Why are some cities better than others at nurturing art? Why are art schools best located in cities, not suburbs? Gemma Tipton asks some talented Cork-based painters and sculptors how their urban base has helped them.
Taking place in cafes, bars, houses and temporary spaces, and made up of friendships, networks and chance meetings, the artistic life of a city comes from its people. It happens somewhere between the major galleries and museums and the studios. And some cities are just friendlier to artists than others. Settling back into its regular stride after a year of being simultaneously celebrated and attacked as European Capital of Culture, Cork is one of the cities that seem to suit them.
One of the reasons is size. Although the great cities of the world provide some artists with what seem like limitless possibility and opportunity, it is in smaller places that others find their feet, developing a style and way of working that are their own rather than being sucked into the system's ideal of what art should be like, of what is showing and selling this year. Smaller cities make it easier for an artist's ideas to find influence, to become something real, to be acknowledged. Another, simpler fact is that smaller cities are less expensive places for artists to live and find spaces to work.
Cork has a long tradition of artists not only finding spaces to work but also setting up projects. Backwater Studios, Art Trail, Cork Artists Collective, Cork Printmakers and the National Sculpture Factory all originated from groups of artists getting together to make things happen. There is a sense in the city that, if you want to do something, it's definitely worth a try - an energy that Dublin may be losing in proportion to the wealth it is attracting.
This is reflected in the artists who live and work in Cork. From three recent graduates of Crawford College of Art & Design (Janet Ellis, Ellen Barrett and Sarah Collins, who have been showing in a space appropriated for art in the English Market) to David O'Brien and Fergal Gaynor (who work together as Art/not art), and their plans for Art Box, things are happening in Cork that have little to do with Euro millions and an arbitrary designation from Brussels that 2005 was the year that culture would happen in Cork. As Dobz puts it, a principal legacy of 2005 was that "we all got a lot better at filling in forms".
Planned for an abandoned factory, Art Box is meant to be a space for idleness, in the sense that Robert Louis Stevenson used it in his wonderful essay "An Apology for Idlers". Stevenson's idleness "does not consist in doing nothing, but in doing a great deal not recognised in the dogmatic formularies of the ruling class". O'Brien and Gaynor want Art Box to be a place where writers, artists, poets, mathematicians and architects can come and talk. "Even coming out of the post-2005 exhausted collapse, I've always had this idea that Cork can be a really significant arts centre," says Dobz. "We approached the council about taking the factory for Art Box. They're not interested, so we're trying to do it ourselves."
Supporting the idea that art doesn't have to be about making things is Villa K, another emerging art group from Cork, made up of Martin Dineen, Tessa Power, Tim Furey, Helena Lyons and Doireann O'Malley, although, as Dineen says, anyone can join. "We have no manifesto, no statement, just a reasonable amount of ambition and a cheque for €450 from the council in our pockets." Villa K spent much of 2005 in a temporarily donated mansion in Montenotte. "We didn't make much art, but we learned a lot," says Dineen. Despite that note of modesty, Villa K characterises the mood of possibility and energy in the arts in Cork - a mood evident in the establishment as well as underground.
Fiona Kearney, the director of the Lewis Glucksman Gallery, at University College Cork, speaks of the generosity of established artists - Mick Mulcahy, Eilís O'Connell, Charles Tyrrell, Maud Cotter and Stephen Brandes all live in Cork - and of the city's institutions. The Glucksman sponsors a position for an emerging curator, which this year has been given to Cork-born Ciara Healy.
The National Sculpture Factory also supports emerging talent, with a residency. Last year's recipient, Vivienne Griffin, has been given a Fulbright award to study in the US. Griffin works with video and slide projection, as does this year's resident, Cian McConn.
McConn also "works in drawing, screen-printing and, really, whatever is required at the time". He recently returned from New York, where he worked with Performa, an organisation that stages performance-art biennales. "I began with them on a voluntary basis, at the beginning of September 2005. Within a fortnight they were snowed under and needed some full-time staff, so I was lucky enough to be on hand to scream 'Me!' "
Such mobility helps to refresh the arts scene in many cities, and in Cork, too, travelling artists have added to the sense of vibrancy. "It's not specifically a Cork thing," says Tara Byrne of the National Sculpture Factory. "Young people want to get away, to see more, but at a certain point, often in their 30s, artists want to return."
Ciara Healy, who is returning to the city to take up the curatorial residency at the Glucksman, agrees. "Moving to Cork is like discovering my past again," she says. The National Sculpture Factory is also the Irish host venue to Pépinières - or Seedbeds - an EU programme that gives young artists a chance to live and work in other countries. Under the scheme, three artists recently arrived in Cork: Anna Konik, from Poland, Tobias Sternberg, from Sweden, and Soyoung Chung, from France.
At the commercial end of art in Cork, the Fenton, Lavit and Vangard galleries all show local, national and international artists. It was the Vangard that brought John Berger and Marisa Camino to the city last year. Nuala Fenton shows the work of emerging artists in the Vaults part of her gallery, as well as in its main space. Coming up in May is an exhibition of work by Linda Quinlan, who studied at the Crawford and is shortlisted for this year's AIB Prize. Her quirky and intriguing installations have a magical beauty that lures you in before you start to wonder exactly what it is you're looking at.
Crawford College of Art & Design seems far more central to the artistic life of Cork than an institution such as the National College of Art and Design is to that of Dublin. Vera Ryan, who lectures in art history at the Crawford, points out that its graduates include artists of the stature of Ita Freeney, Suzy O'Mullane, Megan Eustace, Anthony Ruby, Tom Climent, Linda Quinlan, Joy Gerrard and Vivienne Griffin - "not least because the college is so very well located in the city".
This central position is under threat from a plan to move to Cork Institute of Technology's Bishopstown campus. "It would be appalling," says Ryan, "for the college to move away. The Crawford is now on a mature site where artists can grow and develop themselves. One of the reasons we have such strong artists in Cork is . . . that our artists are integrated into the city. Cork is a fabulous place, and I really hope that while the city won't lose us, we won't lose the city."