PROJECT DETAILS
From the 19th September to the 2nd October six artists - Anna Wiley, Emily Robyn Archer, Hazel Mc Cague, Kari Cahill, Liliane Puthod & Margie Jean Lewis engaged with the landscape at Brow Head, Mizen Peninsula, West Cork.
Brow Head marks the site of a 19th Century signal tower, Marconi's wireless telegraphy station, and ruined cooper miners' lodgings. The wild headland, where the deep Atlantic meets the rugged coast, is the most southerly point on the Irish mainland.
During the time spent on the Tombolo headland the artists developed and produced site responsive sculptural installations. Geography, locality, topography, heritage, community and history played a role in this artistic engagement; drawing from the local and national history of the peninsula, studying the relationship between the land masses and ocean, and integrating knowledge from the surrounding communities.
EXHIBITION
Lay of the Land created an extensive and compelling art exhibition that stood alone as a valuable cultural activity and experience. For the culmination of the project the public were invited to journey to the tip of the Mizen Peninsula to experience the site and the works that responded to it.
Works
BrackenBall
BRACKEN BALL
Collaboration between Tombolo artists, this compacted sphere of dried bracken collected from the site sat in the middle of a low lying field.
Refractions
REFRACTIONS
Refractions sat on Marconi's original telegraph site on the wild Atlantic headland overlooking Crookhaven, Brow Head Cliffs and the Fastnet Lighthouse, refracting and reflecting the autumn sunrise + sunset each day.
Sisters
SISTERS
Repurposing agricultural by-products, debris and discarded farm materials the artists created a majestic sculpture that honoured the landscape and harked back to notions of celtic warrior women.
Totem
TOTEM
A towering monument sited on the North West of the headland overlooking Barley Cove made from stacked tractor wheel rims.
Prints
FIELD MAPS
Three circular images depicting the topography, night sky, and plant lore of the surrounding area hand drawn by Emily Robyn Archer and digitally printed locally.
Land Flutes
LAND FLUTES
Inspired by the wind singing through agricultural steel gates on site the artists set abut creating a sound sculpture that would play the wind vanes.
Flag
FLAG
18m long sun bleached flag mounted on the cusp of the headland. The echo of the light gives three directions to the wind.
Fi Fiain
FÍ FIÁIN
A woven tapestry using natural and found material hanging inside the copper miners lodge.
Scales
SCALE
Aluminium scales facing the light from the Fastnet Lighthouse.
Conch/Performance
CONCH // PERFORMANCE
Octagonal conch structure built by Anna Wylie using scraps of corrugated iron and old pallets Sited looking back at Barley Cove Beach. 5 Tracks created by Margie Jean Lewis played through speakers inside the conch. Recordings included samples of sea shanties. recordings of local séanós singer Peggy, and samples of quartz found on site.
Daily performance by Margie Jean Lewis.
Sky. Land. Sky.
LAND.SKY.LAND
Reflection & refraction of the sky on land using perspex planted into the landscape. The audience could experience the sky reflected on the ground as they walked around the sculpture.
Artists
ANNA WYLIE
Growing up in Tasmania with World Heritage wilderness a stone's throw away, and growing into a community which embraces that wonder as a playground, has given Anna Wylie a profound appreciation for the natural world. Exposure to a wide variety of cultures from a young age instilled an insatiable curiosity in the world beyond the Apple Isle.
Anna has spent the past eight years guiding hikes in the Tasmanian wilderness and travelling and working around the world in the off seasons. Becoming increasingly concerned by environmental and social exploitation globally and by widespread dependency on bodies with economic influence over social or environmental priorities, finally led her to explore her long held interest in sustainable housing.
Anna now works with Earthship Biotecture, an organisation creating autonomous, self-sustaining structures, built largely from recycled materials, to house and nourish people in any environment.
EMILY ROBYN ARCHER
Days spent exploring her grandfather's garden and fishing for crabs on the slipway in the watery idyll of Scilly, Kinsale instilled in Emily an essential connection with the natural world. Later, living in remote areas of Kenya and witnessing the extreme poverty and environmental injustice alongside the indescribable flair of nature and culture inherent to Africa, she was drawn to a career of creative engagement with our environment.
