UPHOLD: Form Follows Function
Form Follows Function is an exhibition of artworks and new commissions by Array Collective, Sighle Bhreathnach-Cashell, Lorraine Burrell, Majella Clancy, Ailbhe Greaney, Mark McGreevy, Jan McCullough, Tara McGinn, and Locky Morris.
Join us for the opening of this exhibition on Friday 9th August 6pm - 9pm at La Roche House (5a Windsor Avenue North, Belfast BT9 6EL). No booking necessary.
The exhibition is free and open to the public on Saturday 10th and Sunday 11th August between 11am - 4pm by appointment only. Please let us know you are coming by sending your name to info@householdbelfast.co.uk
Form Follows Function explores the domestic as an anticipatory, affective space. The exhibition title is derived from the core principle of modernist design; that the shape of a building or object should primarily relate to its intended function or purpose. The exhibition extends and reclaims this definition by proposing that the home’s purpose is not just to organise the everyday functional practicalities of living but also to provide a speculative place that can house the possibilities of dreaming and imagining new, ‘softer’ futures.
Form Follows Function is held in La Roche House, a 1960s building off the Malone Road in south Belfast, where the works will be installed amongst the furniture of the building’s owners. Works in the exhibition explores interior spaces of play, creativity, invention and dreaming, and the domestic as a site of labour and action, and are all part of UPHOLD, Household’s not for profit platform for promoting and selling the work of Northern Ireland based artists.
Form Follows Function is part of The Living House, Household’s new programme of activities that explores the domestic as a radical site of production and imagining. The artworks have all been commissioned through our UPHOLD programme and are available to buy.
This project was developed by Household Belfast and made possible with the generous support of the National Lottery through the Arts Council of Northern Ireland, Belfast City Council, and Arts and Business. Special thanks to La Roche House.
Participating artists
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Array Collective playfully use performance, protest, photography, print, installation and video. They work with a range of creative individuals and organisations to merge artistic expression, participate in direct action and instigate public interventions across urban and online environments.
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Sighle Bhreathnach-Cashell is a visual artist specialising in interactive installation. The basis for her work is an interest in how the environment (physical/social/fictional) affects our behaviour and sense of identity. This has played out in various forms like dark dinner parties, bespoke bedrooms, interrogating waiting rooms and fixed game shows.
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Lorraine Burrell’s practice is concerned with documenting the female body in a variety of spaces. Photographing herself has always been challenging in the context of revealing her own identity. As a consequence of this tug between what to expose and what to hide, she constructs props to use as covers.
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Majella Clancy’s practice is hybrid in its approach, encompassing painting, printmaking and collage. It takes as its starting point found ephemera and material references that come out of an Irish rural experience and in particular their relationship to ideas of home and gendered space.
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Ailbhe Greaney’s work centres around subjects of migration, empathy and the impossible view. using photography, text, video and installation, Greaney’s work challenges our unique perspectives and views of life today. Focusing on the physical view from the window, the work uses this as a starting point to explore our different visual perspectives through photography.
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Mark McGreevy’s works are responses to a collected archive of personal and found imagery drawn from the media, personal experiences and the everyday. They offer a quizzical and intimate overview of the layers of images and spaces, whether tangible or abstract, which the artist encounters.
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Jan McCullough explores untold acts and histories of labour, care and maintenance; fabrication and DIY; and the communities that form around them.
She is interested in the unseen worker, the inventive ways that people solve problems, and the objects and structures they use in the process. The people that she meets and the materials and visual languages associated with these activities inform her sculptural installations, interventions and photographs.
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Tara McGinn’s interdisciplinary practice combines analogue and digital processes to produce sculpture, installation, writing, 2-d media, audio, and moving image. Conceptually, the work explores visual and literal language as a lens through which cultural narratives are deconstructed and re-examined.
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Locky Morris was born in Derry City where he continues to live and work. Renowned for his early work that explicitly dealt with the conflict in Northern Ireland – most notably from a socially embedded perspective – he has gone on to develop another working vocabulary that moves fluidly between the personal, public and political. While still informed by the complexities and intricacies of his immediate landscape, this work extends across video, sound, photography and gallery installation incorporating found sculptural assemblages. Morris’ practice, born in part out of a fascination for what confronts him in the often chaotic details of the everyday, is rich, inventive and marked by a visual playfulness that feels distinctly his own.
Installation view of works by Ailbhe Greaney, Mark McGreevy, Tara McGinn and Array Collective installed at La Roche House for 'Form Follows Function'
'Don't Forget Bins' , 'Time Flies When You’re Alive', Mark McGreevy. Mark McGreevy’s works create possible windows into imaginary worlds and distorted realities, creating visual conundrums, intimate overviews and speculative spaces.
'showground', Locky Morris. This image is part of a series of photographs taken by Locky Morris in and around Derry-Londonderry, where he lives and works. They represent small encounters that surprise, excite and puzzle him, where often manmade objects intersect and interact with natural and urban environments. His images capture these accidental moments and thereby create deliberate, impromptu sculptural installations that demand attention and elevate the quotidian to the extraordinary.
