Buttered Up (2017) by Áine Phillips from Arts Council on Vimeo.
Áine Phillips | Buttered Up | 2017 | HD digital video | 6 min, 43 sec
The Arts Council has a proud tradition as part of Culture Night of showcasing a selection of exciting artworks recently added to the Arts Council Collection.
While this year it will not be possible to share these works in person with audiences on the night, we have decided to highlight the excellence and diversity of visual arts practice in Ireland today by inviting a few of the Collection’s most recently
acquired artists to give some insight on their works.
For Culture Night 2020 works by artists Bárbara Wagner & Benjamin de Burca, Salvatore of Lucan, Áine Phillips and Doireann O’Malley will celebrate the Arts Council Collection’s continuing history of purchasing ambitious work that engages with and reflects
contemporary Irish society.
Here, Áine Phillips tells us more about her featured artwork, her practice and what it means to have her work included as part of the Arts Council Collection.
Explore this and more from the Arts Council Collection at https://www.instagram.com/artscouncilireland/
Buttered Up is a short HD video made in 2017. It is based on a live performance in which I dive into the buttered crevice of a plush couch and emerge from the plumbing of a kitchen sink. In the video piece, the seduction and entrapments of domesticity
are evaded with absurd humour and acts of performative metamorphosis. Butter is a central motif and as a particularly Irish material, is used with delicious abundance as a metaphor for transcendence and sexuality. Vivienne Dick’s cinematography gives
the piece its vivid drama of colour and light. The dense and evocative sound track by Slavek Kwi accentuates the pleasures and pains of being ‘buttered up’. The piece subverts the absorption of identity into the domestic that can happen within family
life especially for women, and for anyone who has had to endure a Covid-19 pandemic lock-down.
— Áine Phillips
Since 1962, the Arts Council has been buying art from working artists. The Collection that evolved tells the story of modern and contemporary Irish visual art in a unique and fascinating way. Today the Collection continues to grow and its more than 1,100 paintings, sculptures and other works are on display in public spaces all over Ireland for people to experience and enjoy first hand. You can find out more at: www.artscouncil.emuseum.com