Winter Preview at Kunstverein Aughrim

Kunstverein Aughrim’s Winter Preview with Sarah Browne took place on Saturday 14 December 2024, from 11am to 3pm at Kunstverein Aughrim and other venues around the town. Watch a video excerpt of the event here.

The Winter Preview was designed to share insight into some of the creative processes Browne uses within her artistic practice. The event began with a warming welcome drink and short guided tactile tour of Browne’s exhibition Tógaimid ár dteanga le carraigeacha, introduced by curator Kate Strain. Visitors were invited to handle a cast of objects including upholstered stones, a squeaky goddess, a quilted text, wrapped books, stripped, nicked and hinged sticks. These are things that Browne has found, adapted, and thought through, in the development of what she calls ‘sensory vocabularies’ for various artistic projects. Following an introduction to the wider questions driving Browne’s practice, visitors walked together to a nearby venue, for an in-person presentation on (Soma)tic Rituals by CAConrad.

CAConrad is an internationally celebrated poet who has been working with the ancient technologies of poetry and ritual since 1975. At the core of their creative process is their practice of (Soma)tic rituals. Soma comes from the Greek word for ‘body’. In English the word ‘somatic’ means ‘of, or relating to the body’ (especially as distinct from the mind). During this presentation, CA shared methods and read from their work, introducing their personal practice of (Soma)tic rituals and sharing exercises they have created to stimulate and support the writing process using ‘any possible THING around or of the body to channel the body out and/or in toward spirit with deliberate and sustained concentration’. Such rituals in the past have involved CA flooding their body with field recordings of recently extinct animals, or using the night sky to design homemade star constellations. CA draws on nature, crystals, meditation and interactions with strangers to create an ‘extreme present’ from which poems emerge. Former US-Poet Laureate Tracy K. Smith wrote in The New York Times, "CAConrad's poems invite the reader to become an agent in a joint act of recovery, to step outside of passivity and propriety and to become susceptible to the illogical and the mysterious."

Following the workshop a nourishing lunch made specially by Cow House Studios was available for purchase. Everyone was invited to sit and eat together, picnic style, returning after to the Kunstverein to peruse Sarah Hayden’s publication as if [...] wearing anklesocks, at their leisure. The event wrapped up around 3pm, with a cosy drink by the fire at the local pub and a farewell.