Find + Create
“Can you hear me Damo?" is artist Anne-May Tabb’s first solo show. It opens next month at St Peter's Vision Centre on North Main Street and it's...well, it's fun.
Lesson number one: art should be fun. Especially making it.
And granted art is also serious, controversial, abstract, surreal, confusing, derivative, divisive, imitative, and sometimes meh - honestly art is an endless list of adjectives, or at least this is one of the idioms through which we discuss art and break it down, but lest you have forgotten lesson number one, and for those of you down the back of the class, let me repeat - art should also be fun.
Anne-May Tabb appreciates and understands this lesson.
When I called by to interview Anne-May at her temporary studio in the National Sculpture Factory on Albert Road it’s a few days outs before she has to move the pieces for her first ever solo exhibition over to St. Peter’s, the deconsecrated church, on North Main Street. Her work is scattered around her studio space, on the table, on the floor, in fact some of it looks distinctly like it might not be her work at all but just random things lying around. And this it turns out is an indication of what she makes, and how she operates.
First things first, Anne-May’s exhibition which opens February 1, is called Can you hear me Damo? which could mean, well, anything. What it actually means is quite meta, very Cork, and 100% pandemic.
Like everybody else, Anne-May, 27, originally from Crosshaven now living in the city, spent a lot of the pandemic, especially in 2020, indoors and on the computer. But back then, there was more novelty to what we couldn’t do as a result of the restrictions, and Zoom calls and Zoom parties and gatherings didn’t feel as shit as they do mostly do now.
And so Anne-May joined a game of lockdown bingo on Zoom organised by this guy Damo, who she thinks lives down in Mahon.
“He’s such a fun guy and it’s hilarious because there’s about 200 people playing online and without fail someone at the beginning of the bingo will say ‘Can you hear me Damo, can you hear me?”
“And he’s just like, ‘Yeah, we can hear you’re fine, if you shout bingo, we’ll hear you.”
And that throwaway line, addressed to Damo, repeated over and over has now found its way into the title of her exhibition.
Anne-May doesn’t know Damo - beyond being the lad who organises the bingo session - and it’s likely Damo doesn’t know he’s now part of an upcoming exhibition.
The Damo line resonated with Anne-May because, as she says, her work, and especially this exhibition is about the quotidian “and what I do everyday, and what happens to me.”
The exhibition is not, as she says, “very lockdown-based,” but, as she recognises, the pandemic and the restrictions have been a big part of her life, two years and change, so of course there’s no avoiding it in some ways if you work in the creative fields.
“My work is very spontaneous and takes shape as it does, a kind of see what happens vibe to it,” she says. While she’s only been in the Sculpture Factory for the past two weeks, it’s been just enough time “rather than humming and hawing about it.”
That said, she’s been planning the exhibition since last year and through many conversations with Ali O’Shea, a friend and fellow artist from Blarney who also studied at the Crawford College of Art. Ali has moved into a curatorial role since she moved back from Glasgow in 2020, just as the country went into the first lockdown and she was still only halfway through her masters in the Scottish city.
So what’s in the exhibition?
Anne-May gave me a walking guided tour, and one way of summing it up could be as pieces of her life and things she has found, re-used and turned into artworks
“A lot of my stuff is found materials and (about) kinda spending as little as possible on it.”
Found art has a long history, and it often pokes fun at the art world, think Marcel Duchamp’s urinal which he christened Fountain and placed on a pedestal. Although it should be noted Duchamp bought the urinal. The main thing Duchamp was doing there is mocking the art world, its excesses and taste makers. Meta, avant la lettre?
A few years ago David Datuna, a performance artist ate a piece of artwork by the Italian artist Maurizio Cattelan. The piece, entitled Comedian, was on show at Art Basel in Miami and had sold for $120,000 before Datuna devoured it.
What was it? A banana.
So plus ca change on that one.
For Anne-May a found item could be something like bits of plywood left in a skip, or the players on a foosball table.
“I’m not going to steal anything,” she says laughing, but if something’s been thrown out and no one wants it and I think ‘I could work on that’, then I would take it.”
It’s also a needs must approach as she explains.
“It kinda started in college, it was so tough buying materials, the constant worry of whether you’d have enough money to put on a big show, that’s how the work began to be more playful and spontaneous,” she says, referencing the Dada (hello Duchamp!) artists who made do with what was to hand.
Anne-May’s work leans more to playfulness, and this is a word that should come with those emojis for sirens either side of it; play and playfulness is not something that lends itself well to long, discursive and ultimately boring conversations.
But there is playfulness at work in her pieces. Take the simple box she’s put together from scraps of wood she’s found and fashioned into a cube. It’s painted black except for one side, which is white and from it a white painted pool spills out on to the ground.
What is it? (Which plenty of people are likely to ask, and should ask when they see it in the exhibition).
“A pint of spilled Beamish.” Which leads to a short story about a recent trip to Fionnbarra’s on Douglas Street and everyone was spilling pints, just because well the crowd were “young one’s and drunk” Anne-May says with an easy laugh.
It’s a rough-and-ready piece and looks exactly like a spilled pint of stout if it were fashioned as a black and white cube.
