Arts Week with Judy Murphy

Seven artists from across Ireland are showing their work in When We Cease to Understand the World, at Interface Inagh, located in Recess as part of this year’s Arts Festival.

The group exhibition from Clare Langan, Clodagh Emoe, Kate Fahey, Jo Killalea, Kathryn Maguire, Sarah Ellen Lundy and Vanya Lambrecht-Ward, takes its cue from the unique setting of Interface – a studio and residency programme in Conamara’s Inagh Valley.

The Interface site, which dates from the 1980s, was originally designed as the world’s biggest and most advanced salmon hatchery – supplying offshore salmon farmers with smolt via helicopter. However, the enterprise eventually failed, because the hatchery was built too high above the adjacent lake which it depended on for water.

According to Alannah Robins of Interface, its failure “represents the scale of human ambition and its lack of understanding or disregard for the natural surroundings”.

But, nurtured by her, the space at Interface Inagh has now become an extraordinary centre for artistic practices. For this Arts Festival show, the seven artists explore the disconnect between people and nature, but they also look at the potential of renewal. Through film, painting, sculpture and installation, the artists invite viewers to reflect on humanity’s relationships with nature, to look back to old practices, to learn about a place and sit within its geology and deep time and, finally, to connect with each other and the natural world.

Pictured: An image from Clare Langan’s installation, The Rewilding.