For her 10th collection Eilis Boyle forsook the traditional catwalk presentation and commissioned Aisling Farinella & Richard Gilligan to produce a video of her work. We were asked to design and light the exhibition to launch the video.

The challenge was to, within a single room, light half a dozen pieces, several oversize photographic prints and maintain the least possible amount of ambient light so as not to take from the video which was being projected against one wall on a continuous loop.

The pieces themselves had really strong textures and by using hand made spot lights created with black out cinefoil elements of the delicate patterns were brought out in the form of shadow play.

The hanging system we had previously developed for the IGI ‘Laundry’ show whereby we created a set of weightless invisible ‘tracks’ 3m above the floor. The tracks consist of 0.5mm nylon chord maintained in tension through simple eyelet and counterweight system and with any potential sag in the lines is controlled through the mass of cement blocks.

The wonderful movie produced by Aisling & Rich can be found here.

Two storey extension with new kitchen and bathroom areas.

Design strategy includes lowering ground floor and extending existing first floor into roof and out to rear to provide additional accommodation.

New extension is being clad in brickwork salvaged from existing house, giving an old familiar face to a new build.

Sustainable strategy involves robust detailing and careful specification of heating and insulation to achieve a high level of comfort and low operational running costs.

Thermal imaging and airtightness testing to be used to ensure level of specification is matched in construction.

Full 40m2 extension, planning exempt design, integrating concealed steel structure to allow for first floor extension at future date.

Design strategy to allow for master bedroom relocated with dressing area to ground floor, with new bathroom and kitchen extension forming new courtyard to allow light into the middle of home. Careful design of circulation areas to provide a variety of storage areas for growing family.

Sustainable strategy includes thermal imaging airtightness testing to insure design specifications met in quality of build.

Music can define space, clothes can have structure and buildings can communicate subtle, complex messages.

Why then should the fashion designer not design walls or the architect not make patterns?

The sometimes strict divisions of labour and of specialisation we now experience were not always the case. Composer Richard Wagner used a word Gesamtkunstwerk in his 1849 essay “Art and Revolution” to mean total artwork, a synthesis of the arts in one piece, where one piece might encompass dance, music and drama together. Your average renaissance man would throw his hand at painting art sculpture and science with equal gusto. Charles and Ray Eames designed furniture, architecture, communications, Film and graphic design, considering all to be worthy pursuits. In terms of the total work the likes of Frank Lloyd Wright might be a good example the where furniture, building and landscape are all designed together as an expression of a single idea.

This project though no ‘total artwork’ was an attempt to achieve a level of that synthesis between the mediums of fashion (Made for you by Arms) and architecture (abgc) for Music From Ireland (MFI).

The Brief

Music From Ireland is a music industry & arts collective set up by First Music Contact to promote Irish talent at International Music Showcases & Conventions and is funded by Culture Ireland & IMRO.

At each show event there are showcase gigs organized by participating countries and record labels. There is a back end too, with a trade show environment where music industry types show their wares. A CD is produced for each event with a showcase of artists and this is the de facto business card, flyer, information leaflet for introduction for the band and the Music From Ireland concept.

MFI commissioned abgc to design Ireland’s Stand.

The Installation

The concept was to make an enclosure out of the talent (the CDs) and as this structure was emptied of it’s contents it would reveal a secondary message to maintain engagement in the display; the glass half empty should look as good as the glass half full. This enclosure would be completed all the furniture necessary to run a trade show so that every single element of the stand would be Irish made by Irish design, from Ireland.

The finished product would have to be demountable (flat pack), lightweight, robust, visually engaging, easily assembled and had to fit into standard long-haul luggage allowance. It was likened it to a picnic hamper in a flight case. When fully taken apart the entire set up weighs 21kg and fits into a large suitcase.

The brief demanded a frugality of structure. After examining numerous designs and systems with the assistance of David Delahunty (industrial designer) a tubular steel frames with linen or plywood skins as determined to most fit the brief. The frames and skins rely on each other and act together in compression and tension to solidify the structure when folding or fabric skin and collapsible frame are simply screw fixed together.

