Of Course

7 July - 30 July 2022

Opens: Thursday 7 July, 6-8pm

 

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Of Course is an exhibition that includes work by Leah Corbett and Ronan Smyth, and poems by Susannah Dickey, Padraig Regan, and Conor Cleary. The exhibition will be accompanied by a dinner party that unfolds throughout the month of July in a series of courses - a starter with Leah Corbett and Thomas Wells, a fish course with Jane Peaker and Sam’s Eden, a main course with Conor Cleary, Phillip McCrilly and Padraig Regan and a dessert with the Waste Land Track Club, Emma Brennan, Louise Kennedy, Ellen Reay and Pete Moser.

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Over a bottle of rioja (brought back from a holiday in Italy in a suitcase by their mother), I sit with Padraig in the front garden, the sun setting and then set, and we talk about food. This isn’t exactly an unusual evening, apart from the smuggled wine, and that on this particular evening we’re talking about how to turn a dinner party (a beautiful, dreadful thing) into an exhibition.

Together we’ve been to, held and missed many dinner parties

 Nothing in Leah’s childhood prepared her for the frequency with which she now attends dinner parties… A

 – at my place, or theirs, or our friends, in Bookfinders Café, The Curfew Tower in Cushendall, in Cittiglio, Italy, the Ormeau Park. And theatrical, yes, some of them, performative, yes, also that, but for an audience? no, and on display? lasting for almost a month? Of course not.

 We’ve both written poems about these dinners:

The / open half of a lemon had / been left in the kitchen, / weeping into the grain of / the table. B

The soy sauce has an interesting saltiness, says Harriet, killing any hope / I’d fostered that this was going to be an entertaining dinner C

and about food, cooking and eating;

 We thought to call it a collaboration. The eggs, the oil, the honey and / the salt. D

 I add the fat I’ve stolen from some calf I’ll never meet. I eat it & think / I should have added more. I eat it & think about the moment that it will become // not it but I. & not without regret, I feel this process taking place. E

We sit and ask the tired dinner party question, who would you invite to your dream dinner party? Dead (Prince, Karl Marx, Gertrude Stein (a terrible party is born)) or alive (you). Or with more intent, whose dinner party would you like to be invited to? Whose table would you like to sit around?

 Let us eat the table. / Let us break its legs and turn it upside down. / Let us tear the bread and stuff it inside the goose / inside ourselves. Let the lovely feelings go the way of flesh. F

And who would you like to feed you?

Of Course is a gathering together of this; is the dinner party realised; is the feast in which  

in order to plan a gastronomic tour G

I ate the day / Deliberately H

Around a table by Leah Corbett, with ceramics by Ronan Smyth housing a herb garden, planted from friends gardens, we invite you to come and eat.

And at the end of it you know Fate cannot harm you, for you have dined. I

A. Zadie Smith, NW, p85 B. Padraig Regan, Delicious, p2 C. Manuela Moser, unpublished D. Manuela Moser, Partisan Hotel, p23 E. Padraig Regan, Some Integrity, p23 F. Mary Ruefle, Selected Poems, p98 G. Anna del Conte, Secrets of an Italian Kitchen, p4 H. Seamus Heaney, Field Work, p1 I. M. F. K. Fisher, How to Cook a Wolf, p 75

 
 

More information about the Menu can be found below. If you are interested in coming to any of the meals, please let us know if you have any allergies in advance by emailing catalystarts@gmail.com

  • Leah Corbett and Thomas Wells invite you to join them in the gallery to make and share Stone Soup.

    Stone Soup comes from a folktale in which hungry strangers convince a village to each give them a small amount of their food in order to make a meal that everyone can share. 

    For the first event as part of Of Course, you are asked to bring along ingredients which will be added to the soup, cooked in the gallery and enjoyed together.

    This event follows on from a residency with büro für kuratorische fürsorge und kollektives experiment in Quartier am Hafen, Cologne where Leah and Thomas facilitated discussions around collaboration, care and working practices.

    The final soup will be vegan.

    No booking necessary for this event.

  • Jane Peaker is a chef at FIN, a new fish and chip shop on the Cavehill Road in North Belfast. Interested in the potential that food has to trigger memory, Jane will take us on a trip down memory lane with Mopping Up, in collaboration with SAM’S EDEN.

    Being taught how to gut, descale and cook fish from their grandmother, Jane will pass on this knowledge through a cooking demonstration of a simple DIY fish course. Accompanying this demonstration, Jane will talk about their relationship with food and teach us how to make butter. All this deliciousness will be mopped up with Jane’s home-made rolls.

    SAM’S EDEN is a collaboration between the MAC and the Rainbow Project facilitated by Thomas Wells. It is a new queer arts publication formed in 2021 to highlight current art practice from LGBTQ+ practitioners. This edition ‘Sensory Overload’ is working with The Rainbow Project to create new content with a number of creative practitioners in fields of visual arts, dance, food and architecture. 

    Spaces are limited so booking is essential - email thomas@themaclive.org for more information, and arts@rainbow-project.org to book a space. Bookings will meet at the MAC at 1:30pm and be taken to Catalyst Arts by Thomas. 

