About
The MA Art and Environment (MAAE) uniquely combines post-studio art practice, interdisciplinary research, virtual teaching, Island Studies and community engagement. Taking contemporary art’s relationship with environments (ecological, spatial, political, economic) as its object of study, the MAAE instructs students in artistic practices shaped by ‘archipelagic thinking’ (a decolonial spatial discourse that emphasises relationality and locality) and a pedagogy that is world-centred. A World-centred pedagogy is a pedagogy that is orientated towards ‘events’ in the world and the responses that they provoke in students and teachers.
Located in the West Cork Archipelago and the West Cork Arts Centre (Uillinn) the MAAE is supported by a team of artists, lecturers, and researchers in the Dublin School of Art and Design (TU Dublin), by community workers and technicians in the Sherkin Island Development Society (SIDS) and by an international, interdisciplinary network of peers and colleagues.
*Image: Insiders Perspective.Mona O Driscoll. 2018
Dublin School of Art and Design
The MAAE faculty is comprised of practising artists, academics, critics, curators and community workers who cover the whole spectrum of environmental art practice and community art-related knowledge. We are actively involved in the contemporary cultural scene as organisers, makers and commentators. The MAAE is supported by a programme of visiting lecturer’s from the Dublin School of Creative Arts, including Jesse Jones, Barbara Knezevic, Dr. Brian Fay, Dr. Noel Fitzpatrick, Dr. Mark Garry, Dr.Connell Vaughan and Dr.Mick O Hara (staff profiles here). The course coordinator is Dr. Glenn Loughran.
Dr GLENN LOUGHRAN: MAAE Programme Chair
Glenn Loughran is an Artist and Lecturer in Fine Art at the Dublin School of Art and Design at the Technological University Dublin. He is the course coordinator of the BA in Visual Art on Sherkin Island and Head of Artistic Research in the Graduate School of Creative Arts (GradCAM). He has presented internationally on Artistic Research, Socially Engaged Art, Pedagogy and Island studies.
ANN DAVOREN: Director of Uillinn: West Cork Arts Centre, Skibbereen, Co. Cork
Ann has worked with many emerging and established Irish and international artists, curators and arts organisations to develop commissions, projects, publications, exhibitions and symposia. With an emphasis on the visual arts, arts education and socially engaged arts practice, she has supported the development of the BA (hons) Visual Art Degree Programme and the new MA Art and Environment Programme for west Cork. She chaired the Building Project Development Group (2007 to 2015) to develop a new purpose-built home for West Cork Arts Centre, which was opened to the public in Skibbereen in 2015.
Curriculum
The MAAE has a unique, three part curriculum focused on Mapping, Sensing, and Hacking. Where Mapping gathers historical and empirical knowledge, Sensing promotes sensorial and aesthetic engagement with materials, systems, and environments. Hacking then encourages imaginative, site-specific interventions (or ‘hacks’) that excavate, repurpose, or recompose elements of the environment. With long distance learning central to the archipelagic reach of the course, virtual learning and in particular virtual environments will also be an aspect of study on the course.
MAPPINg THE ENVIRONMENT
(25 ECTS)
Themes
Histories and Theories of Environment
Environmental Humanities
Cognitive Mapping
Island Studies I
Interdisciplinary practice
Delivery / lectures (on-site and virtual), workshops, projects, curatorial programme.
Mapping the Environment introduces students to the themes, debates, and conceptual frameworks that have shaped environmental arts over the past fifty years. It explores aesthetic, social, and political intersections between art and other fields and disciplines: biological and earth sciences, anthropology, design, education, and political activism. In addition, students learn techniques of deep mapping and other diagrammatic methodologies to cognitively map local environments across the West Cork archipelago.
Sensing THE ENVIRONMENT
(25 ECTS)
Themes:
Artistic Research
Eco-Socially Engaged Art
Environmental Fieldwork and Citizen Science
Island Studies II
Informal Pedagogies
Sensing the Environment will support students to develop expanded artistic research projects within local environments and communities. Focusing on archipelagic fieldwork, students will record, measure, analyse, and sense local environments. Such fieldwork is essential to an expanded art practices that engages with human and non-human actors. Lectures on artistic research, island studies, public pedagogy and socially engaged arts will support this fieldwork.
Hacking the environment
(40 ECTS)
Themes:
Event Studies
Hacking as Acting
Hacking as Adapting
Project Management
Project Realisation
Delivery / lectures, community engagement, fieldwork, project management, project realisation.
Hacking the Environment will synthesise the work developed in modules 1 & 2 through a large-scale project. It will support students to conceive, manage, and deliver a final project that intervenes and ‘hacks’ a local environment. This module will be facilitated by members of the island communities, SIDS and UILLINN.
