Visual Art at Kilkenny Arts Festival

About the Curator

We are delighted to welcome Josephine Kelliher to Kilkenny this year as our new Visual Art curator.  Josephine is the owner and director of Rubicon Gallery. She earned a Bachelor of Science in Management and a post graduate diploma in the History of European Painting from Trinity College, and her involvement with artists began in 1990. In addition to a curatorial role in Rubicon Gallery, she talks and lectures on professional practice, sits on the Board of Ballinglen Arts Foundation and collaborates nationally to promote contemporary art practice in Ireland. Rubicon Gallery catalogues and monographs are all produced by Josephine Kelliher.

2011 Visual Arts Programme

Visiting artists’ studios is one of the privileges of being a curator. In the studio one can observe the purposeful decisions artists make; reflect on their intense scrutiny; their tenacity in making and remaking, painting out and painting over, until that point when they decide to lay down their tools.

“A painting is never finished – it simply stops in interesting places.”

Paul Gardner

Ann Craven’s reworking and re-presenting of stock subject matter makes her dark paintings, and their mirror twins, profoundly affecting. Nick Miller’s film offers a view of the progress of artist and sitter in the making of a single painting. Jacco Olivier’s monumental projections register painted images at various stages, altering the scale and the nature of mark-making.

“Great things are done by a series of small things brought together.”

Vincent Van Gogh

I have also invited David Beattie, Maria McKinney, Michael Thomas Murphy and Liam O’Callaghan to make very specific pieces in some of the shop fronts and hidden spaces of this medieval city. These works are variously playful, transcendent, elegiac, contemplative and surprising, and all are knit together by these artists’ singular vision of the possibilities of plain things.

I want to thank the artists.