Writer-in-Residence

Stephen Sutcliffe, Writer-in-Residence, 2010, detail, courtesy of the artist and Ormston House.
Stephen Sutcliffe, Writer-in-Residence, 2010, detail, courtesy of the artist and Ormston House.

From the Press Release:

Let us begin with a quote. Then a short snappy sentence. Weave an invisible thread through the parallels and disjunctures of image-text relations. Our aim? Blah-di-blah to draw you, the reader, in – the who; the what; the when; the where – to that basic human faculty of thinking in terms of images.

In partnership with Limerick City Gallery of Art, Ormston House is pleased to present the fourth iteration of the Six Memos project: Writer-in-Residence. The project consists of an exhibition of works by BANK Collective, Gerard Byrne and Stephen Sutcliffe, and residencies for art writers and critics from Critical Bastards, Fugitive Papers, Occupy Paper, Paper Visual Art and independent writer, Seán O’Sullivan.

Providing the context for the project is Italo Calvino’s Harvard lecture on Visibility in which he warns us against losing the power to bring forth forms and colours from a string of black letters on the white page. With influences ranging from Goethe and Beckett to Carpaccio (the painter) and Felix The Cat, he encourages the interplay between the visualisation and verbalisation of thought. For Calvino, there are always images at the source of his stories: a man cut in two halves; a boy who lives in the trees; an empty suit of armour that moves and speaks – and these he calls Our Ancestors. Through fiction, criticism and personal essays, he wrote about visibility his whole life – a career of visions, indecisions and revisions.