Chronic Collective

Pallas Projects/Studios are pleased to present Chronic Collective, an initiative by artists Áine O'Hara and Tara Carroll who have developed a landmark series of events around art, illness, and disability for Pallas Projects in July and August 2022. These events are by and for sick and disabled artists as well as anyone who wants to create with accessibility in mind, or participate in an accessible art project. Artists can drop-in to workshops or attend multiple to develop a performance with the support of Chronic Collective.

The events themselves are active sites of learning and best practice. The flexible times, length and frequency of events are laid out by Chronic Collective with accessibility inherent providing comfortable seating, transport, food and snacks, a slow-paced, masked and ventilated environment, and quiet spaces available for breaks. Talks and workshops will be free, live-streamed, captioned and ISL interpreters provided in order to remove barriers to participation.

Through these programmatic actions, participants provide expert feedback about their needs, and what arts organisations can do to assist continued, sustainable involvement in the arts for arts workers and participants. We also invite the wider artist-run network to attend an accessibility focused workshop as a training opportunity for the sector. A guidebook will be produced to share the findings of the project, which will be made freely accessible to arts organisations. We see this as a vital process for the arts sector to develop inclusion capabilities, gathering research directly from artists through activity based research. This important project has been made possible by the Capacity Building Award 2022 with thanks to the Arts Council for their support.

All participants regardless of accessibility requirements are asked to fill out this form for Chronic Collective to best cater to needs of the group.
Access Information Word document versions are found at the end of this page.
Travel stipends are available for anyone who needs them. Please indicate this via the form or contact chronicartcollective@gmail.com.

Event Details:

Performance and the Body—an exploration of live art and sickness: Workshops - July 27th, 28th, and August 10th, 5-8pm

The first event on July 27th will be hybrid with with captioning and ISL

Max 12 participants

These workshops are tailored specifically for artists with disabilities and chronic illnesses to provide a more accessible supportive space to create work. They will be at a more sustainable pace for energy, non-strenuous exercises, a comfortable work space with a rest area, a quiet low light space for time outs, plenty of breaks and food provided. (we will make the gallery space comfortable by renting soft supportive chairs, create a comfy area in the gallery with cushions and snacks, heaters on to help with chronic pain triggers, and a separate room with a low light quiet comfortable area for people to have a rest if they are overwhelmed, unwell or fatigued, provide a larger meal to sustain energy, provide an access document about the building and journey to it.

It will be open to all artists (not only disabled artists) as everyone can benefit from a shift in pace, accessible opportunities and co-creating in a safe environment to learn from each other.
We will encourage through exercises the development of live artworks that are multi-sensory and considerate of accessibility as inherent in the concept of the work and not an afterthought. E.g poetic sound pieces explaining the atmosphere and actions of the performance for the visually impaired, tactile installations that can be touched by the audience, audience engagement, closed captioning for visuals and sound etc
For emerging and established artists who want to explore the body through performance art or to develop current practice. 
The artists who take part in this workshop series will be invited to perform at a performance art event in August.

Introduction to Performance Art —a day long workshop with breaks and supports - July 30th 12pm - 5pm

For people from any background who have little to no experience with performance art but want to learn/try it out for the first time.
Tailored specifically for people with disabilities and chronic illnesses to provide a more accessible supportive space to learn about performance practice. They will be at a more sustainable pace for energy, non-strenuous exercises, a comfortable work space, a quiet low light rest area for sensory breaks, plenty of breaks and food provided.

We will use the same approach and create the same environment as above.
Exercises tailored to explore the fundamentals of performance art and how to begin creating a new performance artwork.

In Person: Solid, Space and Sound workshop by Emilie Conway - August 8th 5-7pm

A workshop exploring audio description and multi sensory for artworks to become more accessible and dynamic. A multi-sensory experience using sound, touch, and a sense of atmosphere to communicate artistic ideas which will open engagement from a more diverse audience to your practice.
https://www.emilieconway.ie/audio-described-sensory-tours

Access Rider Workshop - August 17th 12 - 1.30pm

An access doc, or 'Access Rider,' is a document that outlines your disability access needs. You might make one so that you can give it to galleries/institutions/organisations when you start working with them on a project, such as a gallery you're doing a show at, to let them know what you need them to facilitate to make sure you have equal access to work.
This event will teach and facilitate artists to write these documents for use when working with cultural institutions. It is beneficial for artists and organisations that these documents are widely used to create more supportive, safe and accessible creative environments for disabled artists.
This is an open space for disabled artists to discuss and establish their individual needs to inform their access documents, creating an opportunity to connect with peers and build solidarity.