‘Round the house and mind the dresser’; ‘Bishop’s Knotweed’; ‘The Repeat of the Union’, Array Collective, ‘An Dún’ Range. Array Collective have created three tea towels for this exhibition which are informed by elements of their immersive installation An Dún, commissioned by IMMA, Dublin. Each work features motifs sourced from the installation: rendered pipes reminiscent of handmade instruments; a blueprint featuring drawings of the invasive species Japanese knotweed alongside bishops’ robes; and drawings of pots and ornamental pieces placed within a traditional Irish dresser in the style of a 1920’s catalogue. An Dún plays with domestic tropes such as the ‘Good Room’ and connects these interior spaces of the home to futurist thinking and imaginative world building.
'Spilled Milk # 5' and 'Spilled Milk # 2', Tara McGinn. Tara McGinn's sculptural works in the exhibition connect the subjects of trauma, memory, and identity to the syntaxes of domestic spaces and notions of sentimentality. The work takes McGinn’s family home as a site of information; revealing motifs of trauma, memory and care using storytelling and multimedia through the objects, surfaces and textures of its interiors. The enigmatic sculptures in the Spilled Milk series are each carefully constructed using clay formed in a mould cast from glassware and crockery passed down through the generations as well as plastic food containers the artist collected when caring for their mother in her home.
'Untitled, because I saw a lot of things on tv when I was a kid that I probably shouldn’t have', Tara McGinn
'A Cast Collapse (cut hair from a summer of head lice)', Tara McGinn
Image of 'Celtic Roots II: Ulster Cycles', Sighle Bhreathnach-Cashell. The aquatint etched prints 'Celtic Roots I & II' are part of an ongoing series ‘Ulster Cycles’. They depict mimetic figures using imagery from celtic, biological and architectural sources. This series translates years of the artist’s unseen drawings into etchings, fusing together personal, national and evolutionary timelines.
Works by Sighle Bhreathnach-Cashell, Tara McGinn and Mark McGreevy
![Image of 'Jigs for [the Fabrication and Assembly of] Stool Legs', Jan McCullough. To create the images in the ‘Jigs’ series, Jan McCullough collaborated with a number of fabricators in Belfast to create a series of temporary architectural landscapes](https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/64c8eb9471a0b0659915ba88/b32d0360-05d8-4ab7-a245-334b62298079/Screenshot+2024-08-13+at+10.02.31.png)
Image of 'Jigs for [the Fabrication and Assembly of] Stool Legs', Jan McCullough. To create the images in the ‘Jigs’ series, Jan McCullough collaborated with a number of fabricators in Belfast to create a series of temporary architectural landscapes using their jigs – wooden custom made shapes that are used as tools to assist in the repeated cutting, placing and securing of their materials – in sculptural installations that she then photographed. The fabricators included scenic construction workers who support the film and TV industry that has come to dominate the East Belfast docklands area in place of more traditional manufacturing industries. Their highly skilled labour involves staging partial cityscapes; slices of town scenes, portions of buildings, etc. Much of their work is to create the unseen structures that underpin the authenticity of the sets. These images are intended as a series of temporary monuments to the inventive nature and evocative gestures of this usually invisible labour, and to a changing city.
'The Light Beautiful (I): 21 Westland Row, Dublin', Ailbhe Greaney. Ailbhe Greaney’s works, The Light Beautiful (II): 13 Rue Des Beaux-Arts, Paris' and 'The Light Beautiful (I): 21 Westland Row, Dublin' attempt to bring the outside inside and make exterior the interior. The images were created in the rooms of Oscar Wilde's birth, 21 Westland Row, Dublin, and death, 13 rue des Beaux-Arts, Paris. Their titles reflect on the feeling Oscar Wilde had for light, as described in Kevin O’Brien’s book, ‘The House Beautiful: A Reconstruction of Wilde’s American Lecture’. Further references include Wilde’s collection of essays, ‘The Decay of Lying’, and poem, ‘The Ballad of Reading Gaol’, writing which touches on the concepts of beauty and mortality central to The Light Beautiful series.
'The Light Beautiful (II): 13 Rue Des Beaux-Arts, Paris', Ailbhe Greaney
Works by Tara McGinn and Jan McCullough
'She was in my Dream (and then she left again)' and 'A Resting Place – a coffee table to be exact', Tara McGinn
Works by Majella Clancy and Ailbhe Greaney
'Of a Body VI', Majella Clancy. Majella Clancy’s works are part of a new, ongoing series of prints that explore ideas of the gendered body and its relationship to place, motherhood and materiality. The prints emerge out of an intensive notebook practice where bodily fragments appear, merge and become activated through the process of making.
Works by Ailbhe Greaney and Locky Morris
'Pink Restroom', Mark McGreevy
Lorraine Burrell’s four staged photographs, 'Collar', 'Egg', 'Bell', and 'Flower' are in part a nod to images within the triptych ‘Garden of Earthly Delights’ by the Flemish Painter Hieronymus Bosch, painted around 1503-1515. The props she makes inside her studio encase and constrain the body in contrast to the wanton abandonment within the central panel of ‘Garden of Earthly Delights’.
'Flower', Lorraine Burrell
'Toad', Mark McGreevy