I’m part-way through studying for the MA/MFA Art in the Contemporary World at the National College of Art and Design. Last year our class made a collective publication; we each wrote texts, gathered notes on radical art collectives, designed our own pages, and shared the crediting. So if you read it you have to guess who wrote what. I wrote (giving the game away) something about obedience and the city, after finding out that the Latin motto for Dublin translates along the lines of: Obedient citizens make a happy city.
Radical Togetherness evolved out of a class led by artist Sarah Pierce, and the overall design and cover were by Ellen Martin-Friel. The publication was selected to be shown and sold at the Temple Bar Gallery + Studios annual Art Book Fair 2024, guest curated by Adrian Duncan to the theme Fictions: The makings of other worlds. We made a small profit which was donated to the Palestinian Children’s Relief Fund.
At the end of last year, I was surprised and pleased that a text I wrote was announced as a runner up in the Sarah Cecilia Harrison Essay Prize at the National Gallery of Ireland. The prize is sponsored by the family of the artist and suffragette to reward new research and writing about women in Ireland’s visual culture, as a way of re-vivifying stories that have faded. The family have committed to run it for ten years, and I hope that there are plans to make a book of the 30 or so selected pieces of writing at the end of it all. I’d definitely read it.
My surprise at being selected was partly because the text, called Doubles: a new archive, hovers on the edge of what could be called an essay. The writer and theatre maker Gina Moxley (also my friend and taker of the photo above) coined the term ‘messay’ to describe it. Doubles is partly about stained glass artist Wilhelmina Geddes and painter and champion of artists Sarah Purser. But it is also about tennis, friendship, 24 Pembroke Street Upper, the feel of materials in your hands, and the vertiginous overwhelm of archival research. In it, I conjure an speculative archive into being through the reading of a list of the contents of an imagined archive box. The archive is of the relationship between three pairs of women, living in different centuries and overlapping at a particular location.
I gave the text its first public outing at the Hugh Lane Gallery in late November, where I was asked to read it to the Sarah Purser Study Morning. The text is accompanied by an archive box of specially made glasswork made by my old friend Susan O’Connor. I am hopeful that the work will be published later this year.
After reading my thoughts about surface travel, a few people have asked about the sail-rail trip to London from Dublin. Here are some very practical notes from my experience for people who are thinking of giving it a go. I tend to travel on my own, so the notes reflect that.
Unsurprisingly, Covid slowed down projects I was working on, and knocked some out completely. It also knocked my confidence as an artist – primarily because of the lack of regular creative work, a dearth of substantive contact with other artists, and having to adapt to new ways of working that weren’t always conducive to my creativity.
So it was a real pleasure recently to be able to finally air some ideas for a set design project that had straddled a lot of that Covid time, with a work in progress showing nearly two years after we first started talking about it. The Holding Bones project hit a load of bumps in the road, but the show was changing shape and bursting to come to life. And it helped keep me connected with some kind of creative life too.
I’ve known Niamh Lawlor of Puca Puppets for many years though we have never worked together. So I was pleased when in late 2020 she asked me to help design a production that was a bit of a departure for her. Even more so when I heard she’s also asked director Veronica Coburn and sound designer/composer Sinéad Diskin to work on it. Two women with strong theatre practices, who I respect hugely and hadn’t yet had an opportunity to work with.
The Holding Bones is a one woman show about death and about our connection with ancestors and family. It’s gentle and sad and funny. It’s written by Niamh about her family, and this was the first time she’d be working in this way, with a director and designers. She is a skilled artist and multitasker who is used to doing it all herself. She also has a long career as a deft puppeteer, and it was clear we should use her talents to help tell the story – even though it was adamantly not a puppet show. Or even a show with puppets.
We started out deep in early 2021 lockdown. Like many others, we were anxiously trying to figure out how to do our creative work via Zoom. Building up a meaningful artistic language between people working together collaboratively for the first time is a complex enough process. It turns out that doing it online dulls a lot of the organic, human connections that I didn’t even realise were going on in previous processes. How to do something meaningful and inventive and joyful and three dimensional while talking to small faces on a screen in my spare room. At the end of 2021 we progressed to meeting in a room, masks carefully on. My first time physically in rehearsals since autumn 2020. I found both these online and offline experiences unsettling and nerve-wracking. Was it obvious to everyone that I was off my stride? That I was struggling to remember how to think as a designer? That I felt a bit creatively shrivelled?
In the room together we had the time to play. I’d almost forgotten how. To not focus too much on the final product yet. To develop a visual and aural language that suited the piece, and that wove all of our aesthetics and ideas in. We played with paper and light and clay and music and drawings and yarn and voice and plastic sheeting and tinfoil and sound. We tried to find ways of populating the stage around Niamh with other beings. Veronica and I both wanted to see Niamh the artist on stage – a glimpse of her overcrowded workspace, her beautiful drawings, the way her hands make objects come to life. I didn’t have enough time. I felt I could have spent at least another week or two or more in this process of bringing the materials to life and finding out which ones would serve best.
By the time we did a work in progress showing of The Holding Bones in the Civic Theatre at the end of 2022, I had designed two full productions since Covid – Sing Your Failures and Hive City Legacy – and was feeling a bit more confident again in my creative abilities (though I still resist having creative conversations via Zoom). Niamh and Veronica had created an almost fully-formed show, and we had come up with a satisfying design that would allow for further exploration and development, should The Holding Bones get a further life. We felt it was in a very good state. It had been a slow road to get to this point and Niamh had put so much energy and work and inventiveness into the piece – I primarily wanted to make sure she was happy with how it had all come out.
