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Michael McGimpsey, Minister for Culture, Arts & Leisure, opened Engage 2000, originated by the Arts Council of Northern Ireland with the Arts and Disability Forum. The show is at its Belfast venue from 10th-21st January and is then available for tour to towns across Northern Ireland.
Brian Ferran (Chief Executive, Arts Council of Northern Ireland)
Michael Morgan (Chairman, Arts and Disability Forum)&Michael McGimpsey (Minister for Culture, Arts and Lesiure)
(Photograph by Lesley Doyle)
Disability arts have been a long time gestating in Northern Ireland but now, with the coming of the second millennium, they roar into life! Avril Crawford, Mary Kpakra, Peter Mooney, Joel Simon, Ivor Lavery and Jacqueline Carey are all visual artists, although their media range from traditional fine-art painting to three-dimensional composition and a set installation work. Animation is also featured via an on-site VCR, as is poetry with the writings of Colin Hamilton. This variety makes a fresh original show, marking a brave starting point for disability arts in the new century.
New World by Mary Kpakra |
The Arrival by Peter Mooney |
- For Avril Crawford, from Hillsborough, ‘harmony’ is the result of her exploration of her deafness. Her work conveys a sense of her acceptance of, but not resignation to, impairment.
"I saw myself as a flightless bird – cut down from the sky and unable to get off the ground again. Now I have the freedom to move and fly where I want."
- Mary Kpakra, from Carrickfergus, well-known as a landscape artist in Ireland, spent a number of years of her adult life in Africa . "My experience of Africa and other places such as Peru, India and China have been my inspiration and have allowed me to indulge my love of colour."The drawings of Cookstown’s Peter Mooney are striking in their use of colour. They echo Chagall in their depiction of biblical events and in the small, elongated animals that crop up in the drawings, but above all in the rich colours.UTV viewers will recognise Joel Simon’s work from Busker and Barney. His animated film Second Helpings, shown continuously in the exhibition, centres on the chubby eight-year-old Yvonne caught between the dream of being a supermodel and her mother’s stodgy cuisine. Ivor Lavery’s paintings and Colin Hamilton’s poems address mental illness, isolation and loss, but the main theme is hope. Colin has experienced mental illness: "The more I write, the better I feel and the better I feel, the more I write." St Vincent’s Hospital in New York features strongly in Ivor’s roughly-hewn and symbolic paintings.
- Ballintoy’s Jacqueline Carey explains her impressive Nine Boys Boxes: "An artist once said to me that being an artist is simply a matter of ‘doing it all of the time’. I liked that so much that it is all I wish to say of myself. I do it all of the time. … At the moment, I am intensely interested in chaos and trying to work out who I am when I am not being boxed in by other peoples perceptions and realities.
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