Back home (one of the former European Cities of Culture) for Christmas and I managed to quickly see an exhibition entitled The Sleep of Reason at the Crawford Art Gallery. Things have now pretty much returned to normal in my home city after the city of culture, that is a general absence of culture and certainly any real challenging contemporary culture, but this exhibition had a small handful of works worth seeing.

The one video work that particularly interested me was Redcheeks by Michelle Deignan (video extract above) which consisted of a woman telling a winding account / story of the artist undertaking research in pursuit of an art works creation.

In “Red Cheeks”, an Irish actor adopts the guise of a education programme presenter. She makes a series of speeches to camera at three different locations around London; RTE’s offices at Millbank; The London Irish Women’s Centre; and at Irish Contemporary Art in Kensington. At each site she presents a narrative combining facts about the places and anecdotes about the artist which suggest some connections between the two. At the RTE location for example, we are told about the artist’s first British television appearance as a stand in for a suffragette. The London Irish Women’s centre gives us the opportunity to hear about Deignan’s altercation with a blind elderly racist in a chemist’s shop and at the possibly fictional site of Irish Contemporary Art we hear about the artist’s experience of an artwork at Freize Art Fair.

Not the typical type of work that I usual like however the idea of this work (a work very much in the conceptual tradition), its combination of storytelling with anecdotes (particularly Irish) which the artist has cleverly employed to establish links between places and people mentioned manages to create / highlight verbal / aural networks of associations through day to day interactions.