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Scissors Cut Paper Wrap Stone: On Tour to Uillinn, Skibbereen and Ormston House, Limerick

CCA’s exhibition Scissors Cut Paper Wrap Stone tours to Uillinn: West Cork Arts Centre (14 Jan – 25 Feb, 2017) and Ormston House, Limerick (24 Mar – 27 May, 2017.

Originally curated by Alissa Kleist and Matt Packer for CCA Derry~Londonderry in Spring 2016, the exhibition (featuring artists Alan Butler, Clawson & Ward, Eva Fàbregas, Pakui Hardware, John Russell, Andrew Norman Wilson), will also include new works by Joey Holder and Jennifer Mehigan commissioned for the touring venues.

Scissors Cut Paper Wrap Stone is an exhibition that takes its title from a 1994 book by Belfast-based science fiction writer Ian McDonald. In the book, McDonald describes a young graphic design student, Ethan Ring, who is able to create images that bypass rational thought and control the mind of the viewer. The ability of Ethan Ring’s images to induce tears or ecstasy, to heal, and even kill people attracts the interests of governmental forces, who see the opportunities of harnessing this power for their own ends. As well as being a story of art’s capacities to change people’s emotional and physical behaviour, the book is a story of the artist’s struggle to manage these responsibilities.

The exhibition of the same name is not a direct response to the narrative of this story but instead stages a number of artworks that explore ideas of how our perceptual and physical behaviours are transfigured by objects, images, and new technologies. Included in the exhibition are works that reference how the physical actions of the body are anticipated by design, such as the animated character of self-assembly furniture in Eva Fàbregas’ video installation, The role of unintended consequences (Sofa Compact). Also included in the exhibition are works that suggest the body in a ‘post-human’ hybrid state – the puppetry in Andrew Norman Wilson’s Reality Models; in John Russell’s large prints; and in Pakui Hardware’s Transactions, a series of free-standing sculptural works that contain fleshy images of indeterminable organic or artificial matter, sourced from NASA’s archive. A violence upon the body is suggested by Clawson & Ward in works including their steel ‘branding iron’ sculpture and edited xerox print, This ear says that the artist is not well schooled in anatomy…the ear screams and shouts against anatomy… which depicts an appropriated image of Joseph Stalin’s ear. Throughout Scissors Cut Paper Wrap Stone, the body is present in fragments and is subject to various regimes of control and imposition.

Impositions upon the body also exist for viewers of the exhibition as they walk around the space and encounter artworks that have their own autonomous movements (Eva Fàbregas’ floor-based works, Self-Organising System, and Alan Butler’s Orphan Transposition series of spinning laser-etched mirrored acrylic panels, featuring out-of-copyright images of Yosemite National Park that freely circulate online). These works not only suggest the unfixed and fluid status of our physical and perceptual bodies, but they also raise questions about the control of artistic authorship; one of the key metaphors of Ian McDonald’s story.

A publication designed by Alex Synge / The First 47 accompanies the exhibition and is available to purchase in all participating venues and by contacting info@cca-derry-londonderry.org.

Support & Thanks

The exhibition is made possible through the support of the Arts Council / Arts Council Northern Ireland Touring and Dissemination of Work Scheme and the generosity of all venues.

Artist biographies

Alan Butler

Alan Butler received his MFA from LaSalle College of the Arts, Singapore (2009). Recent solo exhibitions We Were Promised Anarchy, But What We Got Was Chaos, Solstice Art Centre, Ireland (2015); Youth Outreach In N. Korea, Supermarket 2015, Stockholm, Sweden; The Parallax View, Ormston House, Limerick, Ireland (2014); and group exhibitions 2FUTURES: Anthology 2, Royal Hibernian Academy, Dublin, Ireland (2015); Telling Lies, RUA RED, Dublin, Ireland (2015); Please return, Embassy Gallery, Edinburgh, Scotland (2015), among others.

Clawson & Ward

Clawson & Ward is the collaborative partnership of Anna Clawson & Nicole Ward. Their recent activities include: Artists in residence at RUPERT, Vilnius, Lithuania (2015); and exhibitions When Two or More are Together, SWG3, Glasgow International (2014); and Shiny Black Thoroughbred, Tenderpixel, London (2013). In 2013 they launched STUDIO36, a self-initiated residency series hosted in their studio. An accompanying STUDIO36 poster-rack publication toured to The Royal Standard, Liverpool (2014); Tenderbooks, London (2015); and Tate St Ives, Cornwall (2015).

Eva Fàbregas

Eva Fàbregas is a graduate of Chelsea College of Art and Design, London, and the Universitat de Barcelona. Recent exhibitions include The stuff that surrounds us, a two-person exhibition at José de la Fuente Gallery, Santander (2016); How are you feeling today?, Window Space (Whitechapel), London (2015); Unforeseen changes, Green Parrot, Barcelona (2014); Eva Fàbregas & Andrew Lacon, Kunstraum, London (2014); Homeless abstraction, Plazaplaza, London (2013).

