Gareth churning up folk art from Ikea flat-packs

 City Lives – Bernie Ní Fhlatharta hears how artist Gareth Kennedy gives new insight into traditional craft

Turning flat-pack IKEA furniture into folk-art pieces may seem bizarre at first but the process is in itself very creative and the results are currently being exhibited in the Galway City Museum.

The creator of Folk Fiction – Translations in Material Cultures, is Gareth Kennedy, a young man who was reared in the city but who has been living elsewhere for the past number of years.

The exhibition is touring at present and will be in Galway until the end of January, giving people a chance to see and touch a butter churn, a great spinning wheel and lobster pots made from various flat packs bought in IKEA.

The IKEA furniture was brought to each locale where it was used as raw material by locally sourced tradesmen and craftsmen to generate new socio-economic folk forms and functions.

Part of the exhibition are two 30-minute films documenting the process of turning these flat packs into the various items, filmed in Super 8 and without verbal narration.

One of them is a reflection of the economic situation, as a flat-pack IKEA kitchen table (a Norden table to be exact, priced at just €179) is turned into a butter churn in an unfinished house on a unfinished housing estate in Kerry. When the churn is completed, it is put to use and everyone in the village comes in to give it a whirl to make the butter which is then ceremoniously transported to the nearest bog and buried for posterity.

Gareth has a huge interest in folk history and anthropology and had the backing of the Arts Council for this particular work.

In fact, most, if not all of his works at the moment are public art commissions. He is working on another one for the Headford Men’s Shed project for Galway County Council, while other projects on the cards for next year include one for Killarney National Park, another in Northern Italy and in Tel Aviv, Israel.

He is just back from Russia, St Petersburg to be exact, where he photographed barren landscapes, both urban and rural for another project that is still being developed.

As with most of his generation (mid thirties), Gareth’s portfolio is on his laptop and phone and, as he is describing projects and ideas, he is able to scroll to the appropriate image.

“I work non-stop these days but I do mix work with play so when I am travelling it is obviously a bit of both. I have a great interest in how people live and their environment.”

When he was in Russia – he has been three times this year – he worked on a public arts project that involved schools and he visited an IKEA factory there, as most of the wood used by then for their furniture is grown in Russia. He loves knowing where materials come from, so he knows the pedigree of the final item, so to speak.

“I feel we made a time capsule that will be part of our heritage with the making of the churn which made butter that could be preserved in a bog for thousands of years!” says Gareth who got a kick out of turning a modern piece of furniture into an old-fashioned item, which effectively is no longer used in Irish kitchens, but which has a place in our folk history.

He is fascinated by the preservation of old skills, such as weaving and lobster pot making, which he filmed on the Aran Islands.

“I love the way the lobster pots made in Aran sit here near the hand-made Galway hooker in a museum overlooking the Claddagh. It means a lot to me to have this exhibition here in Galway.

For more, read this week’s Galway City Tribune.