Photo by Rich Gilligan
Stone Soup is Kunstverein Aughrim’s friendly takeover of The Courthouse Arts Centre, Tinahely, temporarily reimagining the former courtroom as a community café and loitering space in advance of major upcoming renovations. The exhibition runs from 20 May to 24 June 2023, and features work by artists Isadora Epstein, Yurika Higashikawa, Jennie Moran and the 1798 Club (a collaboration between members of Aughrim Active Retirement Group, photographer Louis Haugh, and Kunstverein Aughrim).
Stone Soup launches on Saturday 20 May with a writing workshop by artist Yurika Higashikawa from 11am-1pm, followed at 2pm with a brief introduction by curator Kate Strain, a presentation on Softening Corners and Institutional Hospitality by artist Jennie Moran, and a live performance titled Spooned! by artist Isadora Epstein. Refreshments will be served.
Epstein's wall works, Higashikawa's words, Moran's table lumps and the 1798 Club's postcards will remain on display throughout the month-long duration of the exhibition, during which time visitors to the Courthouse are invited to bring picnics and packed lunches from local cafés D'lish and Tinahely Farm Shop, to be enjoyed on site.
Stone Soup takes its name from an 18th century French folk story in which hungry strangers, with no more ingredients than a stone, convince the people of a town to each share a small amount of their food in order to make a meal that everyone can enjoy. Stone Soup at the Courthouse holds a space in which to test the potential of reciprocity in practice, by blurring the relationship between guest and host, and asking what hospitality means in the context of a local arts venue.
Opening hours Wednesday to Saturday, 10am to 4pm.
Isadora Epstein writes and makes performances from her research of art history and mythology. Living and working in Dublin, Epstein has presented performances at Temple Bar Gallery + Studios, the Royal Hibernian Academy, Sirius Art Centre, Royal Irish Academy, Ormston House, KuVa Exhibition Lab, Helsinki, and TULCA. Epstein co-created and performed two award winning shows for the Dublin Fringe Festival Flemish Proverbs, 2015 and Very Rich Hours, 2016. In 2019 she was awarded the Art Council’s inaugural Constance de Markievicz Award and recently received a 2021 Agility Award. Epstein was a recipient of the Fire Station Artists Studio Digital Media Award.
Yurika Higashikawa is a multidisciplinary, research-driven artist and writer who is based between Wicklow and Dublin, Ireland. Their films, performances and texts map moments of tension between technocratic systems of power and our capacities to act upon or in league with our surroundings. Overall, Yurika renders porous seemingly absolute perspectives in an attempt to magnify narratives that have been cast to the peripheries. Their latest film ‘Hypermedia Apophenia’ draws close the large scale surveillance project called ROXANNE (Real time netwOrk, teXt, and speaker Analytics for combatiNg orgaNized crimE), in order to demystify it’s embedded, abstracted, top-down governance strategies.
Jennie Moran is a Dublin based artist who uses her practice to create opportunities for hospitality. Her work is an attempt to dismantle places into their basic components and reassemble them so that they might function more poetically. She has gathered knowledge through a degree in sculpture at the National College of Art and Design; international residencies at NES Iceland, Fondazione Ratti, Italy and Galleria Blanda, Buenos Aires. Her projects have been facilitated by Dublin City Council Art Bursary, Arts Council Project Award, Artist in the Community Award, Engaging with Architecture Award and a Visual Art Bursary. In 2013 she founded Luncheonette, a long term art project centred around hospitality and food in Dublin.
The 1798 Club is a collaboration between Aughrim Active Retirement Group, photographer Louis Haugh, and Kunstverein Aughrim, that aims to develop an intangible Heritage Collection for Aughrim by creating an inventory of objects, artefacts and ephemera through which the customs and stories of Aughrim can be represented, shared and re-told. Aughrim’s inaugural exhibition of Intangible Heritage took place as part of Aughrim’s first annual Heritage & Arts Weekend, on 8 October 2022. A curated selection of heritage objects on loan from local residents and members of the community was arranged for public display at the Pavilion. This initiative was supported by Wicklow County Council.
Kunstverein Aughrim is a curatorial production office established by Kate Strain in 2022. Located on the ground floor of a townhouse in Aughrim, County Wicklow, it is part of an international network established by Kunstverein in Amsterdam, with sisters in Milan, New York and Toronto. Kunstverein Aughrim develops ongoing curatorial collaborations with artists to support the artistic process of creating new work, and to bring audiences as close to the creative process as possible. For more information visit www.kunstverein.ie