Funded by the Irish Museum of Modern Art, Rolfe’s film, Into the Mire, was commissioned for installation at the Crawford Gallery (Cork, Ireland) as a complement to the group exhibition ‘The Rocky Road’ (November 2011–January 2012).
Filmed in August 2011 at the Bog of Allen – a large bog located in the centre of Ireland between the rivers Liffey and Shannon – Into The Mire is a slow-motion capture of the artist falling into deep, dirty bog water. Rolfe frames the back yard ‘bog’ of Ireland in terms of the country’s Euro-economic relations, current poverty crisis and the impending failures of the geopolitical landscape.
Commissioned within the context of ‘The Rocky Road’ exhibition – a show concerned with the investigation of art production in Ireland, the difficult public reception of artworks, and subsequent afterlife of these particular works – Rolfe’s new work, Into the Mire, was shown in proximity to documentation of Rolfe’s 1977 solo exhibition of balancing sculptures at the Funge Arts Centre, Wexford, an exhibition that received aggressive negative reactions in the popular press at the time. Together, these works articulate Rolfe’s artistic research into the landscape, place and sociopolitics that emblematise human differences.
The programme for ‘The Rocky Road’ included a live podcast discussion between the exhibition’s curator Sean Lynch and Rolfe. Into the Mire was purchased for the Crawford Gallery permanent collection. The work was widely reviewed, including by the Sunday Times (27 November 2011) and Irish Times (http://www.thesundaytimes.co.uk/sto/news/ireland/_culture/arts/article829158.ece)
and was broadcast on RTE TV and radio, Ireland.
In 2012, the film was screened internationally at universities and institutions, including the, ‘Konteksty: The 2nd Sokolovsko Festival of Ephemeral Art’, Poland (2012), Virginia Commonwealth University, Virginia, USA (2012), ‘The Days of Performance Art’ in Lviv, Ukraine (2012), and the Guangzhou Academy of Fine Arts (GAFA), Guangzhou, China (2012).