Alan Counihan Visual Artist

“OPEN HOUSE”. 2008.

Alan Counihan — Tue, 20 Oct 2009 09:52:46 +0000

Commissioned as part of the New Sites-New Fields Landscape Research Project at the Leitrim Sculpture Centre, Manorhamilton, Co Leitrim.

This work centred upon an examination of the idea of place as expressed through vernacular traditions and explored the web of relationships that are revealed through human habitation patterns and landscape. The focus of the work was primarily on the traditional vernacular house form and its surrounds as area of settlement, shelter, home, and realm of dream. It explored the relevance of such houses within the contemporary landscape.

The landscape intervention took place in Teach Sheáin Mhic Dhiarmada, a National Monument in the care of the Office of Public Works and the birthplace of Seán Mac Diarmada, one of the signatories of the 1916 Proclamation who was executed during that revolutionary struggle. Its custodians describe this classic vernacular cottage as a “national shrine” less for its political legacy than for its architectural expression of life in rural Ireland from the late19th to mid 20th century and of a harmonious relationship to its environment.
The patterns of the surrounding fields seem to have shaped the patterns and customs of life within the house and the internal lives of its occupants. The inner and outer worlds must have been deeply entwined. To express this symbiosis, maps of the surrounding townland were drawn on the bed linen of the house. On what might have been young Seán Mac Diarmada’s pillow was drawn a map of a wider world.
In Corranmore , Laghty Barr, there now stand seven houses where stood thirty not long ago; a thriving community stitched together by custom and shared values. One of these customs was “rambling”. By night the young would ramble to “céilí” in the cottage of their choice. Those with a radio were particularly prized but all doors were open. To awaken a memory of this sense of community and celebration of shared experience a gathering was organized within the house with the aim of reinvigorating the place and allowing it to be experienced as a living building
The theme of openness – to environment and community- was echoed in the gallery installation. Here a house form was deconstructed and its relationship to its environment left exposed. This work explored a different sense of openness, one created through abandonment. There was no adequate shelter in its past. It might be Teach Mhic Diarmada , the hero’s house, as ruin.
Neither installation was an exercise in nostalgia but sought to posit a question as to our fundamental relationship to our surroundings and histories. The traditional house form as a vibrant expression of a people’s relationship to landscape has effectively vanished and with it a whole series of cultural relationships. Does this same disappearance reflect a widespread dissociation from the natural world, from the historical secrets of local landscapes, of the inner life from the outer world? How is that dissociation expressed and what might its cultural consequences be?

Alan Counihan — Sun, 28 Jun 2009 16:35:46 +0000

Alan Counihan
Rhue, Johnswell
County Kilkenny
Ireland

Townland

Alan Counihan — Sun, 28 Jun 2009 12:54:15 +0000

Alan Counihan and Gypsy Ray developed an exhibition, “Townland” for inclusion in the Visual Art Programme of Kilkenny Arts Festival 2009. The exhibition was part of a new collaborative strand of work ,“Townlands”, which set out to explore a very specific place, the townlands in the old civil parish of Rathcoole, Co Kilkenny, Ireland in all their resonant complexities.
The focus is primarily on the “vernacular” history of the townland fields, the names and stories by which they are still specifically remembered. However ’Townlands” is not an exercise in, nor celebration of, cultural nostalgia. Its explorations of vernacular traditions and customs are accompanied by an examination of, reflection on and juxtaposition with, the contemporary practices by which they have been supplanted.
The overall goal of “Townlands” is to re-present local place to local people, among others, by means of a creative distillation, re-envisioning and expression of its folklore. history and contemporary landscape. This re-presentation, through exhibition- and possible publication,- will be in a vibrant and contemporary language, the past of a place viewed through the eye of its presence.
The landscape in which we live is a construct, a product of culture, its surfaces shaped by processes of power, ownership and use. In recent times the Irish rural landscape has changed dramatically as a result of EU directives, changed farming practices and poor planning laws. As Schama has written, our experience of place is fundamentally altered when “measurement, not memory, is the absolute arbiter of value”. Previous symbiotic relationships between people, landscape, and the wider community as expressed in architecture and social custom such as the “meitheal” have disappeared. Does this same disappearance reflect a widespread dissociation from the natural world, from the historical secrets of local landscapes, of the inner life from the outer world, the individual from the communal? How is that dissociation expressed and what might its cultural consequences be?
These are the questions which “Townlands” seeks to further explore. As artists living within these local landscapes, and as members of their communities, we wish to engage with these issues and to contribute to an enrichment of the experience of place. Within a generation a large percentage of field names and their associated lore will be lost. For us, as artists whose practice has been consistently based on the exploration or celebration of place and community it is an invaluable resource to be engaged with now.

Shelter of the Past

Alan Counihan — Sun, 28 Jun 2009 12:52:56 +0000

Over the past twenty years Alan Counihan has realised many large site-specific works in the public domain and exhibited widely both in Ireland and the U.S.A. His work is in many public and private collections on both sides of the Atlantic. He has been the recipient of several grants and awards including the Pollock-Krasner Foundation Award. While perhaps best known for his object-based work his practice also incorporates photography, theatre, texts and curation. Recent projects include The Weavers’ Gifts, a celebration of the Costanoan-Ohlone tribes of Central California, USA, and Olmo/Elm/Leamhán, an exploration of the disappearance of the European elm tree. In 2008 he took part in the NewSites-New Fields landscape research project with the Leitrim Sculpture Centre, Ireland, and in September 2009 will be Artist-in Residence at Sculpture in the Parklands, Boora Bog, Co Offaly, Ireland..

STATEMENT:
Counihan’s practice engages with the human relationship to landscape, with how it is inhabited, remembered and imagined. His work seeks to explore the need to imbue landscape with meaning and inherited notions of cultural identity, the enshrinement of memory in place and its inevitable erosion and revision.