Category: Seeing things

‘The Ties that Bind’ is S/TAC’s fourth show to date and focuses on emotional, somatic and psychological aspects of shelter, presenting a short film The Ties that Bind, the collaborative installation The Clothesline, and a selection of works on paper to illustrate the genesis of the project which was initiated through a collaborative workshop held in the Chocolate Factory, Dublin 1.

‘The Ties that Bind’ is a short film created for Waterford’s Imagine festival for GOMA and was filmed and edited by Fillipe Lezo with S/TAC. The clothesline can signify a variety of feminist and feminised ideas and is a deep-reaching metaphor for the ties that bind families, communities and women together. Strung together it becomes a symbol of the chaos and intersection of lives and cultures within an imposed vertical grid. The lines can be seen to embody twin notions of shelter/ exposure; concealment/revelation; reality/fiction; conscious/unconscious.

The Clothesline installation comprises a number of painted and printed textile pieces, each depicting a particular source of imagery, approach and palette associated with the members of the collective as individuals. While each carries the distinctive marks and gestures of each of the five artists of S/TAC, the whole work is unified through over-printing using colour and stencilled motifs which reference a connecting theme of exposure and masking of internal body organs. The collaborative installation acts as a symbol of shelter, connectedness and intersection which overtly plays with notions of ‘life on view’, private versus public, acts of display and exposure, domesticity and ‘women’s work’…

The works on paper were developed and facilitated by an Arts Council funded workshop, which focussed on the embodiment of experience. Using mono-print and stencilling the first stage of the process which led to The Clothesline and has culminated in the film ‘The Ties that Bind’, saw an extended collaborative group including the collective, curators, scientists and individual artists create collage and layered prints on paper. These small prints were originally formed into giant capes and worn before being finally dismantled and sewn into books. In 2023, when the group was invited to exhibit in the National Gallery of Ireland, this work was further developed into The Clothesline using the concepts and processes initiated in the collaborative workshops.

Accompanying these collaborative works are a selection of pieces by each of the artists which provide some hints and suggestion to the particular significance/resonance to each and how that feeds into and is nourished by the participation and collaboration of a collective.

[Hu]Manned Mission is a pseudoscientific exploration into humans’ interactions with the moon. An appraisal of lunar myths and missions, combining fact with fiction to create new narratives. It offers an invitation to reconnect and communicate with your moon, to consider the importance of language in your quest, because … it matters what stories we tell to tell other stories with; it matters what knots knot knots, what thoughts think thoughts, what descriptions describe descriptions, what ties tie ties. It matters what stories make worlds, what worlds make stories (Haraway, 2016).

The moon is a distant object, gazed upon by more humans than any other solid object in the universe (Morton, 2019), yet its surface has only been walked on by 12 white American men. The only people to have experienced it first-hand. However, does that make the rest of our knowledge less valid?

Etching and pastel on paper, 46 x 38cm

In this  hybrid etching and pastel drawing the figure is situated behind the eyes at a remove from the audience to suggest an interior condition and position. There is a link to body armouring of trauma – the body keeping the score being a familiar term in psychology. It seems that the condition was linked to embodied trauma and these women did not have a voice either in their treatment or in society – they were only able to express this in a non-verbal communication – in the guise of illness.