TLWL Final Low-Res Single Pages

‘…the lives we live’ Grangegorman Public Art
rman Public Art Prof. Ciarán Benson Public Art Working Group
o-Construction Prof. Doris Sommer Pre-Texts Some New Life
A Masterplan for the 21st Century John Mitchell James Mary
ek Dockrell Health Service Executive Breaking the
Century, What Does it Take to Build and Establish a Technological
trick Technological University Dublin The Possibility
Garrett Phelan Solaris Nexum Alexandra Carr Feilden
er and Walker Heneghan Peng Architects West Quad
rgus Martin McCullough Mulvin Architects Todd
are Centre Aisling Prior Joy Gerrard Dusk/Dawn Oisín
m The Life of Loans: On the Politics of Belonging and Co-existence
ice of Public Works Irish Museum of Modern Art
nk Mary Burke Alan Counihan Marie Holohan Gemma
iman Dorothy Smith Stories Between Us Janine Davidson
al School Henrietta Adult Community Education
School of Creative Arts Kieran Corcoran Time As Form Nasir
irasi Confinement Trish McAdam National Archives
ck O’Hara Connell Vaughan Crocosmia × Clodagh Emoe
lkers Fiona Whelan Rialto Youth Project Create
tina Henri Incarceration Altars Bernie Masterson Irish
u Be in Mine? Jennie Guy John Beattie Ella de Búrca
’s CBS Fiona Gannon Home on the Grange Emmett Scanlon
’Keefe Hilary Murray NatureRX Kaethe Burt-O’Dea
lis Nick Roth Maire Saaritsa Dominica Williams
aking Down the Walls City of Dublin Winter Solstice Festival A Creative
mashing Times Aspire Edmund Rice Trust Slí An
ublishing Partnership TU Dublin Early Childhood
y-Step TU Dublin Photography Ann Curran One Hour
angegorman Drawings Dorothy Smith Drawn Together Conor

CROCOSMIA × CLODAGH EMOE 2–3

Grangegorman site, c.1940s, courtesy of GDA

‘…the lives
we live’
Grangegorman
Public Art

The Grangegorman Development Agency (GDA) was
set up in 2006 to redevelop the grounds of St. Brendan’s
Psychiatric Hospital into a new urban quarter
for Dublin city. Integral to the Strategic Plan was provision
for public art. 1
The Irish Government’s national
Per Cent for Art Scheme allocates a percentage of the
total budget of the government-funded capital project
for the arts. 2
The GDA commissioned the Grangegorman
Arts Strategy (2012) which outlines a vision,
values and direction for public art as an integral part of
the overall design and redevelopment. 3
The Strategy
articulates the intent to commission art that builds and
connects with a diversity of artists and arts practices
for Grangegorman and its extensive networks in ways
that are artistically ambitious and relevant to a diversity
of communities. Key to the success of the delivery
of the Strategy was the establishment of a Public Art
Working Group by the GDA and the appointment of a
Public Art Coordinator to lead the implementation of
‘…the lives we live’ Grangegorman Public Art. 4 This book
gives account of this work.
1 https://ggda.ie/strategic-plan, Section 6.3.3
2 https://publicart.ie/main/commissioning/funding/per-cent-for-art-scheme
3 https://ggda.ie/assets/GG_Arts_Strategy1.pdf
4 www.ggda.ie/public_art

‘…the lives we live’
Grangegorman
Development Agency
Compiled and Edited by
Jenny Haughton and Lori Keeve
Proofread by Christopher Steenson
Design by Unthink
Printed by Impress Printing Works
December 2020. All rights reserved
Grangegorman Development Agency,
the authors, artists and publishers.
All images are copyright of the artists,
the Agency or named photographers.
© All rights reserved. No part of this
publication may be reproduced, stored
in a retrieval system, or transmitted in
any form or by any means, electronic,
mechanical, photocopying, recording
or otherwise, without the prior
permission in writing of the publisher.
ISBN 978-1-9998617-1-1
Published by Grangegorman
Development Agency
Gníomhaireacht Forbartha
Ghráinseach Ghormáin
Grangegorman Road Lower,
Dublin 7, Ireland.
www.ggda.ie/public_art
1 Extract from Dreams of a Summer
Night, New Collected Poems (2011),
by kind permission of the author,
Derek Mahon, and The Gallery Press.

Contents
10
A note to the reader
Jenny Haughton,
Public Art Coordinator.
12
‘…the lives we live’ Grangegorman
Public Art 2013–2021
Prof. Ciarán Benson, Chair,
Public Art Working Group.
17
Making It: Cities Under Co-Construction
Prof. Doris Sommer critiques
the UN’s over-emphasis on
policing and infrastructure
while gesturing to the arts in
achieving safety in the city.
Sommer introduced Pre-Texts
to Dublin’s inner city as an
art-based method of encouraging
people back to reading and
learning.
22
Some New Life for This Old Town
Ger Casey, Chief Executive,
Grangegorman Development
Agency, provides an overview
of the role and challenges
for this government appointed
Agency, established in 2006
to redevelop the 73 acre
Grangegorman site into a
revitalised and repurposed
urban quarter.
24
A Masterplan for the 21 st Century
John Mitchell, DMOD Architects,
shares some of his own insights
into the crafting and delivery
of the Masterplan for the
site. Included is a note by
Masterplanner James Mary
O’Connor, originally from
the area, describing how he
drew the original sketch that
has informed and guided the
Masterplan for over a decade.
26
Caring at Grangegorman:
Past, Present and Future
Derek Dockrell, Senior
Architect, Health Service
Executive, acknowledges the
chequered history of health
services and points to the
reuse and reintegration of new
and improved health services
that will ensure a patientcentred
approach to healthcare.
31
Breaking the Rule of Silence
Justine McDonnell’s
performative piece is about
the past and the continued
oppression traced to the ever
unfolding histories that resist
the politicisation of silence.
Essay by Sara Muthi.
36
In the 21 st Century, What Does it Take to Build
and Establish a Technological University in the
City and in the Wider World?
Prof. David FitzPatrick, newly
appointed to the position
of President of TU Dublin,
addresses this question by
positioning Ireland’s first
Technological University within
the international educational
sector, emphasising the
integrated approach to student
learning through practice,
research and engagement.
41
The Possibility of an Archive
Alan Phelan’s monumental video
projection onto the new Energy
Services Building comprises the
animation of classification
headings culled from historical
records of the former mental
health institutions. In
this way Phelan reveals past
human dystopias upon which
Grangegorman is being rebuilt.
47
THE GOLDEN BANDSTAND – Sculpture
Garrett Phelan continues to
explore art as function in
accessible environments. This
‘footprint’ is a signifier
for what will be situated
within sight of the general,
academic, educational and
nursing communities by summer
2021. Initially influenced by
the work of Dr. Joseph Lalor,
a Medical Superintendent at the
Grangegorman site in the 19 th
century, Phelan is committed
to art that is accessible to
people from all walks of life.
53
Solaris Nexum
Alexandra Carr explores our
changing connection to the sun
through technological shifts
of various ages. Comprised
of hundreds of triangular
polycarbonate panels that make
up a colossal helical sculpture
projected onto catenary arches,
it cascades down four floors
of the atrium in TU Dublin’s
Central Quad. This is a sitespecific
collaboration with
Feilden Clegg Bradley Studios
which will be installed by
summer 2021.
59
Endless Play
Walker and Walker’s sculpture
continues these artists’
questioning around the
relationship between the
observer and the observed.
Their intent is that this be
situated within the courtyard
of TU Dublin’s West Quad.
The artists are influenced
by Edouard Manet’s painting
Music in the Tuileries
(1862), housed in the Hugh
Lane Gallery Dublin, which
plays with similar concerns
to Diego Velazquez’ painting
Las Meninas. This is a sitespecific
collaboration with
Heneghan Peng Architects.

