'Arts Council of Northern Ireland Collection’, The Burnavon, Co. Tyrone, 1-31 March 2019. Exhibition celebrating the best female contemporary artists from Northern Ireland, to mark International Women’s Day.

A special exhibition featuring female artists from Northern Ireland launched in celebration of International Women’s Day, Friday 8th March. The exhibition, which included works from the Arts Council of Northern Ireland’s contemporary art collection, ran from 1-31 March at the Burnavon Arts and Cultural Centre in Cookstown.

On show were some of the best examples of contemporary art from the artists in the region, covering a range of media including photography and painting. The exhibition featured a range of artworks from emerging and established female artists and included photography, painting, printmaking and drawing. Collectively, the exhibition brought together artworks which tell the stories of women from different cultures, life experiences and times. The nine artists featured include, Shalleen Temple, Eve O’Connor, Laura McDowell, Ailbhe Greaney, Suzanne Colledge, Sharon Kelly, Fiona Finnegan and Gemma Anderson.

The exhibition is a result of the Arts Council’s new Art Lending Scheme, a free scheme which is open to curators, galleries, and organisations interested in putting works from the Arts Council’s collection on public display. The exhibition at Burnavon has been curated by Joanna Johnston, Visual Arts Officer at the Arts Council, who is on hand to assist organisations in curating their own exhibition.

Ailbhe Greaney's, Nam, Paris, from the series 'StreetFlower', was one of the pieces selected from the Arts Council collection for exhibition. The work ‘Street Flower’, created as part of a Residency Award at the Centre Culturel Irlandais, Paris, depicts a young generation of Vietnamese women living in Paris now, as well as the daughters of women who travelled by boat to Europe in the 1970’s. Here they wear jackets within Parisian landscapes that they previously wore moving through the streets of Vietnam by moped. In Vietnam the jackets are worn to protect the skin from the sun. The jackets are multi-coloured, with floral patterns. They are not traditional, nor do they reference the past. Rather, they are a part of contemporary culture, referencing a momentum that is forward facing. Moving en masse through the streets of Hanoi and Saigon, women wearing these jackets, appear like a moving garden.

Photography enables us to recreate one world within another. It has the ability to transport like a magic carpet or the white horse from the tale of Tir na NOg (Land of the Young). Within these images colour and dress become a language, and the photographs a kind of fabric, which transform and re-imagine complex personal identities, connecting people and place across time and space. Specifically, the displacement of the Vietnamese jackets re-locates aspects of Vietnamese sun, style and subtlety of substance, within a Parisian landscape.