EMBODIED EARTH: SoftCLAY//HardPLAY

🗓️ 21st September 2024

⏰ 1:00 - 3:00 PM

Book your place with CCA Gallery- GO TO LINKS TO BOOK

Join me for an immersive workshop blending playful interactions with gravity and clay. Explore movement, earth, and our connection to minerals through improvisation, proprioceptive sensing, and sculpting. Dive into whole-body sensitivities and be drawn into non-verbal communication in the making of a shared living landscape.

Highlights of the Workshop:

- Interactive clay and raw earth activities
- Insights from Gail’s multidisciplinary PhD research
- Group participation forming a living landscape

Details:

- Wear comfortable, plain clothing (they may get clay on them)
- Be prepared to be barefoot
- Limited to 12 participants

Reimagine your connection to the Earth and join me for this transformative experience.

Note: Images will be taken; inform us if you prefer not to be photographed.

studioMA_hon// @TheClay_Gymnasium

I got great news….. new phase ahead!
I am starting a creative practice-based Ph.D. in September!

I was awarded the Northern Bridge Doctoral Scholarship to study Mineral and Cultural Shifts of Sedentary Skeletons. It will journey as BIOART CERAMICS across Bioarchaeology, Exercise Science, BioEngineering, and Design Interactions. Taking in aspects of personal ethnography, Irish hunter-gatherer remains, female bone strength, and our social interrelationships to sedentary culture.

A very multidisciplinary project across departments at Ulster University with Durham University.
BUT IM VERY EXCITED AND IN AWE.

The working title of the study:
States of CLAY//Positions at PLAY
Squatting between Plasticity and Porosity

.:. THE CLAY GYMNASIUM will be developed as my research blog, photo essays film diaries, or ways the public can engage with my research throughout my studies.

Also, follow @studioma_hon on Instagram for more regular updates.

September 2021

Aengus and I performed live at Leitrim Sculpture Centre on Culture Night. We produced an original audio score merging breath, contact mics, and sound from the caves at Letirm. Live sculpting performance with 300kg of clay; as resonate energies and afterimages that emerge from the darkness and connection to gravity and earth.

Follow on Instagram for behind-the-scenes works and wondering that occurred during the collaborative residency July-Aug-Sep 2021.

Showing Dec 2018 - Jan 2019
Golden Thread Gallery, Belfast.

Dissolving Histories: New Narratives co-curated by Peter Richards and Paul Seawright

The article features essay of my practice and the work LONGDROP, discussing the intention to develop the work into an environment with sound, water and performance elements. I will be presenting the new additons to in Galway Arts Centre as part of the Contempoary Clay Series curated by Kate Howard and Rob D'eAth at Galway Arts Centre. It will be a joint show with Phoebe Cummings, entitled RESIDUE and will be opening in Ocober 2017.

Wonderful adventures in Italy; I have been invited- as part of arts group MAK9 - to a partictake in a residency in rural Italy, Pietrafitta, working in partnership with ART ARCADIA and Ulster Univeristy Arts & Culture festival. Responding to the cultutal and material resonances of the differing cultures of landscapes between rural village sited at La Mola and the heart land of East Belfast. Calling upon influences of Art Povera bridging art, life, culture and natrure within our explorations on location.

Residency October 18th to 28th October 2016

Read more about ART ARCADIA and the blog posts on their website from MAK9 from all artists involved, here is a link to my last post reflecting on the residency.

stuff-on-stuff-residency-reflections/
artarcadia.org

Unexpectantly taking part in a brilliant touring exhibition & inclusion in fab catalogue called 'Imago Mundi'- exhibition first stop Italy in February!
Imago Mundi is the collection of works commissioned and collected by Luciano Benetton on his travels around the world, involving, on a voluntary and non-profit basis, established and emerging artists from many different countries. Each of them has created a work whose only restriction is its 10x12 cms format, contributing to the creation of a remarkable artistic geography. Blue Leaf Gallery
http://www.imagomundiart.com/

'Longdrop' set up at British Ceramics Biennial 2015, shortlisted as part of the Fresh Award for graduates. Image credit by Joel Fildes.

