The new Meet the Artist interview is out and we are glad to present Louise Manifold. Louise works conceptually with film, photography, sculpture and text. Fascinated by the power of stories and the creation of myth her multi-disciplinary practice reflects upon the nature and expectation of narrative as a means to explore ideas on both the self and the body in relation to the other.
Read more here: http://glogauair.net/…/2017/meet_the_artist_louise_manifold/

Volume 2 — on sale from 11 October 2016 Vol 2 of Winter Papers, Ireland’s annual anthology for the arts, will be published by Curlew Editions in October 2016. It will offer fiction, non-fiction, poetry, photography, visual arts, along with craft interviews and in-conversation pieces on writing, film, theatre, dance, photography and music.
– ‘a treasure trove of soul fuel with deep roots in Irish soil’ Irish Times
– Picked as an ‘Irish art book of the year’ Sunday Times Ireland
 
Edited by Kevin Barry and Olivia Smith
Kevin Barry is the award winning author of the novels Beatlebone and City of Bohane and the story collections Dark Lies the Island and There are Little Kingdoms.
Olivia Smith has published widely as an academic. Her current project concerns Irish Law and Irish Letters.
Volume 2 contributors and interviewees include:
Darran Anderson, 
Kevin Barry 
Sinéad Gleeson
Sarah Maria Griffin
Lisa Hannigan,
Mary Leland
 Brian Leyden
Sean Lynch
Louise Manifold
Peter Murphy
Paul Murray
Bob Quinn

Louise Manifold is based in Galway, and most recently co-curated Wildscreen, a two day film screening event, with filmmaker Una Quigley in Connemara. She has exhibited extensively in Ireland and internationally. Through sculpture, photography, text and film, the artist is repeatedly drawn to the margins of society and place, often combining scientific research with myth and story to present an alternative vision of reality to the viewer. Throughout all of Manifold’s work there is a persistent sense of disconnection and distance from the world of which one is living in, in favour of the creation of individual realities. The artist was familiar with Kevin Barry’s work before  they met; “I really like Kevin's style of writing and he has a brilliant way of describing interior thought which I was very drawn to, also he has dealt with similar subject matter so it was both really.” She adds; “My work is very much about visual forms of storytelling, I work with language and text both as material and content for my work - I am drawn to written experiences that almost feel visual or sculptural, to a language of symptoms of ailments of an esoteric nature.”
The artist was working on some footage of a derelict theatre being torn down, filmed while she was on a residency in the USA. She was finding it difficult to come to a decision on what the finished artwork should be. It became clear that if the footage was to become anything, she would have to work in a different way than usual: “I didn't know Kevin before making this film, but I really thought he would be an ideal collaborator. When you approach someone you don't know and want to work in a creative way on something new, things tend to be a bit more structured. This structure really helped the work. When I did the initial filming in New Jersey, I didn't really know where it was going. I find the beginning of any work to be a bit like moving through thick fog, you know where you need to be but just not completely sure how to get there. It became clear that in order to get ‘there’ – to a finished film, it needed to move beyond being singular creative effort.”
The resulting short film, In Death and Fiction, was very much the result of delay. Says Manifold of the process; “I had been working for a while between 2011 and 2012 with transcripts of patients suffering from an illness called Cotard’s Delusion, an illness in which the subject is convinced that he or she is dead or immortal.” Manifold also cites Samuel Beckett as a clear influence on her methodology for working on In Death and Fiction. It was Beckett's research on Cotard’s Delusion that made the visual artist want to explore how language was used in the patient files to reiterate their conviction that they were dead amongst the living. This medical condition was also something that interested Kevin: “I was very interested when Louise told me she was researching Cotard’s Delusion, the psychological condition where a person believes him or herself to be dead. Imagining oneself into such a condition gave the opportunity for a strange little monologue. I was also inspired, I guess, by Samuel Beckett’s The Calmative, which was apparently prompted by his reading about Cotard’s Delusion.”    
 
Read more at 
http://humag.co/features/louise-manifold-and-kevin-barry

http://www.wildscreenireland.com

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Today Numéro Cinq begins a new special feature tagged Uimhir a Cúig, which means Number Five in Irish, wherein you will find some of the best in contemporary Irish literature and culture exhibited. To launch Uimhir a Cúig, we have a video by the amazing and uncanny Galway artist Louise Manifold with text and voiceover from the massively celebrated Kevin Barry, winner of last year’s Dublin IMPAC International Literary Award for his novel The City of Bohane as well as the Sunday Times EFG Private Bank Short Story Prize. Barry is a wonderful read. He is especially good on the rhythm and nuance of Irish idiom (his stories set in pubs are wonderful, put you in mind of Flann O’Brien) and comedy in a dark time. Cotard’s Delusion happens to be a real pathology in which the sufferer believes he is dead.

In Samuel Beckett’s short story The Calmative, the narrator wanders the streets of the city in search of contacts, acknowledgements that he is not in fact dead. He collects memories of his few brief encounters – his ‘spoils’– as so many precious proofs of his uncertain existence. 

Working closely with historians Aisling Tierney and David Ryan, Manifold identified several documents detailing the activities of Hellfire clubs in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. One discovery, an evangelical magazine of 1811, contained an obituary of Captain Perry, a carousing individual and likely member of a Hellfire Club. He suffered the perils of excessive living and radical thinking, an early death and a desperate fight for repentance. Ryan (author of Blasphemers & Blackguards: The Irish Hellfire Clubs, Merrion Books, 2012) considers the article to be written from a moralistic standpoint, acting as a warning to readers of the dangers of being involved in such circles. The article became a point of departure for Manifold to produce a mise-en-scène - an aftermath of a local Hellfire meeting. Using a scripted voiceover, shot in Cagney’s Bar with members of the local drama group and employing special effects to feature the River Deel, A Man of Pleasure (HD video, 4 minutes 15 seconds) acts as a speculative representation of morality and decadence, given the scant evidence of what might have occurred at the Askeaton Hellfire.