First Fortnight presents
Visual artists Helen Delany and Brenda Aherne (AKA Electronic Sheep) have created a new artwork Notifications Off which aims to open up a conversation around mental health awareness.
The knitted Tapestry focuses on the positive and depicts places, people and objects that bring happiness, particularly in times of sadness. It also portrays activities that improve mental health and day-to-day life. It is a colourful, fun, joyous, surreal art piece.
The work weaves in a range of people including artists and cultural figures who have kindly contributed to its creation – Gavin Friday, Róisín Murphy, Aisling Bea, Ben Tomoka and Bamboo Westwood, Vince Power, Dylan Philips and Laura Whitmore. A year in the making, the textile is a hybrid of pencil/digital drawings executed in the artists’ signature style.
Commissioned by First Fortnight and the Arts Council of Ireland it will launch at Project Arts Centre as part of the First Fortnight Festival. The Tapestry installation will also be shown in Art Galleries in London and Paris in 2023
Accessibility
If you require assistance for your visit, please do not hesitate to contact us at access@projectartscentre.ie or call 01 8819 613 . You can find the latest information about Project’s accessibility here.
Credits
Electronic Sheep
Biographies
Internationally-renowned Electronic Sheep was established in 1998 by NCAD alumni and multi-disciplinary designers/artists Brenda Aherne and Helen Delany. The label’s unique, signature style comprises illustrative and typographic jacquards based on narrative storylines drawing on the designers’ personal lives and professional practices. Electronic Sheep are keen collaborators, regularly working with designers, historians and activists, often to the benefit of social initiatives and charitable agencies.
Childhood friends Brenda Aherne and Helen Delany graduated in 1992 from NCAD in Fashion and Visual Communication respectively. Individually, the designers enjoyed prestigious industry experience in London, New York, Rome and Munich before joining forces in 1998. Initially funded by a start-up Guinness award ‘The Hudson Blue’ for innovation in knitwear technology, Electronic Sheep has developed into a label specialising in unisex graphic knits. The product of a heightened aesthetic sensibility, filtered through the complementary disciplines of fashion and graphic design, their signature style has appeared in i-D, Vogue, Grazia, Elle and Kaltblut, among other international style bibles. Based in London and Dublin, they have regularly exhibited at London Fashion Week since 2011, and at Paris Fashion Week in 2018, and are currently distributing to independent sellers throughout the UK, Europe and Japan.
Join us in the Cube for an official launch event on Friday 6th January at 4.30pm.
Electronic Sheep have won several design awards since graduating from NCAD. In 2020 they won a prestigious IDI award for their collaboration ‘Mixed Tape’ design. They were also won a culture fund award by Brent 2020 (London Borough of Culture). Brenda and Helen produced a knitted tapestry The Kilburn Tapestries’ for this project which launched in 2021.
Funding
Commissioned by First Fortnight with support from the Arts Council of Ireland
Project Arts Centre is proudly supported by The Arts Council and Dublin City Council.