65
The Blue of the Sky, The Green of the Grass,
The Red of a Rose
Fergus Martin takes into
account contemporary thinking
about assisted living by
creating colour-based paintings
for the shared areas within
the HSE Residential Care
Neighbourhood. This is a sitespecific
collaboration with
McCullough Mulvin Architects
and Todd Architects.
71
Phoenix Care Centre Art
Aisling Prior curated two
commissions – Joy Gerard, Dusk/
Dawn and Oisín Byrne, Long Live
the Weeds and the Wilderness
Yet for the HSE Phoenix Care
Centre. Essay by John Graham.
76
The Life of Loans: On the Politics
of Belonging and Co-Existence
Christina Kennedy, Senior
Curator: Head of Collections,
IMMA, writes about the role
of public institutions in
lending art. She describes
the unique lending scheme
devised to accommodate artists
to lend existing artworks to
the HSE Grangegorman Primary
Care Centre.
85
Stories Between Us
Janine Davidson creates a
bespoke memory box about play
through intergenerational
discussion and exchange between
young students and senior
citizens. This art project,
comprising workshops and
exhibition, involved partnering
with the National Museum of
Ireland, St. Gabriel’s National
School, Henrietta Adult &
Community Education Service
and Phibsboro Active Retirement
Association.
90
TU Dublin School of Creative Arts
Kieran Corcoran, Head of
Dublin School of Creative
Arts, gives an account of
the transformation of the
DIT School of Art, Design and
Printing into the TU Dublin
School of Creative Arts,
bringing the visual arts
together with music, drama,
film, gaming, media, languages,
the Humanities and Social
Sciences into a custom built
building with studios, concert
and recital halls.
95
Time As Form: Nasir El Safi, Hina Khan,
Hichem and Nala.
Anita Groener writes about
how the TU Dublin School of
Creative Arts opened its
annual summer studios programme
to artists from Spirasi, a
locally-based organisation that
works with asylum seekers and
refugees with a special concern
for survivors of torture,
and gives her experience of
curating a public exhibition
of resulting works.
101
Confinement
Trish McAdam writes about her
approach to creating a digital
film and outdoor projection
narrated through the fictional
voice of the deceased Henrietta
resident and dancer Tony
Rudenko. This work incorporates
her discovery of pre-1900
patients admission photographs
to The Richmond Asylum,
now housed in the National
Archives. With music by Roger
Doyle, this work contributes
to contemporary questions of
socially-acceptable norms and
the outcome of Colonialism.
107
The Aesthetics Group
Jeanette Doyle, Cathy
O’Carroll, Mick O’Hara and
Connell Vaughan write about The
Aesthetics Group – a research
group affiliated with The
Graduate School of Creative
Arts and Media (GradCam), whose
present focus is to research
the aesthetics of language and
politics in the digital age.
111
Crocosmia
Clodagh Emoe forms a community
of interest with Spirasi and
schools in the Dublin 7 area
to continue her investigation
of place that questions
received notions of what is
‘native’ and what is ‘foreign’.
Finding that croscosmiflora
(Montbretia) grows in the
locality and that it is native
to South Africa, the group
replanted a publicly accessible
seating area within the
Grangegorman campus, creating
a new place and metaphor for
diversity in Ireland.
116
Grangegorman
Luke McManus, a local resident
of Grangegorman, writes with
insight about living in the
locality during this period of
change and suggests that the
perceived fear associated with
mentioning ‘Grangegorman’ is
being rapidly transformed.
121
What Does He Need?
Brokentalkers, Fiona
Whelan, and Rialto Youth
Project supported by Create
have initiated an ongoing
performative workshop project
that explores how men and boys
are shaped by and influence the
world they live in. Essay by
Charlotte McIvor.
127
Wear a Bonnet – Living Art Installation
Christina Henri’s installation
began with an invitation that
grew to become a large public
gathering to mark and remember
those who were transported
from the Grangegorman depot to
Tasmania between 1840–1853.
131
Incarceration Altars
Bernie Masterson has produced
and toured a series of short
films by people in prison
based on a singular chosen
item. In this way she explores
relationships between person,
place and object. The work is
accompanied by a publication
with essay by Aislinn O’Donnell.
137
The Masterplan and I’ll Be In Your Camp:
Will You Be in Mine?
Jennie Guy curates these two
nodes alongside John Beattie,
Ella de Búrca, Karl Burke,
Naomi Sex, D7 Educate Together,
‘the Brunner’/St. Paul’s
CBS and TU Dublin School of
Creative Arts in creatively
questioning what school is,
was and will be for, and in
developing creative new ways of
bridging the gap between second
and third level students. Essay
by Fiona Gannon.

142
Home on the Grange
Emmett Scanlon, Aisling
McCoy and Paul Guinan engage
Grangegorman residents through
photography, print, song
and broadsheet to reveal the
diversity of creativity in
home-making that is rarely part
of architectural discourse.
149
Grown Home
Clare Anne O’Keefe and Hilary
Murray have researched and
devised a ‘net-art’ archive
that builds knowledge and
reflects on the heterogeneous
nature of the culinary profile
of people in Dublin 7.
155
NatureRX
Kaethe Burt O’Dea and the Bí
Urban team alongside many
collaborators share elements
from their ongoing campaign
for a green prescription for
Dublin’s north inner city.
161
1916: A Revolutionary Cabaret!
Judith Mok choreographs
an alternative Cabaret to
counteract the destruction
that was rampant in Ireland
and across Europe around 2016
century. This was premiered
in St. Laurence’s Church in
Grangegorman and recorded
for educational and touring
purposes.
167
City of Dublin Winter Solstice Festival;
A Creative Celebration of the Centenary Vote
for Women and Breaking Down the Walls
Mary Moynihan and the Smashing
Times team give accounts of
their work with, amongst
others, Aspire, St. Paul’s CBS
and the Edmund Rice Trust in
breaking down walls that keep
us from the unknown. Their work
involves a wide range of arts’
disciplines from story-telling
to filmmaking, best experienced
in the popular Winter Solstice
Festival co-hosted with
TU Dublin.
175
To Be. To Wallow. To Wonder.
Maree Hensey, in collaboration
with Kids’ Own Publishing and
TU Dublin’s Early Childhood
Education Programme, explores
how children engage all their
senses in the development of
language and expression.
181
The Glass Garden
Devised by Brian Cregan,
The Glass Garden is a lensbased
participatory workshop,
exhibition and publication with
youth within the Grangegorman
locale – Aosóg and Step-By-Step
and with TU Dublin’s School of
Creative Arts, that explores
themes of self-representation,
identity and belonging in the
changing environment. Essay by
Ann Curran.
187
One Hour Archive
Louis Haugh has created an
online, one-hour audio, text
and photography walking tour
of the rich social history of
Stoneybatter. It is led and
narrated by the voices of the
senior members of the Tuesday
Knitting Club in Aughrim Court
which was founded by local
legend Alice Fitzharris in 2005.
Essay by Nathan O’Donnell.
193
Grangegorman Drawings
Dorothy Smith muses on the act
of drawing and accompanies her
text with drawings undertaken
as part of a residency with
Sisk on the East Quad site.
198
Drawn Together
Conor Sreenan writes about
the commissioning of largescale
axonometric drawings by
plattenbaustudio which capture
the character and texture of
the Grangegorman site and
neighbourhood in its current
and potential future states.
200
Index
202
Acknowledgements

