UPHOLD: milk & nectar
milk & nectar is a multi-sited exhibition running from 8-16 June 2024 on the Cregagh Road in East Belfast. It includes works by Bassam Al-Sabah, Caoimhín Gaffney, Michael Hanna, Jan McCullough, Locky Morris, Jennifer Mehigan and Katie Watchorn, artists who respond to economic, social and geo-political issues to create compelling alternate visual landscapes through a range of approaches to photography.
Installed in Dawson Wright Hardware shop, Fusco’s ice cream shop, Bloom Studio florist, Stereo cafe, Bethany Fruit Market and Ciao Italy grocer, and outside B&M and Two Sisters cafe, this exhibition is part of the 2024 Belfast Photo Festival.
milk & nectar and Household are generously supported by Lottery funding through the Arts Council of Northern Ireland, Belfast City Council and Arts and Business Blueprint programme, and local businesses.
Most works in the exhibition can be purchased via UPHOLD, Household’s not-for-profit platform for promoting and selling art by contemporary artists with a connection to Northern Ireland: www.upholdart.co.uk
Artwork location Map
Participating artists
-
Bassam Al-Sabah uses digital animation, painting, sculpture and textiles to convey intricate visions of war, resistance and perseverance, and to explore themes such as displacement, nostalgia and personal mythology. His work references Japanese anime cartoons, which were dubbed into Arabic and broadcast throughout the Middle East from the 1980s to the present day.
-
Caoimhín Gaffney is an artist and filmmaker whose work has been shown in exhibitions and film festivals internationally. Their work combines inward-looking meditations with surreal scenes and images to envision alternative ways of being and worlds with their own logic and possibilities.
-
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.
-
Michael Hanna works in a wide range of forms including text, photography, painting, multiples, video, performance and immersive environments. His work takes the form of social and sensory experiments often with himself as the subject. His research centres around ideas of utopia, error, and how to live.
-
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.
-
Jennifer Mehigan is interested in how power manifests in the world. Her works have always been situated somewhere between art and design, and in the past few years she has focused on widening the scope of technologies she uses to include modes of artificial intelligence and virtual/augmented reality, floristry, writing, parties, and meditative performances and films.
-
Katie Watchorn’s practice is rooted in the rhythms of farming and land management. Primarily sculptural, she often employs fickle, agriculturally specific materials in combination with familiar rural motifs and ubiquitous objects and forms from her surrounding environs. These re-situated encounters aim to establish a new awareness of a contemporary rather than a vanished existence.
Caoimhín Gaffney: 'Emerging too damp to catch fire', 2023. This medium format photograph installed at Bloom Studio florist has been developed by Caoimhín Gaffney as part of a larger body of work reflecting on the restorative power of nature alongside the reality of climate change - and resulting climate anxiety - through a fragmented representation of the landscape. Emerging too damp to catch fire engages a quiet register to examine the subject and is part of a series of photographs shot throughout Ulster; on Rathlin Island; and at Lough Sheelin and its adjoining bog in Cavan. Developed with the support of funding from Platform 31, the University of Atypical, and the Arts Council of Northern Ireland.
Bassam Al-Sabah: 'Reaching your wandering to my eye', 2023. These limited edition prints ('Reaching your wandering to my eye' and 'A scream floats among the flowers') installed at Fusco's ice cream shop are stills from the artist Bassam Al-Sabah’s artwork “IT’S DANGEROUS TO GO ALONE! TAKE THIS”, an ambitious 30-minute-long CGI film featuring ever-changing cinematic sequences from an imaginary video game. Combining fantasy, erotica and body horror, it follows the ambiguous “hero” undergoing numerous metamorphoses. “IT’S DANGEROUS TO GO ALONE! TAKE THIS” unravels and challenges the amped-up, constructed masculinity that video game avatars embody, as well as the associated idealistic connotations of progress, growth and transformation. In the film, external worlds merge with internal ones, the body’s selfhood untangles from the surface, and emotions flood in technicolour form.
Bassam Al-Sabah: 'A scream floats among the flowers', 2023
Jennifer Mehigan: 'Girls Gone Feral VIII', 2018. The work 'Girls Gone Feral VII', installed at Fusco's ice cream, is part of a series of images originally shown as part of the Royal Hibernian Academy ‘Futures’ exhibition in Dublin in 2018. The opalescent formations depicted in this work were a part of a larger surreal landscape of stretched images of materials such as rhinestones, sequins, latex, leather bridles, and dog leashes. The symbols and textures in Jennifer’s works explore the tensions that exist between interior notions of self and external expressions of identity. ‘Futures’ is a sequence of annual exhibitions curated by the RHA that profiles the work of early-career artists based in Ireland around whom exists a growing critical and curatorial consensus.
Jan McCullough: 'Garage I' (2011, printed 2021) 'Garage I' is a small framed black and white image of Jan McCullough’s grandfather’s garage workshop. The artist is drawn to industrial places such as workshops, garages, factory floors and sheds, where others construct, assemble and make things, and the rituals and rhythms of the processes that define the work that happens in them. She often uses historical photography archives as starting points to connect with pragmatic and incidental gestures of work and working environments in different neighbourhoods. On the counter in Dawson Wright’s Hardware shop, where 'Garage I' is installed, you can find a new Belfast Collage Workshop kit that Jan has produced together with Household and designer Alex Synge that encourages children to play and imagine new worlds through collage making, using the unique AE McAlpine photographic archive of East Belfast people, streets, and shops.
Jennifer Mehigan: 'Anesthesia Primavera', 2020. Installed at Bloom Studios florist, 'Anesthesia Primavera' is a digital sketch/collage from a larger series of spring flower studies by Jennifer Mehigan. She is currently focused on stories of suppressed Irish lesbian historical figures and exploring their graves as horticultural sites. Through this, she hopes to uncover queer strategies for surviving our crises of kinship and climate.
Katie Watchorn: 'Get Away From It All (Cromac St)', 2022 (colour digital print). The title of this work, ‘Get Away From It All’ refers to escapism, holidays or time-off or a retreat from urban centre to the idyllic countryside. Often, the countryside is a place to pass through or to indulge in respite, as opposed to a being considered a highly contemporary place of labour, chaos, and technological development. 'Get Away From It All (Cromac St)' is a digitally layered poster of accumulated research made by the artist while living in Cromac Street in Belfast, installed at Bethany's Fruit Market. It is accompanied by one of a series of 8 unique cast aluminium babla (pearl millet) seed heads. Pearl millet is a domesticated grain that has been grown globally since prehistoric times.
Katie Watchorn: 'Get Away From It All (Cromac St)', 2022 (cast aluminium sculpture)
Locky Morris: 'Floaters', 2023. 'Floaters' and 'showground' are two images from a series of photographs taken by Locky Morris in and around Derry-Londonderry, where he lives and works. Installed at B&M ('Floaters') and next to Two Sisters ('showground'), 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.
Locky Morris: 'showground', 2023