Some creative unsticking

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.

Two months in Paris

Artwork, Design for performance

I’ve been meaning to post this for ages, but only getting round to it now. Even though it was months ago, I’m still dreaming of my time on a wonderful two-month residency at the Centre Culturel Irlandais in Paris. Firstly, a huge thank you to the CCI for giving me the time there.

When I applied, I hoped for a chance to ringfence some time to be creative – something that I find very difficult to do with a dual career as an artist and a manager. In fact, the last time I’ve allowed myself to indulge (is it really indulgence?!) in reading, drawing, thinking, seeing things, and meeting people in such a dedicated way may have been at university. I’m talking about the turn of the century here, people.

The CCI residency itself is luxuriously simple: they fly you over, put you up in the beautiful building in the fancy 5th arrondissement, and give you a stipend of €700 per month to keep you going. I was also given access to my own studio (bliss) across the courtyard.

While you have to give an outline in your application of what you’d like to do, when you’re there you are left to you own devices, which is wonderfully freeing. And does feel like a luxury. It was an extraordinary feeling to be taken seriously enough as an artist to be supported in this way. For me, it means I take my own creativity more seriously too. Which I’m normally not great at.

And what did I do? A big part of what I’d wanted to do was get to know the city a bit better – I threw away 4 new pairs of socks over the two months, worn out with all the walking.

Towards the end of my time there I had a small panic that I’d not really done anything, so I started to make a list. Phew. Exhibitions, talks (given and attended), performances, books, music, countless excellent, thought-provoking chats. And lots of time in the studio, sitting staring out the window, writing, drawing, and (a little surprisingly) painting.

One result was a series of simple portraits on cardboard. Not sure where it’s leading me, but it was really, really refreshing to just try things out with no ultimate agenda. Another small revelation for me was to understand the imperative of safe-guarding the time I need to transition from the ‘admin’ way of thinking to the creative way of thinking. A hugely valuable lesson for me. Now the trick is to find a way to transpose some of the creative, relaxed, invigorating Paris energy into Dublin life. Fingers crossed.

…

Design for Stage and Screen Ireland website

Design for performance

Earlier this year I worked with Ewa Segner and Siobhán Bourke of Irish Theatre Institute to compile a website to highlight stage and screen designers coming from and working in Ireland.

You can access the website here. It is in Beta mode for the next few weeks, and the content is being updated and added to every day – an ever-growing catalogue of the work of costume, set, lighting and sound designers/composers who design for the stage, and production, hair, makeup and costume designers who design for screen.

A Girl is a Half Formed Thing horizon ideas sketch

Most exciting (for me) is the chance to see some of the sketches side by side with the final production images – it’s always a treat to see the development of ideas, and the idiosyncratic ways that designers approach their work.

The timing of the website going live in June was to coincide with both the year of Irish Design and the Prague Quadrennial of Performance Design and Space. However, it is a resource that will be kept up by ITI, along the same lines as their Playography and Irishtheatre.ie sites.

Ireland mapping report for IETM

Other work

Earlier this year, I was commissioned by the secretariat of the IETM international network to write a ‘mapping’ report that outlines the current situation of the contemporary performing arts in Ireland. Incredibly difficult to distill it all down, but I had a go.

Here it is in all its sweeping, unsubtle, gap-filled glory.

(Thanks to Cian O’Brien of Project Arts Centre for being the outside eye and reassuring me that you’d never guess from reading it that I was a left-leaning liberal.)

World Scenography 1975-1990 now available

Other work

Book cover of World Scenography 1975-1990

Some years ago I was hired by Irish Theatre Institute to research Irish design for performance as part of the Irish contribution to World Scenography 1975-1990, a publication commissioned by OISTAT, the International Organisation of Scenographers, Theatre Architects and Technicians. The book is now published and available to buy online.

OISTAT says:

World Scenography 1975-1990 is the first volume in a new series of books looking at significant stage design throughout the world since 1975. This volume, documenting 1975-1990, has been about four years in the making and has had contributions from hundreds of people in more than 70 countries. Despite this range of input, it is not possible for it to be encyclopædic, much as the editors would like. Neither is the series a collection of “greatest hits,” despite the presence of many of the greatest designs of the period being examined. Instead, the object is to present designs that made a difference, designs that mattered, designs of influence; to document for posterity a collection of the significant theatrical set, costume, and lighting designs from the period.