Kunstverein Aughrim’s Winter Preview with Sarah Browne took place on Saturday 14 December 2024, from 11am to 3pm at Kunstverein Aughrim and other venues.

The Winter Preview was designed to share insight into some of the creative processes Browne uses within her artistic practice. The event began with a warming welcome drink and short guided tactile tour of Browne’s exhibition 'Tógaimid ár dteanga le carraigeacha' introduced by curator Kate Strain. Visitors were invited to handle a cast of objects including upholstered stones, a squeaky goddess, a quilted text, wrapped books, stripped, nicked and hinged sticks. These are things that Browne has found, adapted, and thought through, in the development of what she calls ‘sensory vocabularies’ for various artistic projects. Following an introduction to the wider questions driving Browne’s practice, visitors walked together to a nearby venue, for an in-person presentation on (Soma)tic Rituals by CAConrad.

CAConrad is an internationally celebrated poet who has been working with the ancient technologies of poetry and ritual since 1975. At the core of their creative process is their practice of (Soma)tic rituals. Soma comes from the Greek word for ‘body’. In English the word ‘somatic’ means ‘of, or relating to the body’ (especially as distinct from the mind). During this presentation, CA will share their methods and read from their work, introducing their personal practice of (Soma)tic rituals and sharing exercises they have created to stimulate and support the writing process using ‘any possible THING around or of the body to channel the body out and/or in toward spirit with deliberate and sustained concentration’.

Such rituals in the past have involved CA flooding their body with field recordings of recently extinct animals, or using the night sky to design homemade star constellations. CA draws on nature, crystals, meditation and interactions with strangers to create an ‘extreme present’ from which poems emerge. Former US-Poet Laureate Tracy K. Smith wrote in The New York Times, "CAConrad's poems invite the reader to become an agent in a joint act of recovery, to step outside of passivity and propriety and to become susceptible to the illogical and the mysterious."

Following the workshop a nourishing lunch made specially by Cow House Studios was provided.

Biographies

Sarah Browne is an artist based in Ireland concerned with spoken and unspoken, bodily experiences of knowledge, labour and justice. Her practice involves sculpture, film, performance and publishing, often in collaboration with others. Recent public projects include Echo’s Bones (2022, commissioned by Fingal County Council); Public feeling (2019, commissioned by South Dublin County Council); and In the Shadow of the State (2016, with Jesse Jones: a site-specific cycle of workshops and performances in Derry, Liverpool, Dublin and London, commissioned by Create and Artangel). She has had solo exhibitions at Sirius Arts Centre, Cobh, County Cork; Marabouparken, Stockholm; Institute of Modern Art Brisbane; CCA Derry~Londonderry; Project Arts Centre, Dublin; Ikon, Birmingham and CAG, Vancouver. In 2020 she curated TULCA Festival of Visual Arts, Galway, with a project titled The Law is a White Dog. Significant group exhibitions Browne has participated in include Bergen Assembly (2019), Liverpool Biennial (2016) and the Irish Pavilion at the 53rd Venice Biennale (2009) with Gareth Kennedy and Kennedy Browne. She is associate artist with University College Dublin College of Social Sciences and Law.

CAConrad is the author of numerous collections of poetry and 'one of America's most legendary living poets' (Ocean Vuong). Publications include Listen to the Golden Boomerang Return (2024), You Don’t Have What It Takes to Be My Nemesis: And Other (Soma)tics (2023), Amanda Paradise: Resurrect Extinct Vibration (2021), While Standing in Line for Death (2017), ECODEVIANCE: (Soma)tics for the Future Wilderness (2014), and The Book of Frank (2010) which is now available in 9 different languages. As a young poet they lived in Philadelphia, where they lost many loved ones during the early years of the AIDS crisis, as documented in the essay SIN BUG: AIDS, Poetry, and Queer Resilience in Philadelphia. In 2005 they began working with (Soma)tic Poetry Rituals. They have received many grants and awards, including the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize, the PEN Oakland Josephine Miles Award, a Creative Capital grant, a Pew Fellowship, and a Lambda Award. They exhibit poems as art objects with recent solo shows in Tucson, Arizona, as well as in Spain and Portugal. They currently live in Massachusetts, and teach at the Sandberg Art Institute in Amsterdam.

'Tógaimid ár dteanga le carraigeacha' was on view throughout Autumn/Winter 2024, closing on 21 December 2024. Video by Ros Kavanagh.

Kunstverein Aughrim’s collaboration with Sarah Browne was made possible with the support of The Arts Council / An Chomhairle Ealaíon.