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Arup partners with Cork’s Crawford Art Gallery for new exhibition

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Clare O'Loughlin Clare O'Loughlin Europe Press Office, Ireland
23 November 2018

Arup is collaborating with the Crawford Art Gallery in Cork to support a new exhibition, ‘Earth, Wind & Fire: Made in Cork Contemporary’.

The exhibition, which runs until February next year, showcases the work of six Cork-based internationally acclaimed artists: Anne Kiely/Mary Palmer, Nuala O’Donovan, Alex Pentek, Eoin Turner and Joseph Walsh.

A long-standing partner of the arts, Arup believes that arts and culture make a vital contribution to the community. In the words of Eoghan Lynch, Chairperson of Arup in Ireland: “We are proud to be a sponsor of the arts in Cork, celebrating the city’s cultural heritage and creative flair. Our consultants and engineers have been working to deliver innovative design in Cork since 1976 on a range of projects including world-class education facilities, state-of-the-art laboratories and clinically excellent healthcare facilities”.

The Crawford Art Gallery – an Irish National Cultural Institution – has a permanent collection of around 4,000 works ranging from 18th-century Irish and European paintings and sculptures, through to contemporary video installations. In the current exhibition, six artists showcase the ground-breaking work that is currently being produced in Cork, ranging from ancient time-honoured processes to new (machine) technologies.

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Crawford Art Gallery is extremely grateful for the support of Arup in realising the exhibition, Earth, Wind & Fire: Made in Cork Contemporary, and the associated education programme. Arup has a long association of working with the creative sector through supporting the realisation of many ambitious projects in the public domain. ” Mary McCarthy Crawford Art Gallery Director

Arup has developed a strong working collaboration with a host of artists internationally, highlighting the synergetic relationship between artistic excellence and technical skill, to deliver unique works exploring new materials, techniques and scales.

Alex Pentek, one of the artists in the exhibition, discusses the impact of our working relationship. “With the ongoing support of Arup through their offices in Cork, London, Toronto and Brisbane, I have been able to realise a number of large scale commissioned artworks in Ireland, Canada and Australia, where, from an engineering perspective, the seemingly impossible was made possible,” Pentek said.

The works on display in the new exhibition range from the breath-taking intricacy of Nuala O Donovan’s ceramic work and the graphic poetry of Mary Palmer and Anne Kiely’s textile pieces to the wildly imaginative and expansive sculptural works of Joseph Walsh, Alex Pentek and Eoin Turner.

Curated by Anne Boddaert of The Crawford Art Gallery, the exhibition, which runs from 23 November 2018 to 17 February 2019, is complemented with a Learn and Explore Programme, designed to attract a broad range of audiences to engage with the work.

Earth, Wind & Fire: Made in Cork Contemporary is supported by Arup.
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A central focal point of the exhibition is the aspect of “making” – of actively doing, modelling, altering things in a mode which simultaneously engages thinking and ideas about future worlds, as well as the practical transformation of present materials. The artworks on display share an organic existence, visible within the artists’ response to form and their appreciation of nature.