22 MAR 2024 · New Neighbours brings together the work of Olivia O’Dwyer and Fergal Styles for the first time. Both artists work come from places of imagination and memory, of things half-remembered or dreamt, with playfulness and experimentation at the heart of each of their practices.  Accompanying the exhibition will be a newly commissioned text by Neva Elliot. (You can download the essay https://www.southtippartscentre.ie/events/new-neighbours---olivia-odwyer-fergal-styles Olivia O’Dwyer’s work is influenced by 'Bad Painting' which refers to a deliberately raw style of figurative painting, rejecting traditional ideas of draughtsmanship, mixing art historical, popular, and personal sources. She examines ideas around quotidian experience, observations drawn from the world around her and more intimate or personal themes and looks to contemporary culture and ideologies drawn from a female perspective and the ‘female gaze’ feminist theory. For Fergal Styles the image represents “an irrational, compact impression of sensory and emotional information” made up of feelings and imagination. He approaches painting in a very egalitarian way, no medium is ruled out even those usually not associated with painting, for him mediums/materials have their own cultural references or weight and he values the associations these bring to the work. In this episode, the pair chat about the experience of becoming New Neighbours for this two person show at STAC.  New Neighbours opened on March 8th and continues until Friday 26th April.  The gallery is open from 10am to 5pm Tuesday to Saturday.  Visit the https://www.southtippartscentre.ie/ for more. Want to get in touch? https://gmail.com produced & presented by Eimear King

19 JAN 2024 · Threadsuns - Sophie Béhal Threadsuns, a new body of work from Sophie Béhal, comes as the result of the Tipperary Artist Residency Award with STAC, supported by Tipperary Arts Office. This body of work comes from a period of engagement with new materials in a new place. Situated in a rural landscape in County Tipperary, it searches for a new way of being in this world and uses repetition, ritual and process to investigate this. The sun and circles are used as a rhythmic refrain and repeated throughout. The most reassuring of shapes, the circle, and its transcendental properties associated with infinity and certainty are questioned. The turmeric-dyed cotton sunprints hanging throughout the gallery will act as a balm in a dark winter, but like the shifting cycles of the sun, they will not last. Created by sunlight, they are a measure of light and time and space. In the gallery the weak winter light will cause them to fade and change over the duration of the exhibition, and as spring arrives they will leave. This exhibition is the result of a sustained period of research, experimentation and learning for the artist in new sculptural materials : glass, slip cast ceramics, large-scale natural dyeing and printing, and welded steel. The different timescales of these materials and their sometimes contradictory properties of heaviness and lightness, movement and stillness, permanency and ephemerality are explored. This exhibition offers the viewer moments of hope and transformation whilst acknowledging the darkness of our time. It reflects on a human need for ritual, repetition and communication and strives to find these things in our everyday life. Sophie Béhal is a visual artist, from Kilkenny and living in Co. Tipperary. Her work usually manifests itself as sculptural installation, often combining traditional sculptural materials of steel, clay and plaster with more ephemeral aspects of light and sound. Recent exhibitions: Awards Show, 2023, MART Dublin, With a View, Chocolate Factory, Dublin 2022, Dublin Art Book Fair, TBG+S, 2022 +2021; Projects: The Postal Project,Carlow Arts Festival 2021, Firestation Artists Sculpture Awardee 2022; Publications: Firestation FileNotes 2023. She holds a BA in Fine Art from Crawford, Cork, 2012 and an MA in Art, Research and Collaboration from IADT,Dublin, 2018 with a term spent in Taideyliopisto, Helsinki. Threadsuns - Sophie Béhal 13th January – 24th February 2024 Visit our website: www.southtippartscentre.ie If you'd like to get in touch with the podcast: southtippartspodcast@gmail.com Thanks for listening:)

17 NOV 2023 · Welcome to the latest episode of the South Tipp Arts Podcast! This time I sit down with artist Moran Been-noon to chat about her exhibition 'Here Nor There' which is currently running in the gallery here at STAC until December 2nd. 'Here Nor There' invites us to consider the connection between ethnicity and one's ability to belong. Mixing moving image and audio pieces with objects that symbolise fragments of the artist's ethnic identity, the artwork encourages us to perceive ethnicity as a multi-layered and intricate theme, and within this, consider the complexities of contemporary Irish identity. As part of the project, Moran is running a series of FREE drop-in art lab sessions at STAC Chapel on the plaza, from 16th - 18th November (2:30 to 5:00pm) where participants can explore Moran's working process and make a piece of their own to take home - all materials provided. If you'd like to learn more about the exhibition visit: https://www.southtippartscentre.ie/events/moran-been-noon Or the workshops at STAC Chapel: https://www.southtippartscentre.ie/events/here-nor-there-art-labs-with-artist-moran-been-noon If you'd like to take a virtual tour of the exhibition: https://tinyurl.com/yc4rt5ev Get in touch: southtippartspodcast@gmail.com

