Welcome to Flaxart Studios

Gruszczyk is interested in art, which does not produce visual artifacts, but which is concentrated on providing spectators an experience of perceiving art. Gruszczyk completed studies at Phd level in Fine Art in 2011 at Nicolaus Copernicus University, Torin, Poland. Her recent solo exhibitions include Merging, project for Culture Night, Centre of Creative Practices, Dublin (September, 2011), Permeating, Contemporary Center of Art Laznia, Gdansk (June, 2010). She was awarded a scholarship of the city of Torun in 2012 and a scholarship of the Marshall of the Silesian Voivodenship, 2012. In Cracow, 2011 she was awarded a prize for the project The Bodies of the Books at the 4P: Penman/Poetry/Prose/Public Place Festival. Her works are held in collections in Italy and Poland.

Bohyun born in 1982, lives and works in Seoul, Republic of Korea. Bohyun has a B.F.A in Fine Arts Education from the College of Education at Inha University, Incheon, Republic of Korea in 2004. Bohyun is a graphic novelist. In 2006 Bohyun was a selected artist for Korea Culture and Arts Foundation, Arts Council Korea, Seoul, selected artist for the support programme for Genre Comics Creation, Seoul Animation Centre in 2005 and the Superior Prize winner of the Korea Cartoon Creation Contest, Society of Korea Cartoonist, Seoul in 2004.

Bohyun is interested in religion, territory, race and conflict. History is the source of Bohyuns inspiration from the Celtic cavalryman in the Punic Wars, to the political revolution in the Joseon Dynasty. Bohyun researches themes of public interest and then utilises a dignified drawing style to represent it.

Bohyun explored the city of Belfast and its divided culture as a parallel to Seoul and Korea’s division and create work in the style of a reportage graphic novel. It is intended that through this work a different perspective of Belfast’s past and present will be presented to an unfamiliar audience in Korea. After publication, Bohyun hopes to extend the project into an exhibition and a serial internet blog in order to truly bring Northern Ireland’s story home to the Korean people.

RESIDENCIES 2010/11

Summer Zickefoose is an interdisciplinary artist who currently resides in Ohio. She grew up amidst the square miles and cornfields of Iowa. The smells of fresh cut hay, horse manure, and hog pens lodged permanently in her subconscious have, in one way or another, led to artwork that is deeply influenced by Midwestern and rural American culture and landscape.

Zickefoose received degrees in both Art History and Studio Art from the University of Iowa in 2000, and in 2004 received a MFA in Multimedia Art and Ceramics from the University of Florida. Her objects, performances, videos, and installations have been exhibited nationally, most notably at the Athens Institute for Contemporary Art in Athens, Georgia, Project Space at the National Council for Education in the Ceramic Arts conference in Phoenix, Arizona, and the New Harmony Gallery for Contemporary Art in New Harmony, Indiana.

The rural, American landscape is often the setting both literally and figuratively for her investigations as an artist. This landscape is representative of its human counterparts and their codes of language, ethics, traditions, and behavioral traits. As with any archaeology, there is the place, its culture, and the objects and materials used by that culture. Summer believes these objects and materials hold within them a multitude of secrets.

The forms of her work might range from ceramics, sculpture, installation, performance, or video. Americana and the art traditions that correspond with it are woven throughout her projects. Responding to these conventions, she is able to evaluate established identities of rural culture. In a reinvented vernacular, layers of history are revealed and evolving rural customs are unearthed.

Each component of her work, whether it is a journal entry decorated on a ceramic cup or a video installation of squirrels foraging, attempts to operate as a familiar language. her investigations of the familiar involve interpreting the inherent and constructed meaning of a material. Additionally, exploiting the decorative and accessible qualities of commonplace objects by pairing them with the more grotesque, visceral experiences of the body. An overlooked and ordinary chocolate chip cookie can, in the course of a performance, be revealed as both cultural icon and social tool. The corporeal and the subversive combine, conjuring honest dualities of the comfortable and awkward, the conventional and progressive, the distressing and humorous that are components of nearly every family, culture, and place.

In Belfast Summer is proposing a public performance that will take place in various locations around Belfast and rely on audience participation for its completion. She is interested in juxtaposing sites within Belfast that are connected to the city’s political past with a portable domestic setting to be used for impromptu conversations between myself and members of the community. The domestic space will resemble a kitchen, providing everything necessary for me to act as “hostess” to the conversations. The conversations will be initiated by the invitation to join the artist for a cup of tea and will engage any passerby who may accept the invitation.

The warmth and familiarity fo the domestic imagery sets the tone for ensuing conversations. The domestic space, in the context of the city’s political/historical sites, offers the example of building and maintaining community through the simple act of getting to know one another, finding similarities, and engaging in face to face communication. The domestic setting will also put on display the places in which political turmoil is felt most intimately, where family members involved in past violence have been cared for, mourned, and worried about. Our homes are personal havens, which reinforce and contain our values and passions. The kitchen is often catalyst for dinner conversations revolving around the day’s events, news, and politics, while simultaneously presenting the cultural identities of food linking us all together.