The vast open space at the Old Spode Factory is a treat to see. Markers and material residues of its industrial past.

Royal College of Art Graduate Ceramics and Glass show, opens in the new WOO building at the Battersea Campus, Howie Street, London. Opens from 25th June - 5th July 12-6pm. Late night until 9pm 1st July, closed 3rd July.

Show includes School of Materials, Fine Art and Architecture.

UPCOMING NEXT WEEK:
TWO HUNDRED YARDS
PumpHouse Gallery and Battersea Park
Show Opens
4th and 5th July
Battersea Park
11am – 7 pm
Opening reception and public programme Saturday 4th July, 7 -9 pm

'two hundred acres' is an exhibition of artworks by current students and recent alumni at the Royal College of Art (RCA). Works will be exhibited at the Pump House Gallery and the surrounding Battersea Park, alongside which a public programme of performances, events and artist talks will be presented. Titled after the size of the park, this exhibition presents work both in the confines of the contemporary gallery, as well as the history-laden gardens, monuments, and sculptures of it’s vast 200-acre grounds.

'two hundred acres' has been produced by the Students’ Union of the RCA through an open call to students and alumni at the college. The resultant exhibition showcases works by artists from a variety of disciplines including Ceramics and Glass; Design Interactions; Information Experience Design; Moving Image; Painting; Performance; Photography; Sculpture and Womenswear.

EVOLVE Project at The MAC - presents 4 exciting new work-in-progress dance pieces, opening tonight at 7pm. Gail Mahon has been working alongside Bridget Madden Dance to develop the feel, atmosphere and subtle intensities of the piece, IONSÙ.

IONSÙ explores waves of intensity, merging the roots of traditional irish dance with a contemporary vision. Real moments of softness, high energy and playfulness, shows this work beginning to form a new language of movement.

Dancers- Leonie McDoonagh, Abbie Madden and Esther Alleyne
Live music performed by: Lorna NicLochlainn

'IONSÙ' is part of EVOLVE, a project by DanceResourceBase
to support the creative development of four original dance works in progress to be performed on 2 April 2015 at 7pm Upstairs at the MAC, Belfast. EVOLVE tickets £6 available at www.themaclive.com/shows.

For more information visit www.danceresourcebase.org.
Dance Resource Base is pleased to partner with the MAC, Belfast on the EVOLVE pilot project. EVOLVE is supported by the National Lottery through the Arts Council of Northern Ireland with additional support from Echo Echo Dance Theatre, Derry-Londonderry.

Year 2 of my MA commences in London, at the RCA. Excited and really looking forward to eating stuck into creating new work for the WORK IN PROGRESS show in January 2015 and then the FINAL SHOW in June 2015. :)

I'm a student once again at the RCA!!! Enjoying soaking up the London life, taking time to deepen my responses and expand my research. Much more exciting work to come just getting warmed up...........

Opened in October at Flowerfield Arts Centre, Portstewart. The second stage in my solo tour exhibition, will see large scale sculptures and installations take over the two gallery spaces and hallway , taking a further look into the chemistry and psychology of components, making and materials.

Opens 6th October until 3rd November 2012

My first solo exhibition of work, opens at Spacecraft, 9b Fountain Centre, College Street, Belfast. Opens from the 3rd August until 1st September. Artist talk happening on 30th August at 6pm call 028 90329342 to book your attendance.

MAK9, a group of artists and makers, have invaded the R-Space Gallery in Lisburn with site specific works that have fed off the rich history of the dilapidated Georgian rectory attached to the newly renovated gallery. The exhibition, Things That Fall In Between, runs from Wednesday 16 May until Saturday 16 June 2012, at R-Space Gallery, 32 Castle Street, Lisburn.

The official opening takes place on Saturday 19 May 2012, 2pm to 4pm.

LINKAGE got through to 2nd stage international competition for emerging ceramic artist in China, the conference and exhibition opens on 7th to the 9th November!

The piece is now part of there collection and on permanent display in Fuping, where they hold many international ceramic events!