Open Forum for disabled/sick artists - August 17th 3.30-5pm

This event creates a safe space for artists to openly discuss their practice and their needs as disabled artists. Through discussion we will establish what we need from organisations for a sense of care and equal opportunities.
This is an opportunity to gather disabled artists to meet fellow peers and facilitate an exchange of knowledge as well as foster connections for future collaboration.
Discussing individual challenges and how we approach them will give awareness to our collective experiences and break down feelings of isolation allowing artists to feel heard and understood.
We will collectively make a document of changes we seek from cultural organisations to assist disabled artists in creating and exhibiting their work.
We will use this document to advise Pallas Projects on devising short, mid and long term changes to their policy and engagement for inclusion.
The document will establish the structure of the workshop Accessibility for Artist-led Organisations.

Alt text as poetry workshop by Bojana Coklyat and Shannon Finnegan - August 23rd 6 - 7.30pm

The workshop reframes alt text as a type of poetry and provides opportunities to talk about it and practice writing it.
Alt text is a written description of an image posted online. Alt text can also be added to images embedded in digital documents (PDFs, Word documents, Google docs, presentations, etc). Alt text has multiple uses, but the workshop focuses on its role as an essential part of web accessibility. Alt text allows visual content to be accessible to people who are blind, have low vision, or have certain cognitive disabilities.
We want to promote that artists in Ireland use Alt Text in their everyday posting and sharing of artwork. This workshop will give artists the tools to explore alt text as a type of poetry to allow them to approach it with some of the ideas and strategies that have been developed by poets. But increasing digital accessibility remains the first and most important condition of alt text’s poetic potential.
Skills learned at this workshop are especially useful for organisations' social media and websites.

Accessibility for Artist-Led Organisations workshop - August 25th - 2pm - 3.30pm + 4pm - 5.30pm

Chronic Collective and Disabled Artists, Disabled Academics Campaign and invited artists will facilitate an opportunity for artist-led organisations to learn from the experts, the disabled artists themselves. A document created at the Open Forum for disabled/sick artists will be the basis for this discussion and any artists who wish to give feedback to art organisations are invited to attend. The workshop will also facilitate knowledge sharing amongst organisations to learn about each other's inclusion policies and actions.

Performance and the Body - an exploration of live art and sickness - Performance Events - August 13th, 18th & 27th

The second event on Thursday 18th will be hybrid with with captioning and ISL

Hybrid evenings of performance art which are open for all to attend. The performance events follow the ethos of the workshops in that accessibility considerations are inherent in the work.

Biographies:

Chronic Collective is a multidisciplinary curatorial art collective with a strong focus on accessibility in the arts. The collective is run by two queer and chronically ill artists, Tara Carroll and Áine O'Hara. We create opportunities to platform disabled and/or chronically ill artists' work in a supportive and care focused environment catering to individual needs with a view to alleviating some of the barriers faced when creating and exhibiting work. Structuring events and workshops to a more sustainable and flexible pace, with quiet low light rest areas, comfortable spaces, snacks and plenty of breaks which benefits both artists and audience.

Exhibitions, events and workshops are open to all as we believe everyone can benefit from more accessible opportunities to support knowledge exchange and to build relationships. We encourage the artists we work with to integrate accessibility into their artworks, for it to be inherent in the concept and not just an afterthought. We also facilitate access and creative workshops to provide artists with tools and generate greater public dialogue and consciousness of accessibility.

Formally known as 4D Space we've always strived to promote accessibility in the arts within our curatorial practice. We are passionate about creating welcoming and supportive spaces for emerging artists or anyone new to performance art to learn, workshop and perform live.  We have curated many live art events in spaces such as Mart Gallery, The Back Loft Creative Hub at La Catedral studios, and Smock Alley Theatre. 'Art Against the Odds' was a two day event platforming artists who feel like 'outsiders' to create work responding to the challenges of surviving the arts industry. Consisting of a live art party and round table discussion with all the invited artists and staff from the gallery to discuss their work, challenges they face and prospective solutions.