A note to
the reader
Jenny Haughton
Public Art Coordinator
This book is written by people interested in public art – artists themselves,
commissioners, communities relating through the arts, and all who wish to
understand the productive process.
I remember being struck by the Agency’s decision to appoint a dedicated
senior Public Art Coordinator to Grangegorman, and how this signaled intent that the
arts would be integral to the redevelopment process that began in 2007 and continues
to this day. From the outset, the Agency invested resources, including a lean
and agile team to ensure a visionary threading of the arts as part of Grangegorman’s
future. Being part of regular staff meetings was an eye-opener for me as an arts
professional, entering into the language of construction and safety with a diversity
of stakeholder and community interests. My work was guided by the independently
appointed and inspired Public Art Working Group.
The work of arts coordination is little written about, but sits between
curation and management, acquiring knowledge from both fields. Art and artists are
at the core of Per Cent for Art initiatives and it is the job of the Coordinator to work,
often invisibly, in ensuring that the productive process, however complex, retains its
artistic integrity and relevance. After five years, the value of the Agency’s dogged
commitment to the arts has been tested and proven and we continue to facilitate the
delivery of art works that will bring distinction to all that Grangegorman is becoming.
I began my work by taking a quixotic route that meandered amongst
artists, communities and agencies, picking up clues, listening, asking, being curious,
ruminating and pausing for thought. Amongst others, Ken McCue helped me get to
grips with the diversities of this part of the city; at night, Jimmy Leonard introduced
me to people sleeping rough in the area; Gráinne Foy raised issues around social inclusion;
Nora Rahill reminded me of good governance and stakeholder representation.
These encounters shook up theory and prior experience and they were vital parts
of the research and discursive process that led to ‘…the lives we live’ Grangegorman
Public Art’s six pathways (2015). By devising the six pathway framework for procurement,
I wanted to provide time for artists to plan. This framework also provided for
an open call process for local communities to partner with artists. My intention was
to reduce bureaucracy and increase accessibility without compromising art practice
and accountability. Working with a bespoke Public Art Working Group has been this
Coordinator’s dream.
The introductory text by Prof. Ciarán Benson, Chair of the Public Art
Working Group, situates the reader in the social and aesthetic context. The Health
Service Executive address the question of what it takes to develop new services on
the historic site for same and new communities. Technological University Dublin
addresses the same question from an educational perspective, what does it take to
build a new technological university in the city in the 21st century? These early sec-

A NOTE TO THE READER 10–11
tions are intersected by exemplar interventions by artists Alan Phelan and Justine
McDonnell who tackle the institutional histories that will not be forgotten.
The rest of the book unfolds ‘…the lives we live’ Grangegorman Public
Art (2013–2021). Each section is contained and autonomous. Together they form a
constellation of arts and community-based initiatives that arise from working with
artists, local people, curators, students, and public institutions. Through open calls
and engaged discussions with representative panelists, artists were themselves asking
the question, what can art do and be in this changing context?
The closing pages acknowledge the many artists, communities and
agencies who are the true authors of this book.
Often I wonder whether the young teenagers who engaged so imaginatively
with artist Brian Cregan in The Glass Garden will enter TU Dublin as students, or
whether those who worked with artist Bernie Masterson will continue to produce films
from their prison cells, and what artist Maree Hensey’s students will bring to the early
childhood environments. But then again, I wonder who will come to sit beside Clodagh
Emoe’s Crocosmia × that overlooks the playing fields, to wonder themselves about the
sign amongst the Montbretia and what it signifies. There is so much to imagine, wish
and work for in this heart of the city, including a sustained presence for the arts in life.
Public Art Coordinators never work alone. In closing, I acknowledge and
thank Lori Keeve who has been my right and left hand, and with whom I have had the
pleasure of compiling and editing this book.

‘…the lives we live’
Grangegorman Public
Art 2013–2021
Prof Ciarán Benson
Chair, Public Art Working Group
In my experience, a beckoning image is a welcome guide when setting
out on a new venture. And so it was when I was asked to help form and chair the Public
Art Working Group (PAWG) for the Grangegorman Development Agency in late
2013. This invitation coincided with the, then recent, publication of Derek Mahon’s
New Collected Poems in 2011. I was particularly taken with his very last poem, the
reflectively expansive Dreams of a Summer Night 1 which ends, in an air of perhaps
surprised gratitude, with the words ‘…the lives we live’. This summative phrase seemed
just right for the task ahead. So many lives, so many kinds of life, so much sadness
and, latterly, such hope and renewal have marked the district of Grangegorman that
here was a particularly fertile ground for artistic imaginations.
Bradóg Regional Youth Service perform Pauline Brennan’s ‘You Out There Change It’
in multiple languages, Culture Night 2015. Photo: Lori Keeve

