http://deappendix.wordpress.com/conversation-series-2013/
This is the link to Dr Ciara McMahon’s deAppendix website where you will find the video of my conversation with Cathy Fitzgerald.
CATHY FITZGERALD: Originally from New Zealand, Cathy has a diverse work background in both art and science. Although always passionate about art, Cathy spent the first eight years of her working career working in biological science working at a agricultural research institute in New Zealand. On moving to Ireland, Cathy spent the next six years completing a First Class Joint Honours degree in Fine Art Painting and Irish Art History at the National College of Art & Design (NCAD 1996-2000), Dublin, then an MA in Fine Art (NCAD Virtual Realities) 2000- 2002. Her MA further developed her interdisciplinary approach with a novel residency in the leukaemia laboratory at St James Hospital in Dublin, while also allowing her to develop considerable knowledge of interactive online media, and experimental film practice.
Since arriving in Ireland in 1995 Cathy has been very involved in Irish and European forest NGO’s, and Green politics (particularly Green Party Forest policy in recent years). From 2007-10 she acted at the first Director of ArtLinks.ie, an innovative five county on and off-line programme of professional arts development catering to over 1500 creative practitioners through the Local Authority Arts Offices of the South East of Ireland (the website for this programme was short-listed for an e-government award in 2009 and 2010). Highlights in her art practice include an Art Council Residency and exhibition in the Zoology Genetic laboratories in the Zoology Department at Trinity College (2004-5), curation of ecological artist Cornelia Hesse-Honneger’s work for Visualise Carlow (2005) and her solo exhibition, ‘the local project’ at the Dock, Co. Leitrim (2006), comprising of a 30 minute film documentary and exhibition that celebrated Crann’s pioneering local native woodland planting scheme. In 2008 she created the first art & ecology resource website in Ireland www.ecoartnotebook.com and has since contributed to many international art & ecology networks. She began doctoral studies on her art-ecology-forest-politics practice in October 2010. For further information see: www.ecoartfilm.com
CIARA MCMAHON practices both art and medicine. Subjectivity, intersubjectivity and the body are explored in the work, which researches osmosis between the disciplines of art and medicine. In 2012 McMahon founded and curates deAppendix an ongoing residency and contemporary art programme. deAppendix is symbiotic or hybrid with a Dublin suburban GP surgery, Amaranta Family Practice. A forth coming article by McMahon commissioned for 2ha magazine on the project will be published later this summer. McMahon is currently collaborating with The open rehearsals group on an Arts Council funded film commission. She was awarded the Adurey E. Klinck scholarship at the Banff Arts Centre in 2011 and in 2010 was funded by Create, the national agency for collaborative arts, to research the Leaky Self Project . McMahon exhibits both nationally and internationally, exhibitions include Temporal Sequencing, Banff Arts Centre Canada, Liminality, NCAD Gallery; Détruis Space, The Joinery. For further information see:www.ciaramcmahon.