After the initial concept was realised and approved fashion Designer and maker of things Renate Henschke of Made for you by Arms came on board for the detail design and fabrication of the installation with abgc.

The rear screen itself is screw jointed tubular steel sections, with linen pockets system holding 256 cds, the pockets triangles are arranged in a pattern with the spot colour linings in a subtle pattern. As the CDs are emptied from the pockets over the course of the event so the pattern is revealed.

Over the next 12 months the installation will travel to, Midem (Cannes), Canadian Music Week (Toronto), SXSW (Austin, Texas), The Great Escape (Brighton), Popkomm (Berlin) and CMJ (New York).

abgc wish to thank David Delahunty (industrial designer), re-dress’ Rosie O’Reilly and designer Clare Geraghty for their assistance getting the screens completed over the final few days before we shipped to SXSW.

There’s much discussion these days about disused commercial/industrial space and the onus on civic authority and property owners to allow encourage creative use of space, reduce eliminate start up costs to incentivise action and to stimulate recovery.

The Tabacalera Is an exciting reuse of an old Madrid factory, originally earmarked for local government, funding shortfalls inspired the local authority to loan out a derelict building as a self managed community arts space.

The block consists of a scores of artists studios, meeting rooms, classrooms, random halls, a large fabrication workshop, yards with a variety of potaging, a library, theatre, separate concert venue, restaurant and bar.

One of the stumbling blocks emerging artists is the catch 22 of not having space to produce work and thus not being able to afford the space to work from. The solution here is to make the space available as artist’s studios. In return the artists teach one day a week. These rules apply for any club or group and one can have access to the space so long as you provide a benefit in kind to the community. Both Artists and Community are winners.

An extraordinary amount of classes take place, from discussions on modern cinema to Tango classes to hands-on workshops from the resident artists in painting and sculptural processes. There are night-time concerts allowing young bands and DJs to strut their stuff, along with frequent exhibitions, installations and showcases

Everything within the centre apart from the contents of the bar is free.

Copyleft — all rights reversed

There is a strong left leaning ideology spearheading the venture in an attempt to achieve a free and open exchange of ideas similar to ‘open source’. Here they use the term ‘copyleft’: an artist retains the right to be identified as the author of a work (whatever medium) but that any work produced in the Tabac can be used, studied, copied, shared, or modified, and within that freedom there is a freedom to distribute modified (and therefore derivative) works.

The sole income from for running the centre comes from the bar and restaurant. This pays for utilities and maintenance and everything else is barter. Dublin artist Kenneth Lambert (who has since taken up a Tabac studio space) and I each enjoyed a stew and a beer for lunch for €5 each. While we were hanging out in the bar our Nigerian host kindly told us that we (the Irish) were the blacks of Europe and described his research project into writing the history of Euro Africans who predate the African Americans and who’s history remains largely untold. Indeed he related the history of Veslaquez’s African assistant, a worthy painter in his own right, whose pictures are buried in the Prado for fear their exposition would devalue the masters work, or so it was explained to us.

Its not without it’s problems – open doors can attract an anti social element, and the bars lose out to beer-sellers on the street that undercut their prices. It’s a worthy study both for it’s success and failures.

The Tabacalera is fascinating initiative, pushing the limits of community, barter, artistic collaboration and intellectual copyrights. The idea that artists who benefit from public funding should also be educators for the community pro bono is something we could definitely learn from.

The Cabinteely village café is located in Irelands first ‘A’ energy rated apartment building, and taps into this ethos with a simply finished unit using simple materials, for aesthetic and economy, in addition to using the ‘found’ unfinished walls wherever possible.

The unit’s existing concrete block work walls were cleaned down and painted and the existing in-situ cast concrete ceiling was left exposed. The table-tops and terracotta tiles were sourced in local salvage yards. The former were combined with bespoke square section stainless steel bases to form ‘canteen’ style bench tables while the latter were used on both floor and wall to define the kitchen and service areas.

