SUMMER 2009     25 years of Irish art         a personal selection   Brian McAvera makes the case for a reappraisal of Irish artists who, he believes, have been undervalued by the art establishment over the past quarter century

Brendan Jamison   This artist is only thirty. He's a sculptor who often uses unusual materials {wool,sugar} and who clearly derives from the great generation of British sculptors who included Richard Deacon, Anish Kapoor, Tony Cragg and Richard Wentworth. Like Deacon and Wentworth, he has a strong sense of the playful, of the innocent - and therefore potentially dangerous - world of childhood. Upon occasion, as in the more installational nature of an earlier show at the Millennium Court, he can plug into the concerns of Tribal Art, albeit with a feminine delicacy. As with Deacon and Kapoor, objects, in his hands, shift from the inanimate to the animate, becoming metaphorical. In the JCB Bucket series the construction industry of Belfast {which is still busily re-arranging the skyscape}, metamorphosed into fifteen JCB Buckets, which were of varying sizes, vibrant colours, and wax-dripped textures. Think of the biomorphic, surreal and distinctly disturbing world of the Alien films, and then introduce an equally disturbing and playful sense of humour. As in classic fairy tales the absurd seems perfectly normal. A JCB Bucket gives birth to a baby JCB, wax dripping onto fanged incisors. It's too early to say how this artist will develop but he is maturing and exploring at a rapid rate. He has none of the baggage of the 'macho' tradition of Irish sculpture and thankfully none of the romantic whimsy. He's definitely one to watch.   Brian McAvera is an art critic. THE IRISH ARTS REVIEW, SUMMER 2009, p 58.

Monday 10 November 2008 Artist’s Sugar Cube Scale Model takes 11,000 lumps by James Harding   Belfast: An artist from Northern Ireland has revealed a unique collection of sculptures made entirely from sugar cubes. Brendan Jamison, 29, can take up to two months to create each model. He recently crafted a 1:100 scale model of new apartments planned for the city’s Cathedral Quarter. Sugar Walk, created for Bradkeel Developments, contained 11,256 cubes. “I enjoyed the challenge of the Sugar Walk project, especially given that the site’s location is only 100 metres from my studio,” he said. Mr Jamison’s largest design stands at 9ft tall and was put together using 19,342 cubes.

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Channel 5 News at 7   Monday 10 November 2008   CUBISM:   This brings a whole new meaning to cubism! It is the handy work of artist Brendan Jamison who used 11,000 sugar cubes to build this model of an apartment block set to be built in Belfast. How sweet!

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* Golden Thread Gallery 2007 SUGAR CUBE SCULPTURE (2007) brendan Jamison, 270 x 180 x 180 cms BBC BRAZIL Tuesday 11 November 2008 Escultor faz maquete de prédio com 11 mil cubos de açúcar by Monica Vasconcelos     Um escultor usou 11.256 cubos de açúcar para fazer uma maquete de um prédio de apartamentos que deverá ser construído em Belfast, na Irlanda do Norte. O artista irlandês Brendan Jamison criou a maquete do prédio de 14 andares, projetado por um escritório de arquitetura. Ele deu uma atenção especial a detalhes como sacadas, terraços e o telhado curvo da cobertura. BRENDAN JAMISON: SUGAR-CUBE SCULPTURE, 270 x 180 x 180 cms, Golden Thread Gallery, Belfast O artista afirmou que seu estilo de arte "sempre foi muito influenciado pela arquitetura". Ele disse que gostou do desafio de trabalhar na maquete especialmente porque o prédio ficará a apenas cem metros de seu estúdio em Belfast. "Açúcar é um material bom para se trabalhar, ele pode ser cortado e esculpido para criar formas orgânicas e os cristais de açúcar podem resultar em uma superfície brilhante sob luz natural", afirmou. O artista estima que sua maquete, com 60 centímetros de altura, 67 centímetros de largura e 41 centímetros de profundidade contenha 8,16 bilhões de cristais de açúcar. Sua maquete consumiu ainda 2,25 litros de cola. "Eu venho usando cubos de açúcar como tijolos em esculturas grandes desde minha exposição Masters of Art, em 2004. Na época, criei uma série de sete esculturas tipo minaretes com 9 pés de altura (o equivalente a 2,74 metros)." Segundo Jamison, foi isso o que chamou a atenção do Grupo Fitzrovia, que criou o projeto do edifício. O nome do edifício também é uma forte indicação da conveniência de ter um escultor que trabalha com açúcar: ele se chamará Sugar Walk. O modelo de Brendan Jamison foi baseado em um projeto original produzido pela empresa Gregory Architects, e a construção do prédio será concluída em 2011.