‘…THE LIVES WE LIVE’ GRANGEGORMAN PUBLIC ART
12–13
As we began to unroll ‘…the lives we live’ project I was again looking for an
image of what it was we wanted to do. A young Albanian boy supplied it, though inadvertently.
At our public launch, Bradóg Youth Service performed. Pauline Brennan had
written a poem about addiction, You Out There Change It. Nine young ‘new’ Irish, each
with their own native language, stood in a line and together simultaneously recited the
poem, but each in their own native language. As one young Albanian man finished he
looked alarmed as each of the others continued speaking. Why? He, not unreasonably,
shared a belief that each language will say the same thing in the same duration of time.
His language, however, and to his own surprise, stopped earlier than the others and he
was visibly left with nothing more to say. He had noticed something highly significant
for the first time. If there can be large differences in ways of saying the same thing,
what rich differences might we expect in ways of speaking differently of similar things?
There is so much to say, and so many ways to say it, in the lives we live.
In a major urban development on an historic site, such as the Grangegorman
Development, there is indeed much to say. ‘…the lives we live’ has been about
enabling genuinely important things to be said and shown. The challenge has been
to enable that saying and showing, performing and imaging, engaging and reflecting,
without being unduly prescriptive. This meant constructing partnerships between
those who could authentically speak of lives led in the vicinity of Grangegorman and
artists of various kinds who could shape what might be said, or remembered, into
compelling and original expressions. In brief, this meant enabling artists and local
citizens to animate the experiences of those who live, and once lived, in the vicinity
of Grangegorman.
In a sense, ‘…the lives we live’ has been a natural experiment in two parts.
The first concerned particular local community aspirations and preoccupations. The
second forged larger-scale, artist-led engagements with specific sites within the
overall campus design. So far Public Art Working Group (PAWG) has commissioned
four major site-specific art works. From its strategic position, Garrett Phelan’s joyful,
fully-functional THE GOLDEN BANDSTAND – Sculpture will serve the whole campus.
Alexandra Carr’s richly complex Solaris Nexum will grace TU Dublin’s new Central
Quad with its celebratory explorations of science, sun and light. Walker and Walkers’
Endless Play will enhance the public spaces of the West Quad. For the HSE Residential
Care Neighbourhood, Fergus Martin The Blue of the Sky, The Green of the Grass, The
Red of a Rose is working to enliven the experience of those coming to live in these
interconnected homes by making richly colourful works, with blues, greens and reds
referencing sky, grass and roses. This will complement the already completed works
by Oisín Byrne Long Live The Weeds and The Wilderness Yet and Joy Gerrard Dusk/
Dawn in the HSE’s Phoenix Care Centre.
PAWG has also funded 27 community projects. The aim in this latter
strand has been to explore themes of local interest that arise in dialogue with the
artists who responded to, and engaged with, our various calls. Consistent themes
emerged, symptomatic perhaps of the early communal dynamics which can arise
when transforming an historic urban setting like Grangegorman – with its own dark
histories – into a vibrant, optimistic new urban quarter.
The works and events that emerged from this strand of PAWG’s work
harmonised well with the injunction of the Finnish-American architect, Eliel Saarinen,
who, in 1950, advised:
‘Always design a thing by considering it in
its next larger context – a chair in a room, room in a
house, a house in an environment, an environment in
a city plan.’ 2

We supported 27 projects which together involved 64 artists and 50
organisations. Here are just some of the themes, at least as I discern them, which
emerged from the experiences of people living within what has been designed,
whether deliberately or by historical happenstance, in the domestic and urban hinterland
of Grangegorman. Each of these projects will be detailed in the substance of
this book, but here is a birds-eye view of some of the topics which came into focus.
A pervasive concern turned out to be ideas of ‘home’ and, more specifically,
of ‘homemaking’. Home is where you live, but where you live requires further
acts to transform a habitation into a home, acts of personalisation and of ownership.
Prisoners turn tiny appropriated spaces in their cells into ‘incarceration altars’. Echoes
of past inmates/patients speak to us through relics of their troubled existence that
they would have kept close to themselves (rosary beads, scapulars, etc.), and which
have been retrieved from the abandoned asylum. Related themes of ‘confinement’,
‘walls’ to be broken down, and the intergenerational expansion of the horizons of
lived memory were also prominent. The hidden memories that many ‘new’ Irish bring
with them (exile and, perhaps, searing memories of abuse and grief) fed into themes
of dispossession and dislocation. Social history, transformational political histories,
and prospective ecological concerns joined the leavening process of this strand of
PAWG’s work. But so too did optimistic celebratory projects such as actively nurturing
the development of new young ‘voices’.
All of this, and more, was accomplished on very limited budgets. The
Per Cent for Art scheme allowed for the pooling of monies, but those quantities were
severely limited by remaining at levels capped in 1996. We successfully added our
voice to the argument for substantially revising those quanta upwards for future developments.
The new dispensation hopefully will come into force from 2020 onwards.
Our work should be understood as just the first of many phases of
enhancement of the newly emerging Grangegorman urban quarter. We developed
one model for the particular period of time for which we had responsibility. We hand
on the baton confidently to our successors.
The lives we live are profoundly shaped by the opportunities that our
environments afford us. But there is a dynamic tension between the familiar and the
new, what we call ‘home’ and what must make ‘home’, that is the source of our noticing
what to appreciate and what to change in our own local worlds. Art helps keep that
dynamic well-oiled. Eavan Boland began her poem In Our own Country with the words
‘They are making a new Ireland
At the end of our road’
And ended it with these:
‘We walk Home. What we know is this
(and this is all we know): We are now
and we will always be from now on –
for all I know we have always been –
exiles in our own country.’ 3
A salutary thought from a life well lived.
1 Mahon, D. (2011). New Collected Poems. Oldcastle: The Gallery Press.
2 Saarinen, E. (1950). Time Magazine, July 2. See, also, Benson, C. (2013). Acts not Tracts! Why a complete
psychology of art and identity must be neuro-cultural. In: T. Roald and, J, Langed, eds. Art and identity:
Essays on the aesthetic creation of mind. Amsterdam & New York: Rodopi. pp.39-65.
3 Boland, E. (2014). In: P. Meehan and J.A. Randolph, ed. A Poet’s Dublin. Manchester: Carcanet Press. pp.81.

‘…THE LIVES WE LIVE’ GRANGEGORMAN PUBLIC ART 14–15

Pre-Texts Training for Trainers Workshop, TU Dublin, June 2019: Participants. Photo: Lori Keeve

16–17
Making it:
Cities Under
Co-Construction
Prof. Doris
Sommer

Until recently, UN advice for achieving safety in cities
focused on policing and infrastructure. The new ‘Guidelines’
offer a welcome people-centered focus. But so
far, there is no connection between safety and art. This
may be predictable, given conventional practices, but
the document is full of illustrations of the work art does
for safety. Illustration for the editors evidently means
decoration rather than exemplarity. The UN document
doesn’t comment on a brightly painted barrio, 1
graffiti
murals, hip-hop singers, break dancers, a gender balanced
drumming band. 2
This is a curable blind spot, if we look at what participatory arts do for
safety. Entertainment is different; it can be enjoyed passively. But the dynamic youth
who will build or ravage our cities either actively participate or they resist. 3 And resistance
can lead to violence, which simmers during the lockdown. Our opportunity is to
redirect – not extinguish – youthful energy, because policing and punishment have
not worked well, nor has investment in infrastructure.
A people-centered approach can close the short circuit between high
investments and low results, through cost-effective investments in art. Why will art
work? A short answer is that arts can include everyone. 4 For our purposes, let’s prefer
the definition of art as process of making and thinking, over art as product.
Who is an artist and who a thinker? Potentially all of us, to follow Friedrich
Schiller who wrote on aesthetics during the French Revolution’s Terror. Slyly, he asks,
if art is untimely for violent times. His answer, bold and compelling, is that without
art nothing changes, neither violence nor despair. Art means change; it rejects tired
patterns and sparks conversation. 5
People are naturally creative he knew – this is clear precisely in poor
neighborhoods that recycle and make-do. As a vital activity, art links to dignity,
because artists know they are not victims. They have options and make decisions
under constraints. People feel proud of their creations and they respect beautiful
things. ‘Beauty was acting like a guardsman,’ Mayor Edi Rama said, ‘where municipal
police, or the state itself, were missing.’ 6 He invited citizens to deliberate about color
and design for painting over old grey buildings.
Choices in art-making let youth take control of material without trashing
it. ‘Symbolic violence’ is another name for art and a route away from the real thing.
Choices also help get beyond feeling emotionally stuck, typical of trauma. 7 We can
therefore promote safer cities through social inclusion, healing, and development, by
recognising all people as potential artists and co-creators.
Vanguards
There are good examples of participatory arts that co-construct safer
cities. Think of Antanas Mockus, elected Mayor of Bogotá when many had given up
on the city. What did he reply in 1995 when his Secretary of Culture said there was
nothing to be done, that it was time to bring out the clowns? Clowns, he said, was a
good idea. He hired 20 pantomime artists to replace 20 corrupt traffic police. The
results were hilarious at the expense of rule breakers, so pedestrians and drivers came
to recognise traffic lights and cross-walks as props for public performance.
When traffic deaths reduced by over 50% in the first year, the ‘yes we can’
spirit went after drug traffickers too. Over the Mayor’s two terms in office, homicides

