End of year news from Sirius Arts Centre

Many thanks to all of you for your interest and support in 2018, it has been an extraordinary year, and it’s hard to believe we are almost at the end of it already. This year we celebrated thirty years as an arts centre in The Old Yacht Club with The Brian O’Doherty / Patrick Ireland Project; which saw the restoration of Brian O’Doherty / Patrick Ireland’s 1996 One Here Now murals in the centre gallery; supported by the Department of Culture Heritage & the Gaeltacht and Cork County Council.

Alongside this has been a year-long series of new partnerships, commissioned artworks, compositions, performances, and talks to honour, re-interrogate, and, most importantly, preserve these important Irish works for future generations. We were so pleased to have President Michael D. Higgins as the Project Patron, and to be nominated with our sponsor Colourtrend, for Best Midsize Sponsorship in the 2018 Business to Arts Awards. We were also successful with the Arts Council’s Open Call Award which allowed us to undertake an exceptionally ambitious artistic programme this year. Special thanks to all of the phenomenal artists that we have worked with and met over the year. Also to all of our supporters and partners in Cork and beyond, in particular to Crawford Art Gallery who partnered with us on a successful series of talks around the work of Brian O’Doherty.

Coming up in 2019…

The associated programme will continue into 2019 with an exhibition of new work by Mary-Ruth Walsh, a selection of older works of Brian O’Doherty’s from various private collections, alongside new work made specifically for the East Gallery, and finally the launch of a book that Sirius Arts Centre is co-publishing with Paper Visual Art; comprising essays on each of the projects and discussions on O’Doherty’s work. It reflects on this important year at Sirius Arts Centre and serves as a legacy of the murals that will be covered up again in 2019.

Throughout the rest of 2019 there will be a variety of exhibitions and new work by emerging and established artists and our annual Cobh-based project, This Must Be The Place | The Great Island; now in it’s fourth year. For this project we are delighted to be working with Australian artists Elizabeth Woods and Kevin Leong, who will produce the outcomes of See You Tomorrow; an ambitious, large-scale project in and around the community of Cobh. Expect conversation, debate, the pop-up Sirius Café, music and art; possibly disguised as freshly baked bread!

As always there’ll be plenty of gigs, workshops, learning opportunities, an international residency programme and our newly launched, bi-monthly Sirius Suppers. Families, visitors and local community alike, we hope to see you here in 2019!

On behalf of everyone at Sirius Arts Centre I wish you a very Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year.

All the best

Miranda Driscoll, Director Sirius Arts Centre