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Cork County Council is delighted to host ‘Heirloom’, an installation of new works created by artist Rachel Doolin opening on Thursday 30th of March in the LHQ Gallery, Cork County Hall.
‘Heirloom’ presents a series of visual, installation and digital based works that celebrates the ‘profundity of seeds’ by exploring the human thread that articulates the connection between our past, present and future.
The works manifest from a culmination of research undertaken during an arctic based residency programme and has been subsequently informed by a creative partnership with Irish Seed Savers Association. Rachel has previously spent two years as an artist in residence with Irish Seed Savers Association, Ireland’s only public seed bank, which curates over 600 non-commercially available varieties of seed.
Mayor of the County of Cork, Cllr. Danny Collins commended the exhibition, saying:
Rachel Doolin has created an excellent exhibition, shining a light on the importance of something which seems so insignificant and yet, is so vital. Viewers of the ‘Heirloom’ exhibition will engage with both the aesthetics of the artwork and the thought-provoking topics that it raises.
Rachel Doolin is a visual artist and project facilitator based in Cork. Doolin’s multidisciplinary practice merges art, experimentation and ecology to create work that is inextricably linked to material research. Doolin frequently collaborates with artists, NGOs as well as community and professional organisations to create meaningful artworks that intersect current social and environmental practices.
The exhibition will be opened by writer Ellie O’Byrne at 6:00pm on Thursday, 30th March and runs until Thursday, 27th April 2023 at the LHQ Gallery, Cork County Library, Carrigrohane Road. The exhibition is free to attend and open from Monday to Friday, 9:00am to 5.30pm. ‘Heirloom’ is supported by an Arts Council of Ireland Visual Arts Project Award.
Notes:
In 2017, Doolin embarked on a research residency to Longyearbyen, an industrial frontier town situated in Svalbard, a remote arctic archipelago located midway between continental Norway and the North Pole. Here, buried deep beneath a permafrost mountain lies a backup of the world’s largest collection of agricultural biodiversity, cryogenically preserved within the Svalbard Global Seed Vault. The Food and Agriculture Organisation of the United Nations estimates that 75% of the genetic diversity in agricultural crops has been lost since the 20th century. As risks from the climate crisis and global conflict escalate, seed banks are becoming increasingly considered a precious resource that could one day prevent a worldwide food crisis.