We facilitated a series of performance art workshops in The Lab Gallery at Dublin City Arts Office, and at The Back Loft Creative Hub at La Catedral studios. We have also taught performance art at 3rd level to various different course groups at Dun Laoghaire Institute for Art, Design and Technology. The goal of these classes and workshops was to introduce performance art to people and artists from various disciplines and backgrounds in order to support them in accessing their individual creativity.

@chronicartcollective

Day Magee is a performance-centred multimedia artist and writer based in Dublin. They have performed since 2011 as part of Livestock and the Dublin Live Art Festival, and graduated from Limerick School of Art and Design in Sculpture & Combined Media in 2021, during their time there staging group live art events managing the Evil Collective. By their penultimate year they had exhibited as part of Tulca Festival, group shows across Ireland and abroad, as well as being nominated for the Future Generation Art Prize 2020 its Irish partner platform Pallas Projects/Studios, and shortlisted for the RDS Visual Arts Awards. Upon graduating they were commissioned by Arts & Disability Ireland, as well as staging their first solo show Contraindications of the Cross in Pallas Projects/Studios in 2022. Most recently they have been commissioned by Aine Philips at Interface Inagh, completed a residency with Museum of Everyone at the Lab Gallery in Dublin, written regularly for Visual Artists New Sheet, as well as hosting and developing regular performance-centred workshops Bodyjam.

Magee's work concerns the induction and enactment of temporality and subjectivity via bodily vectors, and the lived mythographies of selfhood - the stories we tell ourselves about ourselves as simultaneously lived out. Adopting a phenomenological methodology to the live and lens-based performance of images and words, they chronicle their own bodily narrativisations of queerness, disability, and religiosity, towards an unbecoming of the self.

Hog and Dice is the storytelling project of Stiofáin Jack. Stiofáin (Fáin to their friends) is a storyteller and folklorist who studied Irish Folklore at UCD. They specialise in dusting off the forgotten parts of our folklore and exposing them to the cold harsh light of day.

Stiofáin can be found plying their trade deep in the Story Mines of the National Leprechaun Museum in Dublin and on the Hog and Dice YouTube channel.

Emilie Conway is an award winning vocal jazz artist, composer and lyricist. She blends her own compositions, spoken word/poetry, with improvised and composed music.

Emilie's arts practice is multi-disciplinary as Emilie creates work through a process of singing, writing, dancing and painting. Her work focuses on 3 areas: jazz and art/literature, jazz and disability and jazz and children

A passionate activist for equal and equitable participation of disabled people in arts and culture, Emilie also creates audio and sensory art tours and is an EDI consultant for many arts organisations.  She is also founder of DADA, Disabled Artists, Disabled Academics.

“Star of the show is Conway’s voice,” - Hot Press
“Splendid.” - The Sunday Independent
“Her own vocalese to Coltrane’s solo demonstrating her abilities to their fullest, flitting through the lyrics at a tempo most rappers would be envious of, while maintaining a bouncing melody and clarity of diction throughout.” - GoldenPlec"

Lee Dias (b. 1998) is an Irish-American visual artist. They received their BA in Psychology from The George Washington University in 2020, which influences their work with psychiatric prescription drugs and mental illness. Dias obtained their MFA with First Class Honors from the National College of Art and Design, Dublin, in 2022.
Dias’s work has been published in the catalogue “DO NOT TOUCH” as a part of the George Washington University’s 2020 Graduate Show for the Corcoran School of Art and Design. Dias has recently exhibited work in a group show concerning the expression of humanity at the National Treasury Management Agency. They have also exhibited work as a part of the MFA graduating class of 2022 at the NCAD Annex in 2022. Dias works with acrylic paint and sonic scraps of direct-to-consumer pharmaceutical advertisements to express the range of emotions that can come with taking psychiatric medication. They reflect upon the neurodiverse’s relationships with doctors. Dias draws from their own experience with seeing a psychiatrist to be prescribed medication for the mercurial moods of manic-depression.
We tell our doctors about everything from clinical side effects to our deepest emotions. A psychiatric patient’s emotionally-fraught relationship with doctors and psychiatric medications is central to Dias’s work.