studio repair acts fosters restorative cultures in Ireland by connecting past stories about mending, maintenance and healing with what we do today, to how we envision the future.
Taking a situated, arts-based approach we work across and within landscapes and infrastructures and alongside communities, governing bodies, craft, artisan, skilled trades and other professions.
Our work takes some of the following forms art exhibitions, installations, performance, documentary, storytelling, sound and video works, desk and applied based research, design interventions, conversational and pedological formats, community action and activism. Using these forms and methods we look to connecting local wisdoms and everyday lived experience to global economic, legislative and political flows and climate scenarios.
Established in 2022, to date our work has been predominately situated in the midlands county of Westmeath and taken the form of over forty workshops and events on mending, fixing and restorative practices.
Our ongoing, “People’s Archive of Everyday Repair“, enables people to upload their stories of everyday maintenance.
In Nov, 2022 we held our first, four-day festival (or Féile in Irish) on the theme “Caring for Repairing” in Kilbeggan, during which we launched A Repair Declaration for Ireland, Collated by the people of Westmeath, over May-Oct 2022 and premiered the documentary ‘Turning the Collar‘, explores our material relations with objects, through the lives of eleven professional makers, menders and repairers.
Collaborating with several other artists from across Ireland, Europe and Brazil, we created a number of new media arts, that reflected on the relationship between repair economies, professional trades, heritage and craft practices, climate action and materialism. With conversations and demo workshops, providing context for sharing viewpoints, thoughts and knowledges. Supplementing this work, our public exhibition at St James’s Hall, Kilbeggan provided context how changes in local repair economies, reflect broader societal shifts in consumption, manufacturing and environmental activism.
Over 2023, we will be working to transition from this project-based approach to creating a more sustained programme of activities, with new installation based works and workshops emerging towards the end of year and early 2024.
