CAAKE

COLLABORATIVE ART [AND+] KINETIC ENVIRONMENTS

FilM READINGS IN PASSAGE, 2016. Sperrin Mountains and R-Space Gallery, Lisburn. Project collaborators Gail Mahon, Tara J Murphy, Rachel Gomme, Sandra Robinson, Bronagh Corr-McNicholl and Bridget Byrne.

Beginnings of CAAKE

CAAKE project slowly started in 2013 as founder, Gail Mahon, sought collaboration with other artists, poets, makers, and movement performers to act as a catalyst of conversation around culture, and shared creativity. It was a response to better understanding our experience of climate and the elements within our varied social and ecological landscapes. Over the following, few years’ collaboration emerged and residency projects gave space to test out creative methods, processes, and ways of thinking and being through active research and performance practice.

The residencies offered the conditions for new practices to emerge in collaboration, forming both gentle and radical responses to adaptive learning situations. The residency explorations sited in the unknown and uncertain, lead the experiments, experiences, and reflections within collaborative groups that were designed to be time focused, intensive, and working in the outdoors.


Our projects

The first collaborative group developed, Readings in Passage in 2016, with R-Space Gallery Lisburn developing their explorations in the gallery from time spent up in the Sperrin Mountains. The second cohort of collaborations became a 3-month residency project in 2019 entitled FL*OOOW Orient_Ornament_Order at Art Arcadia, Derry City ending right on the presuppose of the global COVID pandemic and a period where priorities and perspectives shifted to address the collective loss and impact upon our health ecosystems.

Now in the post-pandemic phase, CAAKE project laid the grounds for a new iteration of the project as a social enterprise at the nexus of education, health, for cultural renewal. Currently in development as a community-interest company in 2023. CAAKE will develop further creative research and collaborative opportunities in Northern Ireland corresponding to concerns in health ecology, through art, ecology, and movement practices in outdoor environments. Continuing under the new name CAAKE ACADEMY CIC.

Future of CAAKEproject as CIC

CAAKE ACADEMY is moving towards a social enterprise. Where we will create unique life-learning situations, experiences, and workshops based on the Causeway Coast area and other areas of Northern Ireland. Our programmes will benefit communities, groups, organisations, and local education and health authorities, in collaboration, to shape conditions in creative change, exchange, and renewed connections to Earth and our local health ecosystems.

Prioritising practices to rethink the body’s health as continued evolution through clay/earth and play interactions. We will procreate a physical space and active think tank to work(out) our minds and bodies to reconnect to our earth's energies. Together we will join the dots of how sedentary lifestyles are crucially affecting our ability to learn, adapt, and evolve in these most urgent times.

See social media and our CAAKE website for past projects as we work towards our new CIC forming throughout this year.

studioMA_hon//CAAKE_ACADEMY CIC
LIVING ART + ART of LIVING
art. ecology. movement.