  • Conor Cleary, Phillip McCrilly and Padraig Regan invite you to Joy’s Entrée, an interactive event combining food and poetry. The three artists have collaboratively devised a menu of food and poems that explore concerns around intimacy, embodiment, inherited legacies and our sensory interactions with the material world.

    We invite participants to bring along texts (by themselves or others) as their own contribution to this conversation.

    Spaces are limited so booking is essential. Please click here to book your free place.

  • For this course, we will be joined by writer Louise Kennedy, artist Emma Brennan, and the runners of the Waste Land Track Club who will be serving affogato and other treats. After-dinner entertainment will be provided by Pete Moser and Ellen Reay.

    No booking necessary for this event.

About the Artists:

  • Leah Corbett is an artist and curator from Tipperary. Her practice includes realising exhibitions, facilitating workshops and initiating community-led projects. She is interested in the collective (re-)production of public space and often works collaboratively to situate projects in the public realm. She is the Co-founder of artist-run organisation Muine Bheag Arts in Carlow and a former Co-director of Catalyst Arts in Belfast. Recent projects include: Teen Directives: Field Trip, RHA Gallery, Dublin (2022); Grass Roots, Muine Bheag Arts, Carlow (2021); Conditions for Growth; büro für kuratorische fürsorge und kollektives experiment, Cologne (2021) and Common or Garden, Catalyst Arts, Belfast (2020).

  • Thomas Wells is an artist from Manchester currently based in Belfast, they work better with others, and their work is safely planted in collaborative research and practice.

  • Jane Peaker is a chef and co-founder of FIN, a new fish and chip shop on the Cavehill Road in North Belfast.

  • Phillip McCrilly is a Belfast-based artist and chef. Previously a co-director at Catalyst Arts, he is a founding member and director of FRUIT SHOP; a collective of Belfast-based artists operating within a suburban residential café. Projects include 'Irish Modernisms' at CCA Derry~Londonderry, 'Jaunt' as commissioned by Catalyst Arts and Goethe Institut', and ‘Dance Food’ (with Fiona Hallinan) at Project Arts Centre, Dublin. Most recently he has been selected to produce major new work as part of the Platform Commissions programme for the 40th EVA International Biennial of Contemporary Art (2023).

    Interested in the transgressive and interdisciplinary possibilities of food, hospitality and education, McCrilly’s work explores the idea of threshold in often collaborative forms. Combining somatic learning with haptic processes of making, food is frequently used as a conduit for the transference of knowledge and skills. Considering cruising and foraging as likeminded deviant practices, his current research is centred around queer collective acts of land and property reclamation.

  • Padraig Regan is the author of Some Integrity (Carcanet, 2022), The Sensual City (Lifeboat Press, 2022), Who Seemed Alive & Altogether Real (Emma Press, 2017), and Delicious (Lifeboat Press, 2016). In 2015, they were a recipient of an Eric Gregory Award, and in 2020 they were awarded the Ireland Chair of Poetry Bursary Prize. They hold a PhD on creative-critical and hybridised writing practices in medieval texts and the work of Anne Carson from the Seamus Heaney Centre, Queen's University Belfast, where they were a Ciaran Carson Writing and the City Fellow in 2021. Some Integrity is the recipient of the 2021 Clarissa Luard Prize, awarded by the David Cohen Foundation, and is on the Forward Prize shortlist for The Felix Dennis Prize for Best First Collection.

  • Conor Cleary is from Tralee and lives in Belfast where he is studying toward a PhD. His work has appeared in The Tangerine, Poetry Ireland Review, The Stinging Fly and Virginia Quarterly Review. In 2018 he won the Patrick Kavanagh Award. His debut poetry pamphlet, priced out, was published by The Emma Press in 2019.

  • Emma Brennan is an interdisciplinary artist who works predominantly in performative practices to include multi-media installation, moving image and collaborative processes. Based between Belfast and Dublin she is a former Co-Director and Chairperson at Catalyst Arts Belfast and a current studio member of Flax Art Studios Belfast. She was chosen as one of the BBeyond performance collective’s new commissioned artists of 2021 and remains an active member of the collective. Brennan is currently working towards publishing a zine of poetry and accompanying visuals based on specific research curated by Ceceilia Graham, a solo show funded by the Arts Council of Ireland and finally she will be facilitating workshops through the year with the MAC and the Rainbow Project that contribute to the second installment of Sams Eden, a queer publication and programme of events from Curator, Thomas Wells.

  • Louise Kennedy grew up in Holywood, Co.Down. She was shortlisted in 2019 and 2020 for the Sunday Times Audible Short Story Award and her work has featured in the Guardian, Irish Times, RTE Radio 1 and BBC Radio 4. In 2021 she was awarded an inaugural Ciaran Carson ‘Writing and the City’ Fellowship by Queens University Belfast, from which she holds an MA and PhD. She is the author of the critically-acclaimed short story collection The End of the World is a Cul de Sac (2021) and a debut novel Trespasses (April 2022), both from Bloomsbury. Before starting to write, she spent almost thirty years working as a chef. She lives in Sligo

  • The Waste Land Track Club is a group of athletes based in south Belfast. They compete for Annadale Striders on the roads, track and cross-country.