14 JUL 2023 · In this latest Ep, I chat with artist Kate O'Shea from Broken Fields, a multi-disciplinary collective made up of individual practitioners Louise Harrington, Enya Moore, Aideen O’ Donovan and Kate O’ Shea. Broken Fields brings together experience, knowledge, and practice from the fields of socially engaged art, architecture, community work, activism, research, and writing. The name Broken Fields refers to the breaking down of disciplines, siloes, and fields. In the breaking down of these constructed boundaries, Broken Fields brings together the strengths of diverse practices in processes, projects and spaces that are deeply place-based. In partnership with Clonmel Junction Arts Festival, Broken Fields 'Art, What is it good for?' is a social space guided by the question: ‘How can we co-create a space with the public in Clonmel?’ Festival Activities included collective canopy making, printmaking and conversations with a series of invited artists, printmakers, community workers, architects, writers, musicians, and activists, culminating in a very busy day at STAC on Saturday 8th July! The exhibition continues until August 5th, and features a working space where visitors can add a piece to the collective art wall, browse the large Broken Fields archive, or just take a break from the world outside. Gallery open Tuesday - Saturday from 10am-5pm. Visit https://www.southtippartscentre.ie/events/broken-fields-art-what-is-it-good-for to learn more about the artists involved in this project. 'The Ballad of Clonmel' by Padraig Stevens & Siobhán Kavanagh was composed especially for Broken Fields in response to the work. (lyrics & music copyright Padraig Stevens and Siobhán Kavanagh, 2023, Clonmel, South Tipperary Arts Centre) If you'd like to get in touch the email address is https://gmail.com

26 MAY 2023 · In this episoed, I chat with Dorje de Burgh about his exhibition 'Under the Same Sky', currently on show at STAC.. Following the artist's move to Carrick-on-Suir in the midst of the Covid-19 pandemic due to his high-risk status, Under the Same Sky is a photographic documentation of the town and its surrounds. Representing an outsiders view, this work reflects the particular atmosphere of unease and alienation of that time, as well as being an observation on community, home and belonging. Dorje also strives to subvert familiar representations of the Irish landscape, and in doing so reflect the tensions inherent in both the urban-rural space and the artist’s own conflicting positions around closeness and distance. Dorje de Burgh lives and works between Killarney, Dublin & Berlin. Following nomination as a member of the FUTURES European mentorship program, Dorje received the Arts Council of Ireland Next Generation award 2020 and The Darkroom moving image residency 2020/21, producing his second solo exhibition How To Kill Something That Doesn’t Exist in association with PhotoIreland Festival 2021. https://www.forget.rip Find Dorje on Instagram @dum_studio Get in touch with the podcast: southtippartspodcast@gmail.com Learn more by visiting our website: www.southtippartscentre.ie

8 APR 2023 · Austin McQuinn ‘Some signs are secret, some manifest’ 31st March – 13th May 2023 A Solo Exhibition of new paintings, sculpture, and live art performance, curated by Helena Tobin. ‘Some signs are secret, some manifest’ is an exhibition of new work specifically created for the double-height atrium and gallery @STAC. Austin’s new paintings on ash wood panels and found antique prints are intensely gesso-ed, collaged and inked to psychedelic effect. The 17 foot ‘Tower’ of discarded Aran sweaters in the Atrium signals the unique Norman architecture of tower houses in South Tipperary, and echoes an earlier installation McQuinn created in Kilmainham Gaol, presenting sweaters as totems to make a new tribal or fetish power-object for the Gallery. https://www.southtippartscentre.ie/events/austin-mcquinn-some-signs-are-secret-some-manifest In a challenging exploration of the traditional and the discarded, of biopower and queer energy, McQuinn will be artist-in-residence at the STAC Chapel in the former Kickham Army Barracks. He will create a twenty-four hour live-streamed live-art performance event, titled ‘Imperial Lunatic’. Following the cycle of the new moon rising, ‘Imperial Lunatic’ will incorporate the artists’ body in series of repeating actions, video clips of volcanoes and processions, percussion, medals, zigzags, tongues and talc. https://www.southtippartscentre.ie/events/austin-mcquinn-imperial-lunatic Get in touch with the podcast: https://gmail.com Don't forget to like & subscribe ;)