DIANNE CURTIN graduated from TU Dublin’s B.A in Visual Arts on Sherkin Island in 2022, with a First Class Honours. Following her degree show, she was the inaugural Sherkin Island recipient of the annual Graduate Bursary Award, from the National Sculpture Factory in Cork. Dianne’s work explores place, social environment and domestic space in relation to abuse, trauma and recovery. She works in the medium of contextual sculptural and moving image. Her materials are integral to the development of artwork, connecting conceptual ideas to subject matter. Dianne has shown in collective exhibitions at Uillinn Gallery Skibbereen, Open Ear Festival Sherkin Island, Dunmanway Arts Festival, and in a solo exhibition in the Church of Ireland, Myross, Union Hall, West Cork.
D. MARTINS LERIAS D. [dee] is a non-binary artist with roots in Portugal. Their research focuses on dismantling binary beliefs of separation and otherness through the lens of interconnectedness. Their work touches on the ephemeral nature of the human experience, identity, environmental issues, and social justice. D. employs a broad range of mediums and techniques, depending on the nature of the project at hand. More recent work focuses on mixing the immaterial, such as actions and gestures, with material and visual objects, often making use of moving image, sound, photography and found objects.
TERRY FARNELL has a background in environmental science and photography. He came to Ireland in 1993 to work as a volunteer on the Rocky Shore Survey at the Sherkin Island Marine Station and has lived in Ireland ever since, spending twenty two of those years on Sherkin Island. He now lives in Baltimore and spends most of his time experimenting with film and darkroom photography. A lifelong and habitual daydreamer, he has found an outlet for his thoughts in art and graduated with an Honours Degree in Visual Art from TU Dublin, Sherkin Island. in 2022.
HINA KHAN was born in Pakistan in 1980 and completed an MFA with majors in Miniature Painting. Hina uses a mixture of traditional and innovative techniques in Miniatures to portray social issues, immigration, humanitarian crises like prostitution, gender discrimination, gender restrictions, trauma, child abuse & killing etc. Hina chooses to use Miniature because of its intricacy and delicacy of brush work which tends to allow the artwork to have a unique identity. In recent years the work has between miniature painting to drawing-centred installation, videos, and three-dimensional work.
NIAMH SEANA MEEHAN is a visual artist based in Co Armagh. She works across written matter, visual art, and performance. Performative activities function as sites where the body gets lost, misunderstood, exhausted and anxious. The accumulation and overlapping of ideas within the practice has resulted in working towards event-based performances. Ephemerality currently acts as an entry point into the layered thinking within the practice. Spending the last five years sea swimming, Meehan has developed a floating methodology. Floating as a research-based inquiry investigates modes of durational practice, slowing down, observation, foraging, and art writing.
NIAMH NI CHEARBHAILL is a TU Dublin graduate in BA Visual Art , Sherkin Island. She was long listed for the RDS Visual Arts Awards in 2022 following her graduate exhibition: Coming Back to the Table, as part of the overall BAVA show: Thresholds. Through this work Niamh looked at the various ways that covid and digital technology decreased the agency of our tables and how lockdowns, social distancing and working from home resulted in our tables being much more about supporting online communication than about in-person socialising. The exhibited works were made from found objects, wood, and sound recordings. New work considers the memory agency of the environment.
FIONA HAYES is an emerging artist living in West Cork. She graduated from TU Dublin in 2022 with a first-class honours B. A. in Visual Arts, Sherkin Island. The uniqueness of this raw, natural, and extraordinary learning environment has shaped her artistic practice and expanded her worldview. She was long-listed for the RDS Visual Arts Graduate Awards 2022 and received an Arts Council Agility award in 2023. Her preferred manner of expression is video, text, sound, and sculpture combined with socially engaged practice. Her interests lie in humanity’s hybrid digital future, and the complications associated with this fast-paced and ever-evolving mode of being. Her recent works have been immersive installations exploring the politics of this digital future.
News
On the 25th February 2022 the MA Art and Environment graduate show Idir Sholas was launched at UILLINN: West Cork Arts Centre.
Idir Sholas (between light) is the culmination of seventeen months of study by the first group of students on the MA Art and Environment (TU Dublin, 2020); Deirdre Archbold, Ann Burns, Guy Dalton, Sinéad McCormick, Sylwia Migdal, Katie Nolan and Ruairí Ó Donnabháin. The exhibition includes a diverse range of multi and digital media, film, photography, sound, virtual reality, performance and installation.
APPLY
Open for applications from: September 1st / 2024
Applications submitted to: MA ART & ENVIRONMENT
For further information please contact Programme Director: Dr Glenn Loughran at glenn.loughran@tudublin.ie
*Image: Salvage X. 2018. Catch Keeley