Louise Adkins: ‘Notes for a Performance – (Re) visioning a Smoky Meeting’

Thursday 18 October 2018 | 6.30pm
Studio 6, Temple Bar Gallery + Studios
Free admission, no booking required.

'Eight men sit around the table, reading, listening, nodding smoking. Some confident sitting forward some tense and erect others relaxed, settled.
Cigarette’s raised to lips, a suck a draw and drag'.

- L.Adkins & N.Duffy

Notes for a Performance - (Re) Visioning a Smoky Meeting is the culmination of artist Louise Adkins' residency at the Tetley Centre for Contemporary Art in Leeds (2018). Working with the Tetley's industrial archive the performance is concerned with imagining the past and how cinematic language informs our understanding of it. Smoke and smoking featured heavily within the photographic archive, in meetings, visits, portraits and numerous social event and this performance utilises cigarette smoke and smoking (a historical anachronism used in cinema) as a material trope of the past.

Cast: John Beattie, Karl Burke, Gareth Byrne, Kieran Devitt, Brian Fay, Mark Garry, Ronan McCrea, Paul Ward.

*Please note that this performance will involve the use of a haze machine and theatrical smoke. (duration: 25 minutes)

Notes for a Performance - (Re) Visioning a Smoky Meeting is presented as part of:
Inter-Nation
Conference of European Artistic Research Network (EARN)
DUBLIN 18th & 19th October 2018.

Organised by GradCAM & Dublin School of Creative Arts, Dublin Institute of Technology (DIT)

Biography:
Louise Adkins (b.1971) practice explores the intersection between performance and the documentation of the live act using film and digital media. Her work investigates how film and digital media can be used to foster alternative narratives to a performance or live event. The appropriation and re-enactment of historic cultural events as well as popular cultural references are an ongoing theme in her work. Between, 1998 to 2006 she collaborated with the Glasgow based artist Lisa Le Grove under the name ‘Lisalouise’. This collaborative practice was predominately performance-based and explored collective personal histories as well as the shared cultural landscapes of England and Scotland.

Louise Adkins has exhibited extensively throughout the UK and Europe including new work commissions for the Cornerhouse Gallery Manchester and the Centre for Contemporary Art (CCA) in Glasgow. She is currently working as Artist/Curator on 'Between' a programme of performance art commissions at the Cornerhouse Gallery, Manchester.

Louise Adkins lives and works in Manchester, UK and is a Senior Lecturer at Manchester Metropolitan University in the School of Art.