Cléa van der Grijn

Van der Grijn initiated the Liminal Spaces project and has developed the initiative, exhibition and catalogue with the curatorial team.

VISUAL ART PROJECT – SIX ARTISTS COMMISSION + A DESIGN + A PRACTITIONER

Seeking an artistic response to Yeats2015, the Model began working with artist Cléa van der Grijn to conceptualise a series of intereventions based on a local subterranean narrative. In the 1970s, a Dublin-based architect and city planner, Feargal MacCabe, put in a formal proposal to the Sligo County Council for planning permission for a small cabin on an island in Lough Gill, based on Yeats’ cabin ‘of clay and wattles made’. The subsequent sociopolitical dialogue between practitioners and government, imagination and practicalities, and notion of the land of Ireland became intertwined in the imagined space of the Isle of Innishfree. Artists were selected based on their current practices which incorporate social engagement, an interest in architecture, and their commitment to a rigorous dialogical investigation into site specificity. ( Felicity Clear, Maurice O’ Connell, Corban Walker, Clea van der Grijn, Andy Parsons and Michele Horrigan. ) This rigour is juxtapositioned with elements of fun, playfulness and humour to reveal complex ideas and issues in relation to perception, post-colonial folly and architectural aesthetics in relation to place. The six artists represent different approaches to these ideas. The starting point for the artists was to re-engage with the legacy of this project—to respond both to MacCabe’s experience (the rejection of planning permission for a cabin on Innisfree) but also to respond in a more indirect, perhaps poetic or liminal way, to the sociopolitical, historical and literal readings of  W.B. Yeat’s poem Lake Isle of Innisfree. Instead, these artists have unraveled the idea that something is not as what it seems, not literal but liminal therefore challenged preconceived notions of Yeats and place.

‘Art and architecture—all the arts—do not have to exist in isolation, as they do now. This fault is very much a key to the present society. Architecture is nearly gone, but it, art, all the arts, in facet all parts of society, have to be rejoined, and joined more than they have ever been.’   

Donald Judd

CURATORIAL INTENTION

Through a 10-month period, the curatorial team met and discussed the project from conception to production. Our curatorial approach to the project has been centered on two strands: providing space to produce an open-ended and site specific responses to Yeats, the island and the poem; and secondly about the collaboration between the practice of architecture and art. Throughout the process, the exhibition and catalogue were to embody progression of the research. The curatorial intention is to reflect this dialogue – one that prioritises process as a discussion. Key words are: synergies synopsis, response, collaborative [as in open and dialogical], common boundaries, interfaces; these are what make the project interesting, and not a straight-forward, ‘normal’ group show. On this premise, the exhibition will not be approached in a linear fashion, but will integrate work of different disciplines based on commonalities in theme or conceptual approach:

• Dialogical: to encourage discourse and social engagement;
• Process: approach taken to address the concept;
• Poetics of Place: with a strong sense of place.

PARALLEL PROCESSES

The entire Liminal Spaces project is open-ended and non-prescriptive rather than working within a constructed framework. The notion of liminal is important as it is a space between the conscious and subconscious. This is an organic process that is non-binary (rejecting the notion of art on one side and architecture on the other). It is rhizomatic and meandering. Therefore, the idea behind the exhibition and discussion is about exploring the synergies and convergences between practices and approaches between what architects and artists are doing within this project.

More than seven miles of beans have been planted, were impatient to be hoed, for the earliest had grown considerably before the latest were in the ground; indeed they were not easily to be put off. What was the meaning of this so steady and self-respecting, this small Herculean labor, I knew not. I came to love my rows, my beans, though so many more than I wanted. They attached me to the earth, and so I got strength like Antaeus.,. But why should I raise them? Only Heaven knows…. What shall I learn of beans or beans of me?

Henry David Thoreau, Walden (1942)

Both Thoreau and Yeats were interested in the notion of place, using metaphors such as the beans as a magical, utopian place. Through the process of growing, connecting to the earth, beans become an opportunity for thought. John Yeats often read Walden to his son, embedding in him the allusions of place and nature. In response, van der Grijn has been growing beans for months. Inspired by Thoreau’s work Walden, the artist’s approach to Yeats became about memory, recollection and a nuanced understanding of place. She sees the growing of beans as being about a process, the grounding which is thought, and about taking time to see things as they truly are. When Thoreau asks: “What should I learn of beans or means of me?”, van der Grijn replys: “The answer is the question”. By growing the beans, van der Grijn makes a metaphorical connection with Yeats and Thoreau—growing things together real or imagined. For her, it was important to go through the same process as the writers in order to better understand the place. In doing so, as she does often in her work, van der Grijns captures a creative osmosis through this process of empathy  gathering. The ball is a repeated metaphor in van der Grijn’s practice—repeated, reinterpreted. It is another metaphor for no beginning and no end; and therefore for the artist it is on ongoing process without an end product. The ball and beans become vessels; a conduit through which van der Grijn connects to Yeats and Thoreau, effectively re-imagining their experience today.

Van der Grijn initiated the Liminal Spaces project and has developed the initiative, exhibition and catalogue with the curatorial team.