MAKE way to Limerick City Gallery of Art on Pery Square this evening, Thursday 8 from 4pm to 7pm for an original artistic, social and political homage to dying.
Limerick artists Sinead Dineen and Katie Verling have worked together since 2016 on ’Kicking the Bucket’, an arts project that looks at the lighter side of illness, death, dying and grief.
Dineen is an artist whose work is about her experience of living with ovarian cancer. Verling worked extensively as a curator until a diagnosis of leukaemia and long-term health issues have faltered that gallop.
Both women have learned to live with life-threatening illness and have focused on end of life discussion as the driving force behind their work.
Last year, ten participants, working with these artist practitioners, through a series of workshops, decided to face death full on and make something of it. Everyone shared a profound sense of bereavement or grief through loss or through serious illness.
The outcome was a wry and sometimes hilarious take on death.
This year in ‘Kicking the Bucket Again’, Verling and Dineen have worked with six participants. Some were established artists and some newer to the creative process.
Tonight at this launch in Pery Square, new multi-media pieces of work will be revealed from recent months of workshops, including some of Sinead Dineen’s cardboard coffins, which allow visitors to add to the existing piece in an interactive way.
Preceding ‘Kicking the Bucket Again’ at 6pm this June 8, is a talk by Senator Marie Louise O’Donnell. Her new report ‘Finite Lives, Dying, Death and Bereavement’ deals with State services in this area and is fitting subject matter at 5pm.
First off in this triple event, visual artist Cléa van der Grijn already has a show current LCGA, ’Reconstructing Memory’.
It interrogates the disparities between the cultural responses to death in Ireland and Mexico. Van der Grijn will speak about her work at 4pm, opening out this suite of compelling explorations of death and various approaches to it, invoking art, decision making by the individual and culture, and provision available.
In association with Compassionate Communities.