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CIRCA 124   Contemporary Visual Culture in Ireland Summer 2008   Review by Slavka Sverakova   Millennium Court Arts Centre, Portadown                February-March 2008 Queen Street Studios Gallery, Belfast                        February-March 2008   Brendan Jamison IN-BETWEEN: New work and JCB BUCKET SERIES   Both concurrent exhibitions address the inertia of thinking and the stifling effect of majority-led culture and custom on liberty. [1] Brendan Jamison [2] has preferred the liberating qualities of non-traditional materials, including sugar cubes, wax and wool, gluing, cutting and pouring them into highly finished objects ever since his early work. [3]    IN-BETWEEN, 2008, intallation shot of Red Tunnel, 212 x 450 x    600 cms, YELLOW SPIRAL STAIRCASE, 265 x 160 x 160 cms,    and BLUE BRIDGE, 180 x 392 x 120 cms, wool over wood. The new works share a valiant loyalty to primary colours and the desire to dislodge familiar function by segueing into play. Built specifically for the MCAC gallery, Yellow Spiral Staircase (2008) soars upwards, touching the sloped ceiling, as if documenting Kandinsky’s description of the physical effect of yellow as “shrill” and “high treble notes.”[4] Its wooden skeleton, partly transformed from hard wood to soft assembly of exactly measured lengths of wool, is decidedly an object to observe and touch and not one to climb. The ensuing relationship between the word, ie ‘staircase’, and the visible denial of reaching another space, allows reality to become continuous with imagination. The relationship between reality and mental acts has been long understood as constituent of ‘intentionality’. This has been variously defined as “immanent objectivity” (Franz Bretano, 1838-1917), as “consciousness” (Jean-Paul Sartre, 1905-1980) and as a sentient condition where an individual’s existentiality identifies with ontological significance as opposed to what is merely ontic [5] (Martin Heidegger, 1889-1976). Sentience is ability to make conscious choices including not doing, not talking, etc. [6] Jamison’s yellow sculpture engages us in the move from physical stance and design stance (mass, volume, verticality of the staircase) to the intentional stance [7] that activates beliefs, thinking, and crucially, the imagination. This process is intensified by scale, colour, material and position in space. The Apollonian faith in the necessity of order is embodied in the thirty-three-piece assembly that withstands the pull of gravity. As a sculpture it depends on ambivalence for a quality of antithetical referents. It approximates the form of which it speaks but, as Hegel put it, it remains essentially a question. The wool acts like cracks in the bark of the wood it covers, without unveiling its existence and history. The substitution of past by presence (ie the actual observer’s look, gaze, perception) and by future (ie the observer’s imagined purpose or function) could act as a wake-up call to a public obsessed with the past. Thus, the work enters the public domain as a question about the future. The above is true for the horizontal Blue Bridge (2006) [8] more so than for the last of the three objects, Red Tunnel (2007), [9] made of red loops that remind me of a pergola. Kandinsky [10] thinks of blue as invitation to touch, to stroke an object and receive relief, in this case “a pure inner resonance” with an illusive safe crossing. Suspension of reason allows the Dionysian principle of spontaneous impulse briefly to engulf the experience, it being the flux between concept and material, between construct and appearance, between the word and the removal of familiar function.     At Queen Street Studios Gallery, the JCB Bucket Series (2008) consisted of a gallery-floor display of fifteen different industrial models made from wood, covered with microcrystalline and paraffin wax in one of the primary or secondary colours.   Familiar function was preserved in form but denied by material. The colour chimed with Kandinsky’s “colour is the keyboard, the eyes are the hammer and the soul is the piano.” [11] The installation became a jolly assembly of personages [12] dancing, jumping, biting, chatting, lying on the back, being pregnant, etc. Kandinsky [13] pointed to the power of children to clothe internal content into strong form. In reversal, Jamison took a strong form and clothed it in imagined animation. I cite Kandinsky because he faced squarely both the ontic presupposition of a work art and what Rubens called the “inner idea.” [14] At present ontology and epistemology are no longer kept apart due to innovations in quantum physics. In philosophy, Daniel Dennett worked out that the intentional stance is a level of abstraction in which we view the behaviour of a thing in terms of mental properties. A number of beliefs, thoughts and intents may be a theorist’s fiction, but operationally they are valid, throwing light on how art evokes a contingent truth that appears as a necessary one.  JCB BUCKET SERIES, 2008, installation shot, Queen Street Studios Gallery, fifteen components, microcrystalline and paraffin wax over wood       [1]              Inspired by J S Mill’s (1806-1873) defence of liberty [2]              See www.brendanjamison.com [3]             Born in 1979, he completed an MFA in 2004. [4]              Wassily Kandinsky, ‘The effect of colour’, 1911 in H Chipp, Theories of Modern Art, 1968, pp 153ff [5]              ‘Ontic’ is the physical, factual existence; philosophy traditionally distinguishes between ontology and epistemology. [6]              Eg, when I hear a tone, I cannot be sure that there is a tone for others to hear, but I am certain that I hear it. It is an awareness of possible truth, not truth. ’Sentire’ in Latin means to feel; sentience is well established in Buddhism: the first vow in Bodhisattva reads: “Sentient beings are numberless, I vow to free them.” [7]              The three terms were coined by Daniel Dennet, The Intentional Stance, 1987 [8]              Blue Bridge was create in 2006 and exhibited at Draiocht Arts Centre, Blanchardstown. Red Bridge (2006) was made during a residency in October 2006 and exhibited at KHOJ, New Delhi.   [9]              Red Tunnel (2006), exhibited at Draiocht Arts Centre, consisted of seven components; its bigger version made from sixteen ‘loops’ was made specifically for MCAC in 2008. [10]            Kandinsky, op cit, pp 154 [11]            Kandinsky, op cit, pp 154-5 [12]             David Smith called his steel sculptures painted with oil paint “personages” in the early 1960s [13]             Wassily Kandinsky, ‘On the problem of form’, 1912, in H Chipp, Theories of Modern Art, 1968, p 166       [14]            Peter Paul Rubens (1577-1640), ‘De imitatione statuarum’; English translation                         in R Friedenthal (ed), Letters of great artists, 1963, p 162

