Anticipation at Aurora Kilkenny for upcoming art exhibition
Aurora artists to showcase their work at Kilkenny Greyhound Stadium on August 14
Artists and staff at Aurora Kilkenny are preparing for an exhibition at the Kilkenny Greyhound Stadium on August 14.
Aurora is a non-profit organisation supporting 80 people in Kilkenny with severe or profound disabilities.
Meeting them at the Aurora Hub day centre on St Thomas’ Square, Emma Butler (Community Inclusion Manager) and Geri Doyle Ryan (Creative Arts Therapist and Facilitator) exuded warmth and enthusiasm. It was no surprise, then, that the exhibition they have planned is a truly creative and collaborative effort.
The tent for the exhibition was generously loaned by the defence forces, but its walls could not support the artwork, and Butler believed they could achieve something more innovative than laying the frames on tables. So she took to Facebook, where she solicited 16 old doors. “They’ll be set up almost like easels,” she said, “and we’ll have them now for future exhibitions.” Maintenance staff and one of Aurora’s service users Connor then got to work painting and arranging the doors for their new lives as gallery walls.
Doyle Ryan explained that she and Butler approached this exhibition in the way they approach everything at Aurora: “From the off, when we're working here through Aurora, you're working with such a variety of people with different interests, different abilities, different everything. And then you're coming and exhibiting in a tent that's supplied by the army. So you're kind of going, okay, what do I work with? It's not like you’re going to a beautiful ready-made space, so it all adds to the energy of the thing. It all adds to the creativity.”
“That's really our ethos here,” Butler added. “We reach out to what we have naturally available, you know, in our community, and people have helped just with so many different projects down through the years.”
Butler described how the activities at the Aurora Hub are “a stepping stone to what’s naturally available in the wider community,” with Doyle Ryan adding: “We have some particular gentlemen that have been in Aurora for most of their lives and come up through, kind of, so many different stages and phases of our systems in the country… It's amazing to see these gentlemen now living in their own homes, coming and going, out exploring, hiking, drawing, and sketching.”
The exhibition will showcase 76 pieces by 12 artists, and all pieces will be for sale on the night. The artists will be in attendance “supported by their staff and [ready to] meet everybody and to be immersed in their own exhibition,” said Butler.
Butler recalls from last year’s exhibition: “There was a couple who were in Ireland on honeymoon from America, and they really fell in love with a piece of art from one of the ladies. They went in and met her and were having a chat with her and they just said: ‘Your art is going to end up in our home in America, and we're so excited about it.’”