London debut for Irish arts collective

Arts group Nua Collective will be making their London debut with their show Under The Same Sky at Candid Arts Trust this week.

Nua Collective began as an Irish collective but over the past five years has grown to include artists with ancestral or creative ties to Ireland from across the globe.

Through painting, photography, printmaking, video, digital media, and installation, the artists respond to the idea that — despite conflict, distance, and difference — we all share this world.

The group is also entirely self-funded and operate on a non-profit basis.

The artists are Maria Markham (USA), Anne Martin-Walsh (Ireland), Enrique Hernández (London/Spain), Katrīna Tračuma (Latvia), Amy Devlin (Northern Ireland), Lucy Lambe (Ireland),  Caoimhe Heaney (Ireland), Josh Stein (USA), Robert Jackson (Scotland), John Murray (Ireland), Curtis Creationz (London),  Eamonn B. Shanahan (London/Ireland) and Lorraine Hogan (Ireland).

Eamonn B. Shanahan, from Tipperary, who founded the collective, told The Irish World: “I think that bringing it to London is great because it’s such a major stage internationally.

“That we can bring all of the artists together to that one space is fantastic.

“I’m very much about accessibility to art and getting as many people to see the work with as few boundaries as possible.

“That’s why with the previous exhibition we would go to any space whether it’s a library, a gallery or a pub.

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“It didn’t matter as long as we could share it with a number of people and that those people could just look at that and take what they wanted from it.

“I think regardless of whether we’re in London or in Jelgava which is a small little town in Estonia, they all have their own reach of a specific audience and those individuals are not any less important than the individuals that are in London that will come to see what we’re doing.

“But what’s great about London is that it is a very metropolitan society where they’re pretty accepting no matter what your background is and they’re pretty open for the most part of what you’re going to bring to the table and will respond to it equally as open.”

As Eamonn says, the collective has already exhibited across Europe and the states as well as around the UK and Ireland.

Eamonn himself is London based. Having begun his studies at the Crawford School of Art in Cork, he would study at Central School of Speech of Drama.

Asked how the collective, which started in COVID as a way of artists connecting and sharing work, grew from an Irish group to something more international Eamonn says, “It’s the joy of social media.

“The initial call out was that you would have to be either a resident of Ireland or have some level of connection to Ireland whether that was genetic or whether that was from generational or whatever.

“One of our artists, Katrīna Tračuma, is Latvian but she spent six years studying in Ireland and then she lived another three or four years before moving back to Latvia.

“Those sort of connections are kind of what brings the Irishness to it.

“I work a lot with different cultural organisations in Ireland and within arts offices in Ireland to see how much culture is embedded within our society and how extensive that is in Ireland across multiple disciplines whether that’s visual art, theatre, music, poetry, whatever.

“There’s so much in Ireland because we are innately storytellers.

“Katrīna is so passionate about Ireland because of how much she was able to connect that sort of ethos and values that we have in Ireland and the beliefs that we have in the creative arts and the power it has to share a story or to share a view or to share something that they were standing for through art.

“I think we do that as Irish people very, very well and we’re very passionate people, as our history would probably speak quite loudly about.

“Katrīna has a term that she coined a couple of years ago called artivism.

“It’s essentially just activism through art and we kind of have quite a heavy, focused connection to climate.

“We had a big exhibition that was just essentially based on the energy crisis that we were dealing with and we kind of bring it back to us as individuals and how we live on this planet and how we respond to things, bringing it back to passion a little bit.

“Ireland is very passionate about certain things and we see that very much in what’s happening around the world right now politically.”

Asked what he would people to take from the exhibition Eamonn says: “I think Irish people are very good at sharing stories and ideas.

“We are presenting ideas some of them slightly controversial, some of them not so, some of them with a particular view on something and some of them that are quite ambiguous and you just take what you want from it.

“I think the idea is for somebody to go into that exhibition without premeditated ideas and see something for themselves and take their own view.”

Nua Collective bring Under the Same Sky to Candid Arts Trust until 23 November 20–23.

For more information about Candid Arts Trust, click here.

For more information about Nua Collective, click here.

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