The conversations will allow Summer to become familiar with the city of Belfast on a more personal and intimate level, while also providing individuals of Belfast an opportunity to present their stories and identities. Following each conversation, she will document the details of the exchange. She will incorporate the conversation documents into the surrounding site, essentially blending the two spaces. The entire portable domestic space and all conversation documents could be installed as an exhibition in itself, with the performance continuing through an exhibition opening.

Aimee Lee is an interdisciplinary artist working across performance, installation, and book arts media, interested in personal storytelling. Her work has covered topics of human intimacy, internal defenses, and the isolating properties of language. Because her work thrives in moments of vulnerability, its manifestations occur subtly and often go unnoticed: a survival kit buried in the ground, a sound recording of whistles tied to a football goalpost, a book whose prints darken and fade to mimic the life cycle of a bruise. Aimee relates to what falls between the cracks, and seeks quiet sanctuaries to process the outside world and how humans participate in it.

Her technical vocabulary spans music, dance, book arts, and writing. Tedious and repetitive tasks and improvisation are major aspects of her work. Giving and taking is a recurrent theme; she invites people to interact with and contribute to her work, and they receive gifts such as a personalized comic on a paper brick or a letter pressed poem infused with beeswax.

Aimee Lee uses found objects, unplugged performances, and sustainable practices that include papermaking from local plants and clothing that would otherwise occupy landfills. The ideas behind each piece dictate its fiber content: text art about insomnia is printed onto pulped bedsheets, and mail art about mountain landscapes is cut from Wyoming sagebrush paper. She recycles her own work, transforming paper bowls into a sonic performance costume, and a spun paper collar into a book object. Aimee creates objects, spaces, and performances to find the nature of being human, somewhere between the ephemeral gesture and the living document.

For her residency in Flaxart, Aimee has proposed to engage with the notion of walls. She has undertaken research in this area, and has also carried out some projects in South Korea as part of a Fulbright Scholarship and in Morelia in Mexico. She is a papermaker and while in Flaxart she is challenging herself to critical engage with the issues, contexts and environments around peace walls in Belfast. She proposes to use paper to create miniature landscapes of walled scenarios in parts of the city that are not walled. A paper wall growing on a tree, a bench, a lamppost, and anywhere else that requires protection. In 2008 in Mexico she did similar public installation work where hundreds of handmade paper leaves were attached to various trees, vendor booths, and other locations in the city to highlight the ideas of invasive species. She intends to photograph these interventions in Belfast and she is interested in the history of linen and flax cultivation in the area, as flax makes durable and beautiful paper. She intends to make the paper herself if not supplied locally and to collect the images of the interventions and make a print onto the flax paper to create an edition of books.

CENTRIFUGAL: BELFAST MARCH 2010

'Some Actions Around the Centrifugal Book of Europe'

Monday 22nd March: 11am - 4pm

Minna L Henriksson

Workshop: ‘Making a Network Map’

Free all day workshop in Flax Art Studio 7

To book a place please contact Erika Reid at flaxartstudios@gmail.com

CENTRIFUGAL: SEQUENCE VI

The Centrifugal Book of Europe

The members of Centrifugal are artists, educators, architects and theorists who have come together to investigate the spatial, political and economic forces producing contemporary ideas of Europe. Centrifugal arises from the peripheries, from sites that have often been formed through their colonial relations with the ‘old Europe’, and which are now structured through complex webs of desire, resistance and adaptation. The project is concerned with†finding resonances and affinities across†the diverse spaces, histories and political imaginaries inhabiting these†edges of Europe.

The Centrifugal Book of Europe is a 'map' of the social, cultural and political space of contemporary Europe, and of the phantasmic Europes that may yet be called into being. Join us to launch the book and for a weekend of events in Belfast.

Richard Dyck is an artist who proposes to engage Belfast through scanning processes and technologies. Sensitive to urban and interior environments, in the past Richard has scanned entire homes, art galleries, library interiors/exteriors and their contents, farm animals, others' artwork, and bees within agricultural hives. Dyck finds the flatbed scanner as a mythologizing tool with subjects. He explores how it represents light as volume, fog, a haze, or obliteration. Dyck's proposal in Belfast is to address citizenry in Northern Ireland, with his scanner he will scan people themselves like previous projects before where he has scanned a human-sized bronze sculpture in excess of 100 scans.

Tricia Wasney's work explores notions of home, history and loss. She is especially interested in place in how human experience is embedded in the physical landscape and how sometimes that experience is a combination of reality, desire and cultural construction. She is essentially a non-fiction writer and she often combines narrative with images that she creates (through photographs and drawings) or that she finds through archival or other sources. Wasney is interested in others and their life stories as well as landscape as a starting point for where she grew up, and the city she now inhabits. She is excited about Belfast and the possibilities it represents to her, to create new narrative and image works that explore the layers of the physical and cultural environment. Wasney has already identified arts and writing organisations and groups she would like to engage with in Belfast. She proposes to create new narrative and image works that explore the layers of the physical and cultural environment as experienced by a visitor whose own city has a much briefer documentation of recorded human history and built form.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

RESIDENCIES 2010/11