In the Civic studio, on a wintery Saturday afternoon, Veronica and I talked the assembled audience through what they were about to see, how we had worked together, and our hopes for the future physical staging of the piece. And we sat back and watched Niamh weave her gentle magic over the people in the room.
I can’t honestly say that I feel fully creatively unstuck yet. At all. The last few years have been frustrating from that point of view. But doing things like playing with the team on The Holding Bones has kept me buoyed up enough to keep swimming into this new year.
While on residency in Arteles Creative Centre in Finland last September I got to know the quiet dirt roads of the area by bike. The bikes available at the centre had no gears and only back pedal breaks, which made stopping on gravel surfaces challenging, and the rare downhill swoops felt specially daredevilish. The bikes had upright black frames and made me, in my black coat and jeans, feel like an Edward Gorey character pedalling through the open farmland surrounding the centre.
Cycling was a way to explore, and a chance to get some air
after long days spent in my workroom. Having no gears meant I was forced to
decelerate from the speeds I usually cycle in Dublin’s city centre. At first it
felt hugely frustrating. I couldn’t get anywhere in a hurry. I waved at the few
people and cars that I passed, and usually got a wary side-eye.
On those wide open flat landscapes you can watch the weather coming. I often found myself frantically pedalling to get to some kind of shelter – a bus stop, or a particularly lush tree – while heavy bluegrey rainclouds swooped at me over the open farmland. Another challenge was the pockmarked surface of the dirt roads themselves, with copious potholes from, I’m guessing, the harsh winters. Those bikes were not made for swerving, especially on gravel.
Over the weeks, thanks to the residency’s policy of no
phones and limited internet access, I settled into the luxury of living at a
more tranquil pace. I became happier with my slow cycling. I stopped trying to
get anywhere, and started to just explore all the little back roads and woods
nearby.
From my first days in Finland, I’d noticed many rowan trees
laden with their distinctive red berries among all the silver birch. Irish and
Finnish flora seems to have quite a lot in common – between the red rowans and
the browning bracken, I felt at home.
Since my automatic impulse to find out more by tapping
‘rowan’ into a computer wasn’t available to me, I enjoyed my ignorance and
settled with mentally saluting each rowan I passed on my slow bike.
Cycling back to Arteles one day during my last week there, I
wove in and out of the gravelly potholes and imagined filling the holes in the
road as a thank you to the centre, to the people living around it – knowing
that even if I did the coming frozen winter would reopen those holes, or create
new ones, or both. I began to imagine filling the holes with rowan berries
instead – to make something beautiful and surprising for the people passing,
and also to celebrate the futility of my trying to actually repair their road.
But by the time I’d had this idea, the majority of the rowan berries were already shrivelled or gone – the short autumn was already giving way to frost. I only managed to collect enough berries to test out one pothole, so when I left, I left instructions for next year’s harvest.
In the scorching summer of 2018, Róise Goan invited me to be part of a great team of artists, making another performance with and about Donegal local stories and local people. The first time was with She Knit The Roof. This show was called Foyle Punt, after a particular kind of local wooden boat. As part of the show, we commissioned a boat to be made by the famous McDonald boatyard of Greencastle.
I got to spend some magical summer weeks in beautiful Moville, in the very far north of the country, with Caitriona McLaughlin, Darren Murphy, Little John Nee, Farah Elle, Jennie Moran, Lisa Mahony, Evie McGuinness, Brian Mooney, and the boatbuilder Philip McDonald who also performed in the show.
The highlight of my time there was spending a week as an honorary member of the Moville Men’s Shed as we (they) built the few set pieces. Lakes of tea, mountains of chocolate biscuits, and endless quiet slagging of my carpentry skills. Shout out to Hubert (standing on the right of this photo) for the best sarcastic eye roll on the island. I might have been offended if I could understand a word any of them said.
I won’t lie. Touring a show with a boat to 6 harbours in 10 days nearly killed us all. And what eejit decided that stones were an integral part of the design and had to tour with us? But on the plus side, I had biceps for the first and only time in my life. At the most difficult moments, we pursed our lips and said that at some point we’d probably look back at the experience fondly, forgetful dopes that we were. I guess this is that point.
And to be fair, when it went well it was absolute magic. I’ll always remember the day at Raghly harbour in Sligo, which is just about the most beautiful place you could imagine working. The weather was incredibly tranquil. We arrived in the van first thing in the morning, quickly mapped out how the show would be set up, set it up, stopping every once in a while to look at the changing light on Ben Bulben, did the show to a full house, fed the audience, took everything down in the dark, and only as we packed the van the wind picked up a little and we realised how differently our day could have gone if there’d been even a breeze.
We finished that night in the legendary Ellen’s pub, accidentally becoming part of a kind of wake for the ashes of the local writer Leland Bardwell, who was an old friend of my father’s.
Róise set up The Local Group as a way of making high quality theatre that is rooted in local stories, local history, local places and local people, and that the team making it becomes embedded in the local community. The fact that Foyle Punt and She Knit The Roof were both sell-out successes and attracted crowds from far and wide is testament to her vision. Fingers crossed that more excellent Local Group comes soon.