MAKING IT: CITIES UNDER CO- CONSTRUCTION 18–19
dropped by 70% and tax income tripled to finance infrastructure and education. Citizens
on public streets learned to be active stakeholders of their city, not passive or
resentful wards.
Another leader is Gilberto Gil, Brazil’s Minister of Culture from 2003-
2008. He pioneered ‘Pontos de cultura’ 8 to support everyday artists who generate
social collectives in neighborhoods with restless youth (Afro-Regae in Rio de Janeiro
is a good example). The grants were modest, but the public recognition was great.
This is a grass roots approach to inclusion. In Venezuela, by contrast, classical music
instruction promotes inclusion and cohesion for the country’s poorest children, also
through neighborhoods. Not all will be professional musicians, but they learn discipline
and the pleasure of sounding good together. 9 Both initiatives are models for
violence prevention throughout the region. 10
Everyday arts along with the education to manage projects, can multiply
the offer of local attractions and keep tourists eager to visit and revisit a variety of
destinations. This is a gambit we can make with Pontos de cultura. Even in destinations
that may be off-limits security risks become navigable with grassroots guides.
The ‘Museo Popular’ in Siloé Cali comes to mind. It is a home damaged by decades
of civil war in a neighborhood that’s vulnerable on good days and downright dangerous
on others. But the ‘curator’ and resident David Gomez gives guided tours of
the wreckage and guarantees the safety of his many visitors, students, scholars, and
other outsiders who come to learn local history from expert participant observers.
David’s authority and the respect he earns are better safeguards than any armed and
underpaid policeman with ambivalent loyalties. 11
Worldwide, exclusions by race and social class confirm unconscionable
disparities as the rates of contagion and death multiply 6 or 7 fold among marginalized
people. This backdrop to the brutality of US police and the riots that responded
demand urgent attention, to put out fires, to supply food, medical care, even as we
confront the impossibility to de-densify
most poor neighborhoods. But, for safer
cities, we will have to address the practices
that perpetuate exclusion and that
stoke resentment and future violence.
General education through
the arts is crucial for primary prevention
of violence and teen pregnancy. Elite
families can pay for creative schools,
Pre-Texts Workshop in Grangegorman, June 2019.
Photo: Lori Keeve
while poor families cannot. Do the poor
learn differently from the rich? This
implied assumption has perpetuated
exclusion and dissuaded ‘experts’ from
co-constructing safer cities. Expert
advice can backfire in vandalism, as if
to say: You cannot decide for us. Either
people will be partners or they will be
refusniks.
To mention Mockus, Rama, and Gil may inspire you to name more mayors
and ministers who know that arts work for inclusion. Perhaps you will be one, and
promote the ‘40 Days Safety Challenge’ to seed self-sustaining proposals for participatory
arts.
There is no lack of documentation about the effectiveness of art programs.
I direct two: Pre-Texts, an arts-based literacy program. An important workshop
with sequels – in prison, immigration center, schools – is the collaboration in 2018
with Grangegorman. The uncanny selection of text was Michel Foucault’s chapter on
Panopticism from Discipline and Punish; it traces the construction of political control
through the mechanisms of public health control during the plague of XVIII.

The other current project is ‘Futebol Viral,’ a deterrent to domestic violence.
What authorities lack is not evidence but rather a rationale for art as violence
prevention. That rationale should be clear by now:
- Art redirects violent energies toward socially cohesive activities.
- Recognizing everyone as a potential artist closes the short circuit that
‘targets’ people with paternalist expertise.
- Public spaces co-designed with communities become precious and
protected.
- Educating through art prepares citizens to be resilient and collaborative.
Context
In June 2016, to coincide with
Bloomsday, TU Dublin hosted an
introductory session on Pre-
Texts, developed by Dr. Doris
Sommer. Pre-Texts combines
high-order literacy, innovation
and citizenship. It encourages
educators to ‘re-tool’ for
‘close reading’ and getting
‘beyond’ a text. Pre-Texts is
suitable for groups of all ages
and abilities and favours the
shy or disenfranchised reader
and learner.
This led to an intensive Pre-
Texts Training the Trainers
Workshop in June 2019.
The planning and delivery of
this Workshop was undertaken by
a cross sectoral Steering Group
including Vanessa Fielding,
Artistic Director, Complex
Productions, Gráinne Foy, Social
Inclusion Coordinator, North
West Inner City Network, Siobhan
Geoghegan, Artistic Director,
Common Ground, Kathleen
McCann, Employment and Training
Coordinator, Grangegorman Labour
and Learning Forum and Julie
Stafford, Senior Development
Manager, TU Dublin. Meetings
were hosted by the North West
Inner City Network.
The Pre-Texts Training for
Trainers was undertaken in two
parts: firstly through workshop
sessions facilitated by Doris
Sommer, and secondly by trainees
with their own communities.
The primary text for the first
workshop was an extract from
Foucault, Michel. Discipline
& Punish, (1975), Panopticism
III. For in-community workshops,
texts utilised by trainees
included O’Brien, E. (1986).
The Country Girls; Donaldson,
J, Scheffler, A. (1999) The
Gruffalo; Joyce, J. (1914).
The Dead. Dubliners; Kearns, C.
(1989) Stoneybatter – Dublin’s
Inner Urban Village; Mulligan,
A. (2010), Trash; Owell, G.
(1945), Animal Farm.
1 www.bbc.com/mundo/video_fotos/2015/08/150819_fotos_mexico_pachuca_las_palmitas_mural_ng ‘El proyecto
‘Pachuca se pinta’ desarrollado por el colectivo de artistas Germen Crew y financiado por el gobierno local,
pretende aprovechar la transformación del espacio público del barrio para facilitar la integración de sus
residentes…Además de crear el mural más grande de México, la iniciativa logró bajar sustancialmente los índices
de criminalidad.’
2 https://unhabitat.org/united-nations-system-wide-guidelines-on-safer-cities-and-human-settlements
3 In his essay on ‘The emerging lessons from COVID-19 on vulnerability and safety,’ Jaideep Gupte makes a similar
point. ‘Planners, designers and municipal administrators need to treat the police and emergency services as
equal stakeholders.’ We should add educators, artists, and community leaders. Example of standard approach to
infrastructure, Antioquia, http://www.eafit.edu.co/centros/urbam/proyectos/Paginas/proyectos.aspx
4 Sommer, D. (2014). The Work of Art in the World: Civic agency and Public Humanities. Duke University Press:
Durham.
5 Raymond Williams, Keywords, 1977, Prologue. UNESCO collapses these definitions in Universal Declaration on
Cultural Diversity (2001), Culture is ‘the set of distinctive spiritual, material, intellectual and emotional features of
a society or a social group that encompasses art and literature, lifestyles, ways of living together, value systems,
traditions and beliefs.’
6 www.ted.com/talks/edi_rama_take_back_your_city_with_paint?language=en
7 Danieli Y. (2009). Massive Trauma and The Healing Role of Reparative Justice. In: C. Ferstman, M. Goetz, & A.
Stephens, eds. Reparations for Victims of Genocide, War Crimes and Crimes Against Humanity: Systems in Place
and Systems in the Making. Leiden; Boston: Martinus Niijhoff. pp.41–77.
8 Ariel Nunes, ‘Pontos de cultural ’ construção e de integração das políticas locais, nacionais e globais.’ www.
casaruibarbosa.gov.br/dados/DOC/palestras/Politicas_Culturais/II_Seminario_Internacional/FCRB_ArielNunes_
Pontos_de_cultura_e_os_novos_paradigmas_das_politicas_publicas_culturais.pdf See also https://pt.wikipedia.org/
wiki/Pontos_de_Cultura
9 www.ted.com/talks/jose_antonio_abreu_the_el_sistema_music_revolution/transcript?language=en
10 Alvaro Restrepo, Artistic Director of El colegio del cuerpo in Cartagena, Colombia, is a particular and eloquent
example: ‘Talent is when we discover the reasons to be in this world and live according to these. But above all,
talent is a deep desire for personal transformation, and by doing it we transform those around us.’
11 www.qhubocali.com/con-la-gente/la-casa-de-los-recuerdos

