12’ 57’’ Radio Play
The Model, Sligo
2021
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Radio play partly inspired by a Jack B. Yeats painting, ‘Man on a Train, Thinking,’ (1927) and a grisly ghost story told by the artist at the annual RHA dinner. A surreal comedy plays out between two conflicting projections of Irish national identity as it was being constructed in the early days of Irish Independence. Blending historical research and present-day conspiracies, the train is used as a metaphor for enduring binary debates such as public versus private; progress versus nostalgia; tourism versus conservation and even Dublin versus the rest of Ireland.
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credits:
Artist voiced by Peter Broderick
Bureaucrat voiced by Ruth Clinton
Music by Aoife Hammond & Ruth Clinton
Additional voices and sounds by Cormac MacDiarmada and Niamh Moriarty
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Supported by a Leitrim County Council Collaborative Artists’ Bursary.
GO WEST was selected as part of the annual Pallas Projects Periodical Review, ‘12: Practical Magic’ with Basic Space in 2022.
Excerpts of this radio play and a sequel titled Stone by Stone featuring the voice of Patrick Curley were included in a solstice radio special Last Stop : Grianstad presented by Ruth Clinton & Niamh Moriarty on Dublin Digital Radio and broadcast from the Rainbow Ballroom of Romance in Glenfarne, Co. Leitrim on 21 December 2021 (see stills from live visuals left).
Concert and Video Vignettes
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Press Release:
Two Miles Of Earth For A Marking Stone is a concert of traditional songs by the Irish four-part harmony group Landless, with an experimental video accompaniment commissioned by Solas Nua (Washington D.C.) for International Women’s Day, all filmed outdoors between Leitrim and Sligo in winter 2020/21.
Brigid, the Irish pre-Christian goddess of poetry, is the inspiration for a psychic vision exploring feelings of intangible longing arising from experiences of emigration. Film clips set in the North-West of Ireland appear as interjections through the music, with the themes of the songs mirroring each corresponding scene in the saga. The songs follow the story of two sisters, who journey across the ocean and through a mountain, representing a search for a better future as well as a descent into the subconscious and destructive forms of ‘progress’. When her son Ruadán fell in battle, Brigid is said to have cried out - the first time keening was heard in Ireland. Landless’ singing can be thought of as a kind of keening, as might have been heard at an ‘American wake’, held on the eve of the emigrant journey.
Landless are Lily Power, Meabh Meir, Ruth Clinton and Sinead Lynch. Based in Dublin, Belfast and Sligo, they sing unaccompanied traditional songs in close four-part harmony. For this performance they are joined by Consuelo Breschi (Varo/Nomadic Piano Project).
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Video Credits
Concert:
Thom McDermott - Camera/Edit
Sean Treacy - Camera/Lighting
John Spud Murphy - Live Sound Recording, Mixing and Production
Cantique Typeface by Sébastien Hayez for Velvetyne Libre & Open Source Type Foundry
With thanks to Miranda Driscoll, Aoife Hammond & Cormac MacDiarmada
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Kindly supported by the Dock, Carrick-on-Shannon, the US Embassy of Ireland and the Northern Ireland Bureau in Washington DC.
Commissioned for Solas Nua, Washington D.C., International Women’s Day and the 15th annual Capitol Irish Film Festival, 2021
The Model Sligo, Depth of Field film shorts at ‘Out of Step’ weekender / festival, 2022
HD Video and Soundscape
July 2020
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Press Release:
Echolocation is a 25 minute performative story filmed and recorded on location between the artists' homes in Leitrim and Sligo. Festival-goers in Sligo were invited to take a solitary walk around Doorly Park while listening in online. The work is best heard using stereo speakers or headphones.
The story of a set of twins who inadvertently start a popular protest movement in their local forest is told as a nonsensical one-sided phone conversation. While enacting a peaceful tree-top sit-in, the twins are confronted with parallel struggles of technological progress versus heritage; communication versus interference and surveillance, and conservation versus tourism. An in-unison story-telling technique is coupled with mirror imagery and layered sound, in order to convey an atmosphere of collapsing time, displacement and uncertainty.
Inspired by media accounts of popular Irish protest movements from the last 25 years, including a campaign to save the Glen of the Downs’ old-growth woodland threatened by road construction; efforts to block Royal Dutch Shell (Shell to Sea) from laying natural gas pipeline through a small rural village; and ongoing anti-war actions against US military use of Shannon Airport, our present research concerns Ireland’s complicated relationship with its colonial past and capitalist present.
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With thanks to Aoife Hammond and Cormac MacDiarmada. This project was kindly supported by the Arts Council of Ireland, Askeaton Contemporary Arts and Fingal County Council.
12’ 21” radio play / eulogy
stitched chrysanthemum funeral wreath
April 2012
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presented as part of ‘Prelude to Nothing: selected and devised works to mark a moment of finality’
The LAB Gallery, curated by David Fagan
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A composed radio play (or radio-broadcast funeral) to commemorated the switching off of satellite analogue television. The eulogy begins with a short story about a man descending from a ship above the sky and drowning in the earth's atmosphere. Recorded at St. Mary's Church in Howth, including a funeral march performed by Ruth Clinton on the church organ.
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‘Prelude to Nothing’ was a live event initiated by David Fagan to mark the final hours before the transmission of analogue satellite television channels to Europe was discontinued.
