Houlihan creates a discourse between art and community by engaging directly with people and places, be it offering leg-ups over walls to people in Copenhagen, collaborating with members of Dublin’s parkour community, or helping residents of Greensboro, North Carolina re- arrange their homes. Her work is concerned with the connections and bonds that come out of these exercises - actions which tease out the transformative dimensions of collaborative practice. Houlihan has been living in Manorhamilton since June investigating the surplus of housing in Leitrim. At first interested in partnering with locals, banks and developers to knock an unlived-in house, she's altered her project after the lack of interest from the public forced Houlihan to rethink people's relationship with their houses.This process-based exhibition will deal with the effects of so-called ghost estates on the Leitrim landscape and, with the help of local builders, will seek to transform some of the detritus of the housing boom into a more tangible, usable object
Emma Houlihan is a cultural producer and artist whose practice involves public projects, collaborations, participative and curatorial practice. Houlihan creates a discourse between art and community by engaging directly with people and places, be it offering leg-ups over walls to people in Copenhagen, collaborating with members of Dublin’s parkour community, or helping residents of Greensboro, North Carolina re- arrange their homes. Her work is concerned with the connections and bonds that come out of these exercises, actions which tease out the transformative dimensions of collaborative practice.
International residencies include PLATFORM (Vasa, Finland), FRAGMENTED CITY (Fondazione Antonio Ratti, Como, Italy) and Elsewhere Artist Collaborative (Greensboro, NC, USA). Exhibition's include How do you Know?(Blanspace, Oakland, CA, USA), Too early for Vacation, (ev+a, Limerick curated by Hon Hanru), alt_cph (Copenhagen, Denmark) and City of Ideas (Galway, Ireland) . She was awarded the Emerging Artist Award 2007/2008 from the National Sculpture Factory, Ireland and is a recipient of the Arts Council of Ireland Bursary Award, 2009. Emma currently lives and works between Dublin and Stockholm