MAKING IT: CITIES UNDER CO-CONSTRUCTION 20–21
Trainee participants were
nominated by the City of Dublin
Education and Training Board
(CDETB) Educational Service to
Prison, Complex Youth Theatre,
Common Ground Arts Organisation,
Dublin Adult Learning Centre,
Glencree Centre for Peace &
Reconciliation, Henrietta Street
Alternative School, Dublin
7, Independent Artists and
Storeytellers, MOST Garda Youth
Diversion Project, Bradóg Youth
Service, the National College
of Art and Design, the North
West Inner City Network Gateway
Project, Pathways Centre,
Dublin 1, Stanhope Street Girls
Secondary School, Dublin 7,
St. Michael’s Family Resource
Centre, Dublin 8, St. Paul’s
Primary, Dublin 7, Wheatfield
Prison Education Unit, Dublin 22
and the Writer’s Centre, Dublin.
Pre-Texts encourages educators to go ‘beyond’ the text.
Complex texts become prompts for creating a choreography,
a painting, a storyboard or a spoken word poem allowing
participants to deeply engage with the content. Photo: Lori Keeve
Participants: Tom Adams,
Michelle Brown, Erin Campbell,
Sinéad Clancy, Eilish Comerford,
Brian Cregan, Clodagh Emoe,
Gráinne Foy, Anthony Goulding,
Claire Jegousse, Phil Keane,
Lisa Kilbride, Jimmy Leonard,
Bernie Masterson, Shilo Mbulle,
Emma O’Brien, Anne O’Connor,
Bríd O’Mahony, Laragh Pittman,
Robert Robinson, Jean Ryan,
Leonie Tang.
A printed publication ‘Pre-
Texts experience in Ireland’
including an essay by TU Dublin
PhD Candidate Emma O’Brien is
available. This publication was
made possible with support from
the Grangegorman Area Based
Childhood (ABC) programme that
is funded by the Department
of Children and Youth Affairs
through Tusla. Grangegorman ABC
targets investment in services
to improve outcome for children
and their families, in the North
West Inner City Area of Dublin.
It enables greater interagency
collaboration to ensure services
make the most impact, are timely
and accessible, and have the
potential to be sustainable.
‘Pre-Texts — the Irish
Experience’ was presented at the
Consortium of Humanities Centers
and Institution conference on
Wednesday 19 June in Trinity
College Dublin.
Pre-Texts received additional
support from Dublin City Council
and the Ireland Funds.
Pre-Texts learnings in action, Grangegorman
Workshop, June 2019. Photo: Lori Keeve
Links
www.pre-texts.org
www.culturalagents.org

Some New Life
For This Old Town
Ger Casey
Chief Executive Officer
Grangegorman Development
Agency
I’ve been involved in the redevelopment of Grangegorman for over a
decade, starting out as Director of Architecture and now as CEO of the Grangegorman
Development Agency (GDA). The revitalisation of this distinctive part of Dublin, with
its rich and uneasy past, is as exciting now as it was then.
As the Agency responsible for the redevelopment of the site, our purpose
in the GDA is to redevelop the grounds of the former St. Brendan’s Hospital into a
new piece of city with a vibrant, sustainable community. The development of the site
includes a world-class integrated campus for both TU Dublin and the Health Service
Executive (HSE).
The process of revitalising an urban area is a complex task that requires
the support of national Government and wider society. It also requires patience, commitment
and, at times, a leap of faith. At its core is a belief that the outcome of the
project will enhance the lives of the people who live, work and study there.
It begins with a vision that must excite and engage key stakeholders from
the outset, but that also has the capacity to evolve and endure over time. In the case
of Grangegorman, the fundamental building blocks in achieving the vision were already
there – a great location,
a passionate community,
and clear objectives set
out by TU Dublin and the
HSE.
The next step
is to entice the most innovative
and creative talents
to help realise the vision.
We achieved this initially
The Grangegorman Playground, opened to the community
in 2015. Photo: Lori Keeve
through an international
competition that was
won by architectural firm,
Moore Ruble Yudell (MRY)
and DMOD Architects.
Their vision has stood
the test of time and won
international acclaim. This
approach has been repeated for the design of the various buildings and elements of
infrastructure being delivered as part of the revitalisation.
This commitment to talent must also be reflected in the delivery team,
who need to be highly skilled and sufficiently resourced. A key aspect of their role is to
act as champions for the vision and to continue to drive it forward. In a project of this
scale, decisions can often be made on the basis of cost, convenience, or a lack of understanding.
The delivery team must work collaboratively with key stakeholder groups
– be they internal stakeholders, funders, end users, or the local area – to continuously
remind them of the vision and to promote its shared value and unifying characteristics.