After years of focusing on environmental issues such as climate change, Emily is now exploring our innate connection with the natural world. How are we affected by key cycles in nature and how can they help us draw meaning and relatedness in these complex lives we lead?
education. She lives in Dublin.
HAZEL MC CAGUE
Hazel spent her childhood days tramping to school through the fields, chasing bulls, stealing apples from the orchards and foraging for edibles in the drumlins of Monaghan. This has instilled in her a great sense of curiosity about the world and sparked a desire to travel and experience new things. Exposure to new cultures, landscapes, people, places and things has engendered a sense of openness and freedom that has contributed to a multidisciplinary and collaborative approach in her art practice.
Hazel began her career in woven textile design. Intrigued by the complexities of fabric construction, the creation of material that has longevity and functionality as well as tactility and beauty. She focused on designing collections specific to the aviation and soft furnishing industries. After years of working in this field she found herself drawing back towards a more hands- on creative approach and so began her exploration into working collaboratively on outdoor art installation. She has since worked for various festivals and events designing and building large-scale site-specific art installations. She loves to work in a variety of mediums from fabric to wood to rope with an emphasis on reusing and repurposing old materials.
KARI CAHILL
Kari Cahill grew up in Cork City and Athens. She has worked in a range of creative fields both as artist and designer - a combination which has resulted in a varied practise. She fuses ideas of art, design, and functionality and believes in creating through collaboration. She completed her BA (Fine Arts) in the National College of Art and Design, Dublin.
She is the co-foudner of Basic Space, a contemporary art space in Dublin and was a director of the space from 2011 to 2014. She set up residency programs and curated exhibitions and projects within this context; facilitating the work of both Irish and international artists practicing a range of disciplines.
Through her freelance art+design studio KACA she makes large scale installations, often showcased at events and festivals, and has worked as creative director on events and projects throughout Ireland. She spent time in the West of Ireland, in Aughrusbeg, Connemara where her work was directed by the landscape, using natural fibres and elements to make functional objects.
LILIANE PUTHOD
Liliane Puthod is a French artist living in Dublin.
She graduated with a Masters in Contemporary Art Practice from HEAD in Geneva and has extensively exhibited in Europe.
Recents projects include a self-directed residency, funded by Geneva Arts Council, to investigate the origins of an Ikea rug across Denmark and Belgium.
Liliane works with commodities, places and individuals to generate surprising connections and unexpected situations.
Her multidisciplinary practice explores the possibilities to construct structures that subvert our relation to specific and generic objects.
MARGIE JEAN LEWIS
A classically trained violinist and jazz trained vocalist, Australian-born Margie Jean Lewis has lived in Dublin, Ireland for 8 years. Over this time she has been developing a unique and mysterious world of sound. Working primarily with her voice, Margie uses loops, effects, violin, zither and electronics to create music to get lost in. Walls of lush vocals, sensual meditations, meandering string melodies, vibrant songs, pumping beats, dark hooks.
Her latest project in collaboration with drummer Brian Walsh was a score for the road journey film "Peripherique" as part of artist Fiona Hallinan's ongoing series Heterodyne. This was performed in Centre Culturel Irlandais in Paris, September 2015.
Project Photos
Location
TOMBOLO 2016 took place on the tombolo headland at Brow Head, Mizen Peninsula, West Cork.
Directions: https://goo.gl/maps/spxsBpMbLEA2
Co-ordinates: 51°27'24.1"N 9°45'23.6"W
THANK YOU!
We are extremely grateful to everybody that donated to TOMBOLO. We would like to say a huge THANK YOU to everybody who came down and helped, cooked, laughed, ate, climbed fences, took photos, sat around the fire, basked in the September sunlight, and braved the torrential downpour during take down.
Through this generous support we raised enough to make the project happen and to pay our artists a stipend. It is the foundation of what this project will become.
There were a couple of folk whose generosity really made an impact to what we were able to achieve. We would like to show our special thanks to the following people:
JOHN + JACKIE WALSH
DANNY O'KEEFFE
ELIZA + EVIE WARD
BODY & SOUL Festival
MARIE MC CAGUE
BRENDAN O'HARE