For the 2026 Burren Annual, Burren College of Art is pleased to present Original Copy: Mushrooms, Megaliths and Maculate Monuments, a group exhibition featuring Original Copy (Riccardo Carbone and John Strutton) in collaboration with John Cage, George Shaw & Marissa Stoffer.
For the past 13 years Riccardo Carbone and John Strutton have worked collaboratively under the moniker “Original Copy” creating both digital and analogue devices to translate visual material into sound, text and musical notation for live performances, video works, audio recordings and installations. Over the last several years they have collaborated with a number of artists to produce works that explore ideas of place, time, ritual, chance and the process of fragmentation. For this exhibition they will be presenting works made in two previous collaborations with the artists George Shaw and Marissa Stoffer and a response to an archive of works by the composer and artist John Cage.
John Cage was a revolutionary American avant-garde composer, philosopher, and artist. He is widely regarded as one of the most influential and controversial figures of 20th-century music. Cage completely redefined the boundaries of art by introducing elements of chance, Eastern philosophy, and environmental sound into Western music traditions. His lifelong passions for mushroom hunting and mycology were explored in the Mushroom Book, a 1972 portfolio created in collaboration with textile designer Lois Long and prominent mycologist Alexander H. Smith. For this exhibition Original Copy will make a new live performance and installation in response to the original works as well as a facsimile produced by Atelier Editions in 2020. Burren College of Art is delighted to partner with Limerick City Gallery of Art to present the Mushroom Book, a key work from the permanent collection, as part of the exhibition. The Mushroom Book will be exhibited in the context of works created in dialogue with it by Original Copy.
Both: Original Copy, Fungi Drawings, 2026
George Shaw is a contemporary painter widely celebrated for his highly detailed, realistic depictions of British suburban life, focusing heavily on the post-war council estate where he grew up in Coventry. He was nominated for the Turner Prize in 2011 and was the Associate Artist at the National Gallery in London from 2014 to 2016. In late December 2023 George Shaw and John Strutton made a three-day walk on Dartmoor to record and produce some material with a view to revisiting a collaborative show they had made in 2000 called “The Land of Nod”. Before undertaking the walk Original Copy made a particular version of their software which created a response that would continually reference a single set of samples all taken from the 1981 single by The Specials, Ghost Town. This particular song and its associated cultural and visual references to both popular culture and the political landscape of Thatcher’s Britain played a large part in the London show in 2000 and acts as an emotive touchstone for both Shaw and Strutton’s family backgrounds in the kind of manufacturing industries decimated by Thatcherite policies.
George Shaw, Midwinter, Humbrol Enamel on Board
Marissa Stoffer is a contemporary artist and educator whose practice explores ecology, plants, and humanity’s evolving relationships with the natural world. She has exhibited widely as well as taking part in residencies in Peru, Ireland, Finland and China and is currently working on a project at Kew Gardens in London. Marissa has been involved in several collaborations with Original Copy resulting in a number of live performances, short film works and installations. The performances have a highly ritualistic feel to them involving costumes, mark making, manipulating objects and responding to text generated randomly by the software in a form of vocal summoning and chanting. The collaboration presented for this exhibition comes from responding to work Marissa made whilst exploring the material qualities and historical importance of the iconic London plane tree that grows throughout the city in both its grand municipal parks and its modest suburban streets.
Marissa Stoffer, Song of Earth, 2025. Artist Pigments (Bamboo, Field Horsetail, Himalayan Nettle, Peach, Chinese Dawn Redwood, Earth) oil on Ramie, 85cm × 100cm
The Burren Annual series of exhibitions brings Irish and international artists working with diverse modes of practice to the Burren to engage local and visiting audiences. Inaugurated in 2004 it foregrounds Burren College of Art as a site for discourse and artistic engagement and prioritises the rural as a hub for building local and international creative networks. The Burren Annual 2026 is generously supported by funding from the Arts Office, Clare County Council. Burren College of Art also extends a special thank you to Limerick City Gallery of Art for the generous loan of the Mushroom Book.