SOME NEW LIFE FOR THIS OLD TOWN 22–23
Another critical element is quality, both in terms of the design, as well as
the materials used. Visual impact, shared and universal use, as well as longevity are all
factors that need to be considered in this regard. Provision also needs to be made for
emerging and future technologies in a way that is flexible, unobtrusive and engaging.
This, of course, needs to be balanced against the realities of budget constraints, the
capacity and capability of the market, as well as timelines for delivery.
Revitalisation, however, is not just about bricks and mortar. It requires an
understanding of the importance of ‘place’ in terms of social and cultural engagement.
One of the best decisions we made was to provide a high quality public realm. This
contributed greatly to the transformation of Grangegorman from being a place where
people were ‘sent to’ – to being a place where people wanted to be.
Another significant strand of the Agency’s work has been the commissioning
of public art. Given the rich and poignant history of Grangegorman, and the
transformational nature of the project we were beginning to undertake, we wanted to
get the very best out of the public art strand. We knew this would be limited financially,
and we wanted to avoid an ad hoc arrangement of individual art projects per
building, so with expert help, we created an Art Strategy to optimise the delivery of
public art, and this led to the creation of the independent Public Art Working Group
(PAWG). This group was to be led and supported by people who had the passion, drive,
understanding and reputation for public arts, and who could represent the various
stakeholders and actors involved in Grangegorman. We have been very lucky to have
Ciarán Benson's expertise in chairing and leading the PAWG, and to have appointed
Jenny as Public Art Coordinator. The group has truly delivered over this period, devising
various pathways to capture the depth and breadth of artistic talent and explore
themes relevant to Grangegorman and those whose lives have been touched by the
place over the years. The public art pathways were designed to reflect the past, present
and future of Grangegorman and to inspire curiosity, conversation and connection
among its communities.
Given the success of the PAWG model, a similar structure was used for
the establishment of Grangegorman Histories. This project has the aim of contributing
to the uncovering, cataloguing and commemoration of the rich and chequered history
of the area.
Finally, revitalisation must be seen as a continuum and in the context of
the broader challenges of society. These can have both a push and pull effect on the
progress of a project. Some of these challenges can be planned for, such as budgetary
and labour issues. Others are more complex and unpredictable, such as our lived
experience of COVID-19, and the impacts of climate change and artificial intelligence
– which will change how people work, live, and interact with each other.
These factors will all influence why urban spaces develop and how people
adapt. In revitalising historic and culturally significant parts of the city like Grangegorman,
our role is to ensure they remain resilient to these challenges and that their
communities continue to thrive long into the future.

A Masterplan for
the 21 st Century
John Mitchell
Director DMOD Architects,
Grangegorman Masterplanner
Creating a Masterplan
The lead designer and our partner in the Masterplan development, James
O’Connor of MRY, is fond of saying that a Masterplan is setting the table properly, not
serving the meal. It is no simple matter however to ‘set the table’ properly and a good
masterplan is a combination of and a reflection on many different considerations, the
final Masterplan document produced by the team listed nearly 20 principles, including
Public Art.
Part of the success of Grangegorman is the integration of the lands into
the fabric of the city, a key Masterplan principle being Connectivity. Previously the
lands, by the nature of their use were closed off from the city with the only boundary
on a major road being an imperforate north facing black calp limestone wall along the
North Circular Road. One is reminded of Kavanagh’s words ‘My Black hills have never
seen the sun rising’ and millions of Dubliners have sped by the site oblivious to the
potential behind the wall.
Before there was ever a Masterplan, however, there was a vision of a
committed group to develop the site for, the now Technological University Dublin
and healthcare uses for the HSE. And perhaps luck too, few cities having 73 acres
available for a substantial new use in the heart of the city. And it is the heart of the
city, standing on Capel Street bridge you are as near Grangegorman as you are St.
Stephens Green, a 15-minute walk both ways. Together with a great location, there
was a range of fine historic buildings, dating from 1804, and some fine stands of trees.
That is not to say that exploiting these features is a simple matter. A good example,
is an extant tree-lined Allee, designed purely as a path to walk down and back, a
therapeutic landscape element that now links the past with the present. While this
may seem like a small thing, the technical challenges of keeping a few hundred metres
of a tree-lined path while placing playing pitches and bleachers on either side was a
technical challenge both in design and construction. It is one of many examples of
an apparently simple component being delivered through great commitment and the
guidance of the Masterplan.
We tend to think of a vision as something ethereal, thinking of George
H.W. Bush’s famous quote ‘Oh, the Vision thing’. But in fairness to President Bush,
visions are ground in practicalities. Too often in this country, we develop buildings
ahead of the necessary infrastructure, think of Ballymun or the early iteration of the
IFSC. Part of the courageous vision at the Grangegorman Development Agency was,
in very dark times for the country, the decision to invest in the infrastructure of the
site, ahead of any buildings. The then CEO describing this strategy as ‘Live horse, get
grass’. DMOD were privileged to be involved in the design and delivery of this first
major project which built out a large element of the Public Realm with the highest
quality hard and soft landscape, playing pitches and playgrounds. In the modern masterplan
what can be seen is dwarfed by what lies hidden. Of the approximate €25m
budget less than a third can be accounted for by the elements visible above ground.
Also required in developing a piece of city are pipes for water and drainage, conduits
for digital communications, district heat pipes, retaining structures, substations.

A MASTERPLAN FOR THE 21ST CENTURY 24–25
If what is needed for the completed campus is not in the ground from the beginning,
there will be endless digging up of roads here.
The other elements that make a successful masterplan are those important
intangibles; the governing, briefing and management structures put in place to
deliver high quality structures to match the original vision. There has been very careful
attention, for instance, to ensure the government procurement rules are not an
impediment to delivery of a top class campus and ‘price’ in Price/Value assessment
is the lesser partner. Oscar Wilde’s famous quote is never more apt. ‘The cynic knows
the price of everything and the value of nothing.’ 1
The influence of the Masterplan doesn’t stop at the boundary of the
Quarter. For instance, DMOD are currently designing a large complex on an adjacent
site which will give access to the west of the site from Prussia Street along a pedestrian
street called Bó Lane. The Bó Lane Gallery will be a collaboration with the TU
Dublin School of Creative Arts and will feature the work of the School’s students.
Finally, with regard to the another element of intangible structures so
central to the success of the Masterplan is the arts strategy itself, adopted and
strongly supported by the Authority and to which this publication itself is a testament.
Grangegorman Masterplan Sketch
What follows is a note on the conceptual sketch from an early stage in
the Masterplan design process from James Mary O’Connor, Masterplanner, Moore
Ruble Yudell Architects.
It suggests the Campus and landscape reconnecting with the city as a
continuous flow. Right from the start, I had felt the Grangegorman site was a missing
piece within the city with the power to reconnect to its larger surroundings. The
large curve lines capture the bucolic landscape
that was preserved within the walls
of Grangegorman. Having grown up in
Phibsboro, I already saw the opportunity
to connect it on east to Broadstone, King’s
Inns and Royal Canal Bank, and on the
west to Prussia Street and eventually the
Phoenix Park. The campus would have a
series of academic quadrangles each one
with its own identity that would be two
centres (two hearts): academic heart at the
top of the site and a social heart at Broadstone.
The pedestrian walkway, which we
called St. Brendan’s Way, connects the
journey across the site and connects the
two hearts through the existing historical
buildings out to North Circular Road.
The sketch was drawn on a
Saturday morning overlooking the Pacific Ocean remembering the numerous times I
cycled around the perimeter of Grangegorman, navigating my journey from home to
the Dublin Institute of Technology architectural college known then as Bolton Street.
Grangegorman Masterplan sketch by James Mary O’Connor
1 Wilde, O. (performed 1892), Lady Windemere’s Fan, (1940), The Importance of Being Earnest and Other Plays,
Penguin Books.

