in Glasgow.
Written by Stephen Mulhall on 25-01-10 | Categories:
Building Material
Dara McGrath
Dara McGrath is a photographic artist. He is interested in exploring the transitional lives of spaces, the in-between places where architecture, landscape and the built environment intersect, and where a dialogue – of absence rather than presence – is created. His photo works are realised both within the structure of the gallery space and as site specific interventions/installations and collaborations. Recent projects include:The Lives of Spaces, Irish Pavilion 11th International Architecture Biennale Venice (2008); European Night, Rencontres d’Arles, France (2008); Singapore Photo Festival 2008, National Museum of Singapore (2008); The City, Nordic Arts Centre (2008); Beyond the Country, Lewis-Glucksman Gallery, Ireland (2007); Idensitat ’07, Priorat Centre d’Art, Barcelona, (2008). He was the recipient of the 2003 AIB Arts Prize and several Arts Council of Ireland Awards.
See: http://www.daramcgrath.com
Written by Stephen Mulhall on 25-01-10 | Categories:
Building Material
Material Imprecision
“…I began to wonder how I could use paint merely as material, as an industrial found object; I did not want to use it to make something else, to create an illusion…”
Richard Serra, Torqued Ellipses
There is a sense of delight about the primitive character of the concrete at the Monastery of Sainte-Marie de La Tourette. Yet perhaps delight is too passive a word to describe the condition, it is closer to revel: the impression that Le Corbusier is revelling in the rawness of the surface. One can still sense the very plasticity, the viscosity of the concrete in its prior state as it seeps unevenly down the formwork. A condition captured in stasis as an embodiment of experience and memory of its other nature.
Concrete is more often used in an illusionary way, detailed and executed with precision to ensure a surface that bears no association with either the material or the process. Yet it is an approach which effaces the very nature of the material itself. In contrast, the way in which the inherent duality of concrete is celebrated throughout Le Corbusier's work suggests a love of both the tectonic of the material and the hand of the maker, eschewing precision in deference to a more tangible embodiment of process.
Architects do not, as a rule, make but rather speculate about making, leaving the act itself to others. It is perhaps this distance from the process that leads to the common treatment of material as an instrument of graphic effect rather than an expression of material consequence. In contrast Serra, as a maker of both painting and sculpture, could readily understand the evocative power of the material itself. Serra’s attitude toward the exploration of paint as an artefact in and of itself is suggestive of a different reading of Le Corbusier's approach to making, that as a painter Le Corbusier could also have appreciated the nature and expressive potential of material. While the transfer of form and image between his work as a painter and his architecture is easily recognised there is perhaps another common preoccupation, that of a desire for a more candid expression of material consequence and the processes of making. As Le Corbusier himself once wrote, ironically in his publication Precisions, “Techniques are the very basis of poetry.”
Biography: Elizabeth Shotton
“In chronological order: economist, architect, architectural educator, writer, displaced Canadian.
That’s really all I can say about myself...”
Written by Stephen Mulhall on 25-01-10 | Categories:
Building Material
Clancy Moore Architects
Andrew Clancy and Colm Moore established Clancy Moore Architects in 2006. Both partners teach at Dublin Institute of Technology and are visiting critics to Queen’s University, Belfast and Dundee School of Architecture.
See: http://www.clancymoore.com/
Written by Stephen Mulhall on 25-01-10 | Categories:
Building Material
The primary aim of the series is to promote critical thinking and discussion between related disciplines at research, professional and post-graduate level. The seminar series was designed to provide a forum for the advancement and acknowledgement of the very valuable research currently being undertaken at this level. Each session provides an opportunity for airing of new ideas and approaches, wherein the value of diversity, particularly as it occurs in thematic approaches, perspectives, interpretations and methods, is recognised. The provision of such a forum has already begun to establish a sense of character, presence and communal scholarship within the postgraduate and research network in architecture and related disciplines.
Each year the seminars are broadly addressed under an overarching theme. The theme of the 2009 calendar year was “Fieldwork”, whilst that of the 2010 seminar series is the same as the title of our research community, “Research As Is?”1 . As a theme, it is to be considered in its widest possible sense.
It can epitomise the state-of-play of personal research, encapsulate, interrogate or broaden accepted disciplinary boundaries, address ideas of interaction, introduce processes and methods or describe aims and aspirations within a field or across fields. Essentially, the aim is to promote research and ideas by providing an informal forum for presentation and discussion, and by creating a strong “research community” with a range of diverse interests and background. Generally, the majority of presentations are largely concerned with works in progress, rather than completed bodies of work, although this is not a stipulation for participation.
The website related to the seminars is a platform for further discussion on the subjects presented and will have latest news on conferences, symposiums and calls for papers that might be relevant for the participants’ research.
All interested participants welcome. For further information see the researchasis website - www.researchasis.webs.com - or contact one of the organisers:
Fiona Smyth: .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address)
Elizabeth McNicholas: .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address);
Agustina Martire: .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address)
Mariana Francis: .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address)
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Written by Stephen Mulhall on 12-01-10 | Categories:
Building Material
We are happy to announce that Building Material 19, Art & Architecture was commended in the recent IDI (Institute of Designers in Ireland) awards. Congratulations to Ronan Devlin at LittleSeal.
See: http://www.idi-design.ie/designawards/2009winners.html for a full list of winners.
See: http://www.littleseal.com/ for information on our new graphic designers.
Written by Stephen Mulhall on 11-01-10 | Categories:
Building Material
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Please find below some images from the launch of Building Material 19, Art & Architecture at Dublin City Council’s The LAB in October 2009. The Architectural Association was pleased to have Ali Grehan, City Architect, launch the journal.
Preceding this, there were presentations by artists Dennis McNulty and Grace Weir, followed by a panel discussion and presentations by Blaise Drummond (artist), Georgina Jackson (curator), Orla Murphy (architect) and Ruiarí Ó’Cuív (DCC Public Art Officer). The panel discussion was moderated by Brian Ward (architect and lecturer).
Written by Stephen Mulhall on 10-01-10 | Categories:
Building Material
We are pleased to announce that Building Material 19, Art & Architecture is now also available from:
The Winding Stair Bookshop 40 Ormonde Quay, Dublin 1
http://www.winding-stair.com/
The RIAI Bookshop 8 Merrion Square, Dublin 2
http://www.riai.ie/about_the_riai/riai_bookshop/
The National Gallery of Ireland Bookshop National Gallery of Ireland, Merrion Square West, Dublin 2
http://www.nationalgallery.ie/
PLACE, The Architecture and Built Environment Centre for Northern Ireland 40 Fountain Street, Belfast BT1 5EE
http://www.place.uk.net/
Noble and Beggarman Books, 28 South William Street, Dublin 2
http://www.nobleandbeggarmanbooks.com/
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Written by Stephen Mulhall on 10-01-10 | Categories:
Building Material
Copies of Building Material 19, Art & Architecture are available from the Architecture Association of Ireland. Please contact Stephen Mulhall, Editor at: buildingmaterialeditor@gmail.com
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