Anne-May has formulated a neat and interesting outlook with how she works with what she has, or finds.
“It doesn’t restrict you,” Anne May says about her catalogue of found items. “Sometimes when you’re trying to find materials to buy, you’re restricted by what’s in the shop, by how much it costs. Without that (element)…that’s why I think the stuff is very playful and communicates well with each other, as it’s all coming from the same place.”
Which brings me to another buzz word that should come with even bigger emoji sirens: 🚨sustainability🚨.
“I didn’t come from a sustainable viewpoint,” Anne-May says when she started out back in college seven years ago. As she points out there was beginning to be more recognition of our throwaway and crassly commercial culture and the damage it’s causing, but sustainability was not the sole focus of her art.
Now though, its definitely something that’s in the back of her mind when she’s making her artwork. And while she doesn’t preach sustainability, well, at least not to me, she practices it.
If there’s one overarching theme to the show it’s “basically about the everyday.”
And while our lives are as different as they are similar there are many overlapping points - for example when you have to buy and assemble flat pack furniture, or when you go for a walk in a park full of pigeons.
Ann May throws me a bone, “if you want to put it in arty terms, it’s finding the wonderful in the mundane.”
Later in the interview she recalls that when she was trying to figure out what the show was about and formulate some words around it, she started into a short story and she “just kept writing pints”.
“Because that’s all we were doing,” and Anne-May and Ali burst out laughing.
“Or having cans, it was very much that, but actually you got to embrace what you’re doing.”
That might also explain the spilled Beamish on the ground.
It takes two
While Ali O’Shea is not making any of the work in Can you hear me Damo?, she’s making it happen. The pair have a close relationship which dates back to college at the Crawford, and as Anne-May says, Ali’s taken on the role of doing everything else to make the show happen.
“There’s a lot of work that goes into making a show and Ali’s been the one who’s organising everything behind the scenes and in front of the scenes.”
This interview came about as I had had come across a post by Ali flagging the exhibition on Instagram and on the same day that I was going to contact Ali, she contacted me, which is like something that my mother would say every time she picked up the phone and one of her friend’s was on the line, leading her to say: “I was just about to call you.” That line became kind of a “Can you hear me Damo?" running gag in our house growing up.
Ali too has had her art and studies and life pandemic-interrupted. She came home form Glasgow for what she thought would be two weeks in March of 2020, but ended up staying and completing the rest of her masters from Cork. Having graduated she’s thrown herself into curating projects with artists, not an easy task when so many venues have been going through a cycle of openings and closings with restrictions placed on them, but she said the Arts Council have been really supportive of artists in Cork.
“Most people and most organisations want to talk about art and want to do things,” Ali says.
The problem is though in trying to make a life as an artist in Cork (or for that matter any city or town in Ireland). Ali mentions talks of the universal basic income (UBI), which would be a lifeline, not just for artists but hundreds of thousands of people in Ireland.
“There is an understanding that artists do need to be paid, because it is really difficult. Just to take Cork - finding space in the city is so difficult.” And by space she means somewhere to work and to live.
“I think there’s so much property development with a real disregard for arts spaces in the city,” Ali says, mentioning the old FÁS building where Sample Studios was. The building has been demolished and the space is empty and lying idle.
“All of these real hubs of art in the city are disappearing and it’s really important that they are there and it makes the city alive, or else it’s just loads of offices and expensive apartments that none of us can afford.”
Ali didn’t mention the massive redevelopment of the docklands which are on the doorstep of the NSF, but one wonders what role or space there will be for artists there?
“I do think there needs to be some designated spaces for artists and galleries in the city and that would make such a difference,” Ali adds.
A brief introduction to Damo
A drawing of Lisa Simpson comes via the time Anne-May recently took a dip in a flotation tank. “That’s basically me in there thinking what am I up to?”
“The flag is reused and the cork board that represents Cork and the fact that we can’t fly anywhere, but I’m flying it for ourselves here,” Anne-May says explaining another piece that features clouds and a flag and a stick. There’s a bit in there about a hurley - Ali usually has one in the back of her car - but the funniest part about the explanation is when Anne-May proceeds to describe a part of the hurley/stick she had fashioned with some plastic: “That’s the gummy part at the top of a the hurley” also known as the grip which Ali helpfully points out.
“As you can tell I’m obviously not a sports person.”
Hot dogs.
“They are the Danish part of me,” Anne-May explains (her mother is Danish) and they’re her favourite food as we stand looking at the prints of hot dogs on wrapping paper she picked up from Dealz. Anne-May would love to open a hot dog van in Cork, which is something I would also love her to do.
The ketchup pools out on to the ground in spools of red wool and there’s a little red duck atop it, a reference to being a sitting duck for Covid, which she has managed to dodge thus far.
Can you hear me Damo? opens February 1 at St Peters and runs until February 14.
Anne-May will be discussing Can you hear me Damo? and her other work with artist and curator Ciara Rodgers as part of Faoin Spéir progamme presented at the Living Commons, Wandesford Quay on Saturday February 5 at 2 p.m.
A newly commissioned print from Anne-May will also be presented as part of the exhibition.
