Joseph Higgins: Life and Legacy Symposium

 

Joseph Higgins: Life and Legacy Symposium Saturday 6th December | 1:30pm - 5:30pm Cork City Library, Grande Parade National Sculpture Factory are excited to collaborate with Cork Public Museum, Cork City Arts Office, and Cork City Libraries, to present a panel discussion with artists Alan Butler and Vivienne Roche. This discussion between two renowned contemporary artists, chaired by NSF Director Helen Carey, will be a one-off event that examines the shape of the future of sculpture. Alan Butler, ASSETS exhibition shot, photo courtesy Green on Red Gallery & the artist Alan Butler works with traditional and new media as a means to explore subjects and ideas related to digital culture and their role in the formation of realities. With a production modality that utilises materials and media from the history of image-making, the body of work often examines how 3D graphics, video game and cloud technologies function both ideologically and politically.  Butler’s solo show, ASSETS, opened at green on Red Gallery, Friday 7 November, to coincide with CAGA’s Dublin Gallery Weekend 2025. ASSETS, an umbrella term which refers to information or the objects in a database which are appropriated and transformed into new forms and assemblages. ASSETS, in how they relate to Butler’s practice, are part of a logistical image-production pipeline and the works in which the show reflect the vast array of approaches to art production from the artist’s studio. In Butler’s practice, ASSETS are not something that should be considered or fixed, but nodes on an undulating planetary network composed of data infrastructure, organic matter, dirt, decay and culture; all potential tools or media at play. Vivienne Roche, Baby Teeth in Perspective, 2022 – 2024,Cast bronze, plaster, steel, photo courtesy RHA Gallery & the artist, Photography by Ros Kavanagh Over the last decades, Vivienne Roche has worked in large-scale bronze, glass, steel, sailcloth, stuccodore plaster, and reconfigured landscape.  Drawing, watercolour and photography have also been central to her work. Her artistic themes derive from site-specific dialogues between architecture and sculpture, the emotional resonances of the coastal landscape in which she lives, relationships between male and female, archaeology sites and their artefacts, and between music and the visual. Her most recent solo exhibition was Abridged, a major show of works including drawing, sculpture and video, at the main gallery of the RHA, September- November 2024 Cork Public Museum in collaboration with Cork City Arts Office and Cork City Libraries, with the Higgins Estate, commemorates the Artist with a dedicated programme of events, beginning on Saturday 6th December, featuring a lecture by Peter Murray, curator and art historian, ‘In Conversation’ with art historian, Vera Ryan and sculptor, Matthew Thompson, and a panel discussion in collaboration with the National Sculpture Factory, with artists Alan Butler and Vivienne Roche, chaired by NSF Director Helen Carey. On Tuesday December 9th a new exhibition opens at Cork Public Museum Best known for his mastery as a figurative sculptor, Joseph Higgins – was a both a painter and a sculptor, a carver in wood and stone. His small body of surviving works are both deeply personal but also evocative of the contemporary politics of the time in which they were made. Above all, they are an exquisite testament to the relevance of the artist, one hundred years after his premature death at 40 years.