We sourced decorative electrical flex in Elephant Grey, brass light fittings and Swiss made light bulbs all of which were assembled to form the pendant lights over the table

The feature wall used standard bullnose external light fittings sourced in a local hardware store and reused as interior lights. Standard steel conduit is folded into a feature pattern on the wall to house the lights’ cabling.

The kitchen counter and display table are made of polished concrete, in natural colour and regular aggregate, and include polished insets of 3 sets of cutlery which were included during the casting process.

You can visit the great folk at Urbun here
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To exhibit 64 A3 artworks mounted on foam board in a 1,830 square foot double height studio space in daylight.

The images consisted of 48 pieces of cover art and 16 portraits from online magazine Le Cool Dublin. Collectively Le Cool now reaches over 300,000 people every week across Europe (Barcelona, London, Madrid, Lisbon, Budapest, Istanbul and Moscow).

Concept

The concept came from the combination of the size of the art work in relation to the large exhibition space, and our observations about how the public engage with art, and each other, in a gallery.

The response was to make a gallery structure within the larger space that would contain the art work as well as provide a sculptural object that would respond to the scale of the room. This gallery, 900mm wide and 2100mm high internally with art work stacked on both sides, means the viewers must enagage with each other as well as with the art work.

The concept references a 1970’s installation by Marina Abramović & Uwe where visitors to the ‘show’ must squeeze between the 2 naked artists in order to gain admittance. We inverted this by making the spectators the ‘artists’ whose experience of the art is tempered by their interaction with each other within the structure.

Execution

A cut-out is made from a standard sheet material, 18mm MDF. The 150mm borders make a series of structural ribs, and the cut-outs form all the internal surfaces – walls, floor, roof. This economy of construction leaves 0% waste from the raw material. This strategy is then extruded to form a 6.3m long corridor, pivoting or ‘snaking’ on the module of 2100mm, the length of the cut-outs

The structure is internally lit making the Nathair Nimhe a lantern within the otherwise blacked-out space and so the structure and the art becomes the focus of the space. The open nature of the structure also allows for some innocent voyeurism as people on the outside watch the legs of the people on the inside who are looking at the art.

The installation featured work from the following artists/stylists/painters/illustrators/photographers/collectives: Keith Walsh, Ruan van Vliet, Lauren Crothers, Gaetan Billaut, Aidan Weldon, Loreana Rushe, Mario Sughi, Shane O’Driscoll, Jon Cheung, Isabel Reyes Feeney, Brian Coldrick, Niall Sweeney, Synth Eastwood, Richard Gilligan, Dave Comiskey, Paddy Lynch, Stephen Ledwidge, Dragana Jurisic, Stephen McCarthy, Alan Clarke, Gary Farrelly, Jamie Saunders, Trevor Finnegan, Faye George, Raul Arantes, Eleanor Reilly, Fergal McCarthy, Aaron Brady, Justine Le Guil, Niall O’Brien, David Turpin, Owen Kane, Aisling Farinella, Tamara McCarthy and studioseventyseven photography.

We’re very grateful for the assistance of Cillian Johnston Joinery in the construction of this installation.

The 2 shots are ‘giveblood.ie’ and a blood droplet which is the logo for the Irish Blood Transfusion Service. For the shoot we ultimately prepared 2 drawings which on the morning of the shoot were staked out onto the sand with bamboo. For the giveblood.ie shot the position of every umbrella was tagged and numbered.

The site is Sandymount in Dublin which has an extensive tidal area of very even gradient. The photo’s we’re all taken approaching hightide with the water level increasing at a rate of 220mm for every half hour so both of the final shot’s involving over 150 volunteers we’re taken within a half hour.

We also produced with sean and yvette photography and mr paul mahon this stop motion animation.

every drop counts from abgc on Vimeo.

Recently completed, progress photographs above, will hopefully have finished pictures shortly. (gc)

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Refurbishment of 1840’s seafront villa. New green technology is carefully integrated into with the original fabric, maintaining the character of the original dwelling while providing an airtight ‘green’ house and upgrading the energy rating from G to A/B.

Contractor: Oaklawn Construction

Landscape Architect: thitythreetrees

Ecological Consultant: Jay Stuart of DWEcoCo