Pakui Hardware

Pakui Hardware is the name (coined by Alex Ross) for the collaborative artist duo Neringa Cerniauskaite and Ugnius Gelguda. Recent activities include solo exhibitions at MUMOK, Vienna; ExoExo, Paris (in collaboration with Fenetreproject) (2015); kim? Contemporary Art Center, Riga (2015); Jenifer Nails, Frankfurt (2014); Contemporary Art Centre (CAC), Vilnius (2014); 321 Gallery, Brooklyn, New York (2014), NADA New York (2014). They have also participated in group exhibitions at National Gallery of Art, Vilnius (2016), Threads: A Phantasmagoria about Distance (curated by Nicolas Bourriaud), Kaunas Biennial, Lithuania (2015); Valentin, Paris (2015), Soy Capitan, Berlin (2015); Moderna Museet, Malmö, Sweden (2014); CCS Bard / Hessel Museum of Art, New York (2014) and ar/ge Kunst Gallery Museum, Bolzano, Italy (2014).

John Russell

John Russell was a co-founder of the artists’ group BANK, of which he was a member for ten years participating in over fifty exhibitions and events, as well as several publications. Since leaving BANK in January 2000, Russell has worked both independently and collaboratively in producing exhibitions, publications and curatorial projects. His work has been exhibited at Bridget Donahue, New York (2016); Lofoten International Art Festival, Norway (2015); Treignac Project, Treignac, France (2013); MOT International, London (2015); Allegra La Viola Gallery, New York (2013); The New Art Gallery Walsall, UK (2013); ICA, London (2011), Focal Point Gallery, Southend, UK (2011); The Grey Area, Brighton, UK (2011); Kunsthalle Exnergasse, Vienna (2011); Tate Britain, London (2010); and Tate St Ives, Cornwall(2009).

Andrew Norman Wilson

Andrew Norman Wilson is an artist based in New York. His work has exhibited at Centre Pompidou in Paris (2015); Palais de Tokyo in Paris (2014); Ullens Center for Contemporary Art in Beijing (2014); The Hammer Museum in Los Angeles (2014); Project Native Informant in London (2014); Fluxia in Milan (2014); Yvon Lambert in Paris (2014); the New York Film Festival (2014); CCS Bard in Anandale-on-Hudson New York (2013); MoMA PS1 in New York (2013); the San Francisco International Film Festival (2012) and the Images Festival (2012).

Joey Holder

Joey Holder received her BA from Kingston University (2002) and her MFA from Goldsmiths (2010). Recent solo/duo exhibitions include Ophiux, Wysing Arts Centre, Cambridge (2016); TETRAGRAMMATON, LD50, London (with John Russell) (2016); Lament of Ur, Karst, Plymouth (with Viktor Timofeev) (2015); BioStat., Project Native Informant, London (2015); and HYDROZOAN, The Royal Standard, Liverpool (2014). Recent group exhibitions include Winter is Coming, Georg Kargl, Vienna (2016); Deep Inside, 5th Moscow International Biennale for Young Art, Moscow, Russia (2016); The Uncanny Valley, Wysing Arts Centre, Cambridge (2015); BODY HOLES, New Scenario, online exhibition at the 9th Berlin Biennale, Berlin, Germany (2016); Sunscreen, online and at Venice Biennale (2015); A Plague of Diagrams, ICA, London, UK (2015), #WEC- Whole Earth Catalyst, The Composing Rooms, Berlin, Germany (2015); h y p e r s a l o n, Art Basel Miami, USA (2014); Vestige: The Future is Here, Design Museum, London (2013); and Multinatural Histories, Harvard Museum of Natural History, Massachusetts, USA (2013).

Jennifer Mehigan

Jennifer Mehigan is a recent graduate of LaSalle College of the Arts, Singapore. She has exhibited internationally, including recent solo exhibitions Butcher, Golden Thread Gallery, Belfast (2016); WATCH YRSELF ROT at Interstitial, Seattle (2016); HARD GIRLS at SOMA Contemporary (2016); and group exhibitions including Busan Biennale’s Asian Curatorial Exhibition. She currently lives and works in The Burren, Ireland.

Richard Howard

Richard Howard writes about science fiction, weird fiction and critical theory. He received his doctorate in 2016 from Trinity College Dublin in 2016 for his study of the science fiction of Bob Shaw and James White. He has had critical work published in the journals Foundation: The International Journal of Science Fiction and Medical Humanities, and fiction in Weird Tales, M- Brane and Electric Velocipede.