14 MAR 2023 · If you missed our latest artist talk, you can listen back here. Ita Freeney's artist talk on Saturday March 4th featured a conversation between Ita and fellow artist Katherine Boucher Beug. The discussion focused on the process behind Ita’s current series of paintings - from her choice of subject, to her focus on form, light, mood, and structure, and the making of the paintings. Water's Edge @STAC February 17th - March 18th 2023 Ita Freeney’s Water’s Edge exhibition consists of a series of new paintings created over the last three years. The sea is glimpsed at in all of these works but they are not seascapes per se.Their focus is on the shape of headlands, piers, slipways, strips of water, roofs - areas forming a boundary with the water or breaking the block of water or sky. The solidity of land and the surrounding infrastructure is contrasted with and used to emphasise the airiness and openness of sea and sky. This series gravitates towards horizontals, distance, direction, echoes, gaps, openings, and connections/separations.These paintings play with abstraction and representation - finding and emphasising abstract forms in reality, while also observing nuances of colour, tone and form to evoke mood and atmosphere. Familiarity and building relationships with the places that inspire, has become a very important element in the work. Many return visits to inspirations in North Mayo, and East Cork into Waterford, result in getting absorbed in the places, observing them from different vantage points and in different lights. See more of Water's Edge, take the virtual tour, or listen back to our podcast with Ita here: https://www.southtippartscentre.ie/events/ita-freeney-waters-edge

24 FEB 2023 · Artist Ita Freeney's 'Water's Edge' was officially opened here at STAC on 16th February by Catherine Marshall. It presents a body of ethereally beautiful paintings produced over the last three years. The sea is glimpsed at in all of these works but they are not seascapes per se. They play with abstraction and representation - finding and emphasising abstract forms in reality, while also observing nuances of colour, tone and form to evoke mood and atmosphere. It was a pleasure to sit down with Ita for a chat about her inspirations and her practice here at STAC on the morning after the opening reception. Water's Edge runs until March 18th - gallery open 10am to 5pm, Tuesday to Saturday. https://www.southtippartscentre.ie/events/ita-freeney-waters-edge Dublin born, Ita Freeney graduated from Crawford College of Art and Design with a BA Hons degree in Fine Art (1994). She now lives in Cork. Her most recent shows have included a solo exhibition - Outer Edges at The Lavit Gallery (2019) and a two person exhibition, The Paul Kane Gallery at the Irish Architectural Archive in Dublin (2018). She has exhibited with the Paul Kane Gallery since 1998, with solo shows there in 2001 and 2008 as well as several two person and many group shows.

27 JAN 2023 · Our first exhibition of 2023 features a new body of work from Annie Hogg, coming as a result of her Tipperary Artist Residency Award with STAC, supported by Tipperary Arts Office. LOST is a keen consideration of what happens in a landscape after the land has gone through conversion to an industrial scale farming model, specifically a system of long established hedgerows. Through installation, incorporating pigments rendered from that landscape, soundscape devised on site and sculptural elements, the work asks the questions of what cost, other than financial has this action had. The artist has used materials which were charred, ground and collected from this space in its present state to transform or at the very least confront the human grief and meaningfully mark that once, this place was alive. Annie joined me for a chat about LOST, the specific site that it is based upon, and the deep meaning it holds for her, as well as the wider issues such as the continued industrialisation of agriculture and the need for more sustainable practices. LOST opened on January 14th and runs until February 11th @STAC The gallery is open Tuesday - Saturday from 10am to 5pm https://www.southtippartscentre.ie/events/annie-hogg-lost Artist Talk - Annie Hogg in conversation with Helena Tobin Saturday 28th January @2pm https://www.southtippartscentre.ie/events/artist-talk-annie-hogg-in-conversation-with-helena-tobin Details of Annie's next scheduled workshops with Plants & Colour can be found here https://plantsandcolour.co.uk Check out some more of Annie's work here https://www.instagram.com/anniehogg_thewildhedgeinkco/

24 NOV 2022 · Welcome to the latest episode of the South Tipp Arts Podcast! In this Ep, we focus on the artists involved in 'She'll Give You All she Has' - Orla Barry, Chloe McKeown & Laura Fitzgerald. In 'She'll Give You All She Has', the artists create work addressing farming, feminism, farming practices and being an artist in rural Ireland, through a mixture of objects, sound, print, writing and video. The works are woven through with absurdity, tragedy, humour and the kind of emotional detachment familiar to readers of contemporary farming manuals. The exhibition, curated by Helena Tobin & Anne Mullee, opened on 29th October and continues at STAC until December 3rd. All the work discussed can be explored on our website www.southtippartscentre.ie where you can even take a virtual tour of the space. Thanks to Orla, Chloe & Laura for their time, and thank you for listening :) If you'd like to get in touch the email address is southtippartspodcast@gmail.com and we always love to hear from you.