From in and with draws on Anne Tallentire’s long standing interest in urban infrastructure, mobility, hidden labour, processes of chance and translation. The titles of the photographs relate to the names of six architects (Ruth Morrow, Jane Rendell, Gráinne Hassett, Ellen Rowley, Culturstruction and Alice Casey) who Tallentire commissioned to write four, 100 word texts each in response to images of buildings in Dublin. The objects depicted in the photographs (produced through various processes of drawing), were selected and worked with in response to, and in association with, the texts.
Printed as 24 c-type photographs formed one of three elements in Tallentire’s commission for Still we work (a curatorial project and exhibition devised by Valerie Connor in response to an invitation from The National Women’s Council of Ireland in 2013 to challenge clichéd mainstream representations of women and work). Still we work sought to engage diverse communities throughout Ireland by commissioning works by four artists that could be easily housed and transported in a portable container. 24 transcripts of the architect’s texts printed in the Still we work publication and 24 diagrammatic plan drawings etched on ply panels stored in a ply wood box (scaled to fit within the portable Still we work exhibition container) formed the other elements of Tallentire’s commission. Having toured Ireland for three years, the work owned by The NWCI is on permanent loan to the collection of the Limerick City Art Gallery and Museum.
In 2016 Tallentire began to reprint the From in and with photographs on a slightly larger scale so they could be exhibited more widely. They simultaneously originate and deviate from the original commission and are significant to Tallentire’s overall practice. A practice that frequently engages in dialogue between the camera and the object, e.g. Photositings, Instances (performances), Manifesto (work seth-tallentire) and Zero-58, through processes of making and unmaking, construction, deconstruction, the placing of things and that here also draws upon languages of architecture and embodied gender politics.