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JCB BUCKET SERIES (2008) Brendan Jamison, microcrystalline and paraffin wax over wood, installation JCB BUCKET SERIES, 2008, installation shot, Basement Gallery, five components, microcrystalline and paraffin wax over wood June 2008 Review by Declan McGonagle Basement Gallery, Dundalk, May 2008 THE SPACE IN BETWEEN Curated by Fiona Mulholland       The apparently toytown images of Brendan Jamison, where JCB buckets, of various sizes and types, which are synonymous with the building industry and urban change, are coated in brightly coloured, dripping wax, are, at once, a reference to a past childhood and innocence and also a depiction of nature reclaiming a man-made artefact or tool. While recognisable as man-made, the coated buckets are on the verge of looking natural, as if perceived now, at a point frozen in their transformation – ‘in between’. The individual pieces here act as catalysts for an enlarged reading beyond their strong aesthetic presence.   The Space in Between, therefore, is a synopsis, an ‘object’ lesson in contemporary sculptural concerns and practice that would stand wherever it were shown. The exhibition erases inherited categorisations across which the artists mark out their cross referencing propositions about negotiable process and space. Working from within their own practice and understandings of art and historical contexts, each artist has managed to speak in their own voice but also dialogue with other voices in the show. This is, of course, a measure of the curation and the capacity of the gallery context to test the art. In this period this process has to be an essential characteristic of publicly funded gallery/institutional provision, as we try to create new models of practice and reciprocal relations between artist and society.   We have all eaten from the tree of knowledge and cannot go back to ‘Eden’ and this art reflects both the complexity of a new reality and our complicity in it.   Declan McGonagle  (CIRCA online review, June 2008) Add your content here