Events: a public seminar on the role of risk in a live art practice

Participating artists - LIGNA (Germany), Carole Lung (USA), Fergus Byrne (Ireland), Aileen Lambert (Ireland), Sandra Johnston (Northern Ireland) - will explore the relationship between risk taking and innovation in their practice, identifying the ways in which risk is essential to the vibrancy of live art. How do artists calculate risk and how might curators support live artists to play with risk and the fear of failure?


When audiences are invited to journey with an artist to test the boundaries of their role as viewer/spectator what precisely is at stake? RISK will question the relationship of audience and artist and the management of uncertainty in live art. RISK is chaired by Áine Philips.

The seminar is the second in the series of Create Think Tanks -  an initiative of Create, the national development agency for collaborative arts. Create Think Tank encourages and facilitates discussion on innovation and development in collaborative arts practice.

For further information or to book a place please email Create at This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it  or telephone, 01-4736600.
It is necessary to book as places are limited.

Create is the national development agency for collaborative arts. Our mission is to support artists to work collaboratively with communities of place and /or interest. www.create-ireland.ie

Aileen Lambert is a County Wexford-based artist whose practise spans video, performance and sound work, as well as participatory public art projects. Aileen’s video, sound and performance practice is concerned with the relationship which the body has with its environment, and represents a claiming of space. Using simple actions, gestures, processes, and interventions, she traces her body's presence on the landscape, expressing and documenting a particular place and time. Many works are concerned with a vain attempt to preserve, mark or measure a certain material, activity or process. Aileen completed an MA in Visual Arts Practices in Dun Laoghaire IADT in January 2007 and in 2007 received a Bursary from the Arts Council.  She is currently working on a public art commission in Creagh, Gorey, Co Wexford and developing a new body of work which will be presented in solo shows in Wexford Arts Centre in 2008 and Triskel Arts Centre, Cork in 2009.

LIGNA is a German group made up of the media theorists and radio artists Ole Frahm, Michael Hueners and Torsten Michaelsen. In numerous shows, interventions and performances LIGNA has explored the effects of the dispersed radio voice and of radio as a means of dispersion in general. LIGNA’s work often refers to remote possibilities of radio use in order to develop new formats of radio practices. Focusing on the reception side of radio, LIGNA is looking for ways to turn the situation of reception into a performative intervention into public space. Listening to the radio then becomes a collective production, which bears uncontrollable results. Their Radio Ballet performances explore deviant behaviour in public space and question the normalisation of behaviour in these spaces. They have created work throughout Europe and took part in Liverpool Live 2006.

Carole Frances Lung AKA Frau Fiber is a textile worker, artist, activist and nomadic instigator of sewing revolutions around the globe. She received a BS in 1988 from North Dakota State University and her BFA 2005/MFA 2007 from the School of the Art Institute Chicago in Fiber and Material Studies. She worked as a professional seamstress, cutter, pattern maker, production manager and designer. These experiences, coupled with the current globalization of the garment industry and its effects on day-to-day living, are the foundation for her art practice.  Her work addresses issue of labour, value and time through the thoroughly hand-made construction of garments.  This construction often occurs as part of public performance, or in the case of the Re-Dressing New Orleans Project as part of a community interaction and gift economy, where she constructed a bicycled powered sewing machine and took it through the post-hurricane Katrina Gentilly neighbourhood of New Orleans, offering her services as a textile worker free to citizens in need of repairs or new textiles. Stop Shopping Start Sewing!

Sandra Johnston (Belfast), Susanne Bosch (Belfast-Berlin) and Marylin Arsem (Boston) invited viewers in March 2007 to a participatory event called Appropriate , in Belfast where the artists talked about their processes of making work, and a collaboration between the artists was initiated. Appropriate was a public event, opening a week of artistic interventions, based on exploring Belfast through the sharing of ideas/experiences/ processes which each artist has previously developed in response to their city of residence. With funding from the Visiting Arts and Interface, the artists worked together in Belfast for a week developing and reflecting on issues of public space, and the potential for creative intervention within negotiations of social, spatial and economical sub-structures. Home and Property, an intervention exploring the housing market and the idea of home in a period where property prices have exploded by up to 67%, will become the centre of their work in Dublin during OUT OF SITE 2007.

Sandra Johnston’s performances centre around the notion of territory. Each performance is site specific and utilises elements of audio and video recording sourced from the location. Using this material and her own body she explores the geographic and psychological sensitivities of the place. She has exhibited widely and is associate lecturer in Time Based and Mixed Media at the University of Ulster, Belfast.

Áine Phillips has been exhibiting multi-media performance works in Ireland and internationally since the late 80s. She has created work for diverse contexts; the street, club events and exhibitions including Moving Image Gallery and The Kitchen New York, National Review of Live Art Glasgow, Tanzquartier Vienna, Factorio Theatro Madrid and in Ireland at the Irish Film Centre, Arthouse, EV+A, Galway Arts Festival and the Hugh Lane Gallery. Her work has been shown at Museums of Art in Stockholm, Liechtenstein and Cleveland USA. She is Head of Sculpture at Burren College of Art, Ireland and is curator of Tulca Live, festival of live and video art in Galway since 2005. Her work is centred on autobiographical performance.