International Artist Talks: Micheal Flaherty & Cliodhna Timoney
While distance often hinders connections, this certainly wasn’t the case for our recent Artist Talks! We hosted this event between NL and Ireland with the help of our friends at Artlink in Co. Donegal.
We are so happy that over 45 people from NL and Ireland (& beyond!) attended to listen to both Cliodhna and Michael talk about their work. We learned about the broad scope of concepts and experiences that influenced their practice: the forces within folklore, music, night clubs, farming, and beyond with Cliodhna’s, and the organic matter, explorations, discoveries, and collaboration with nature with Michael’s. We can’t wait to learn even more in the coming year!
Cliodhna Timoney’s work is concerned with rural and provincial social histories, subcultural movements and marginal or vernacular methods of making. She picks and appropriates the cultural detritus from these sources alongside the debris of quotidian life to create allusions of other realities or fictional states. Gleaning matter from the everyday, Timoney pushes this matter into new contexts revealing, awkward meeting points and precarious moments of mutation. Timoney’s work fluidises and destabilizes recognized forms in order to breakdown fixed material states of being. The work lives somewhere in the in-between, neither fully subject or object, familiar or unfamiliar, embodied or disembodied.
Michael Flaherty is an artist from Port Union, Newfoundland, Canada. He studied ceramics at NSCAD University (BFA) and University of Regina (MFA) and has taught at numerous institutions across the country. He was a semi-finalist for the Sobey Art Award in 2011 and a finalist for the RBC People’s Choice award in 2013. He won the Large Year Award from Visual Artists Newfoundland and Labrador in 2013. More recently, Flaherty has been instrumental in establishing rural art initiatives including the Cultural Craft Festival and Union House Arts. He is currently a Ceramics Instructor at Haliburton School of Art and Design in Ontario, and operates his studio, Wild Cove Pottery, in Port Union, Newfoundland.
Click here to learn more about the International Atlantic Residency Exchange.