Caring at
Grangegorman: Past,
Present and Future
Derek Dockrell
Architectural Advisor,
Health Service Executive
I.
Grangegorman has a rich and complex history as a piece of Dublin; for
over 200 years institutions on the site have reacted to the situations as existed in the
city and accommodated facilities that were considered necessary and appropriate.
The site at Grangegorman, initially accommodated the House of Industry which was
set up in the 1770s; the ‘lunatic asylum’ was then developed to transfer ‘the curable
lunatics’ from the House of Industry in 1810, and then the penitentiary was opened in
1820. The institution evolved as did its name becoming Grangegorman Mental Hospital
and more recently, St. Brendan’s Hospital. Over these years, it has served the needs
of the city and the inhabitants, accommodating those most disadvantaged and those
who struggled most with the challenges that life presented. The common good was
considered more important than the individual, for whom admission, containment and
incarceration often caused long-term damage. Individuals were left in an environment
that they struggled to cope with and which did not always assist with the particular
challenges of their condition.
Grangegorman’s past has provided two parallel sets of records, the medical
records and the informal documents and artefacts left by residents. The official
medical records are one of the most complete records from such an institution in
Europe; they have been conserved (with the support of the Wellcome Foundation)
and are now in the National Archives. Alternative stories are told in the informal documents
and artefacts from residents. These were retained by Father Piaras Ó’Dúill, Dick
Bennett and others. These include letters, spectacles, rosary beads, photographs,
purses, handbags, etc. – objects that artist Alan Counihan has used for his Personal
Effects works and are now on display in the Primary Care Centre.
The progressive nature of the treatment and care under those in charge
including Dr Connolly Norman and Dr Ivor Browne is evident by their important roles
in the development of the treatment of mental health illnesses in Ireland. At the same
time, their roles and the institution have become part of Dublin history and folklore.
‘He is up in Dottyville with Connolly Norman’
James Joyce, Ulysses
II.
When one considers the more recent role of Grangegorman in the city and
the redevelopment of the site as a health and educational campus, one has to understand
that many Dubliners are not familiar with Grangegorman as part of the city; they are
familiar with Constitution Hill, Stoneybatter, North Brunswick Street and North Circular
Road but what lies within has for many Dubliners been an unchartered area and not part
of many Dubliners’ mapping of the city. The institution had frontage onto Grangegorman
Road which divided the site. The high walls on either side masked what lay within and the
tunnel (to allow for safe transfer of patients from one side to the other) under the road
ensured that only those who entered the site understood what was within.

CARING AT GRANGEGORMAN: PAST, PRESENT AND FUTURE 26–27
The master plan proposed by Moore Ruble Yudell and DMOD Architects
opened up the site; permeability is provided on all sides and this allows connections
previously not possible especially east/west. This opening up onto Constitution Hill,
North Circular Road, Manor Street and Prussia Street has allowed the site to become
a community resource with convenient access through new connections. The site has
provided space for much needed healthcare facilities, a primary school and amenity
space with playgrounds. All of these were badly needed and encourage those living in
the area to consider the Grangegorman site as part of their environment rather than
apart, as it was historically.
The first healthcare building developed as part of the Masterplan was
the Phoenix Care Centre which was built to accommodate the residents who were
still in the old Victorian buildings. The move into the Phoenix Care Centre allowed
the original buildings to be refurbished for TU Dublin and their initial move onto the
site. The intention and aspiration was to provide a building which respected and valued
the residents, and focussed on improving their conditions and their transition
back into the community. Generous space standards, good day lighting, and access to
landscaped areas all contributed to the wellbeing of the individuals and improved outcomes.
The building, designed by Moloney O’Beirne, won the RIAI Healthcare Building
of the Year in 2013.
The next building completed, designed by Taylor Architects, was the
Primary Care Centre which brought the original laundry building back into use, having
been unoccupied for some time. The building now provides access to a range
of services including a GP practice, primary
care teams including public health
nurses, physiotherapists, occupational
therapists, speech and language therapists,
along with a Child and Adolescent
Mental Health unit. In addition an Audiology
Unit and Ophthalmology Suite are
provided which cover the north city. All
of these have brought those living in the
area onto the site for the services on a
regular basis – a site that had excluded
The new Grangegorman Primary Care Centre,
opened 2017. Photo: Donal Murphy
them previously.
A further building, a residential
care setting, is at pre-planning
stage and will be providing homes for
the elderly, those with dementia and
residents with mental health issues. The
building will allow those needing care to
remain in the area where they live. The residents will be grouped in households in a
building designed by McCullough Mulvin and TODD Architects. The building poses
many challenges and is a novel building type for the HSE in that it is an urban and
multilevel residential care setting with households stacked with external terraces/roof
gardens on each level. The building will be combined with the Primary Care Centre to
form a residential care neighbourhood within the one block and it is hoped that this will
become a template for the co-location of Residential Care and Primary Care Centres.
Bringing these community services onto the site is an important part
of the vision for the campus so that the site does not only become a healthcare and
education campus but a piece of the city where there is continuity of use for those
in the local community. Grangegorman as a site provides facilities for all ages; for the
young through the EIT (early intervention), paediatric audiology and ophthalmology
services and for the elderly homes and GP and primary care services.

III.
Grangegorman is ideally located to provide healthcare services to the
north inner city and to those in the community in the years to come. The proximity
to tertiary hospitals at St. James Hospital and the Mater allows the site to become
part of the universal healthcare infrastructure. The strategy as set out in Sláintecare
is to provide non-acute and community services within the area they serve; continuity
between the acute hospitals, non-acutes and community services reduces the
demands on the acute hospitals. Both Primary Care Centres and Residential Care Centres
play an important part in the overall strategy. Grangegorman Primary Care Centre
is part of the developing network of primary care centres constructed or planned on
the north-side which include Summerhill and Navan Road Primary Care Centres.
The Grangegorman Masterplan as proposed provides flexibility for the
future and will allow additional sub-acute services to be co-located as part of the
healthcare hub at Grangegorman.
COVID-19 and the ensuing pandemic, has brought challenges to healthcare,
including understanding that each individual has a part to play in public health;
individuals have reacted well to the need for them to contribute to the health of others
by cocooning and isolating. The pandemic was the first experience for many people
of remote consultations with healthcare professionals. It has also changed the pattern
of how individuals accessed services. How services are provided will evolve further
in the coming years.
As the HSE comes to terms with COVID-19 and the delivery of healthcare
with the changes required by coronavirus, Grangegorman will develop as a key
hub serving those living in the north inner city and the community surrounding the
site – all of this will be based on a patient-centred approach to healthcare as set out
in Sláintecare.

CARING AT GRANGEGORMAN: PAST, PRESENT AND FUTURE
28–29
The Phoenix Care Centre, the new mental health hospital at Grangegorman,
opened in 2013. Photo: Ros Kavanagh

30–31
Breaking
the Rule
of Silence
Justine McDonnell, Breaking The Rule of Silence, live performance, 18 September 2016. Photo: Laura Skehan
Justine
McDonnell

The conscious refusal to uncover that which was
declared invisible can often distort representation
of the self. This active invisibility will often reveal an
opportunity to distinguish the who and the what we
discern against the standard of ‘other’. Peggy Phelan
states that representation follows two laws: it always
conveys more than it intends; and it is never totalising.
The ‘excess’ meaning conveyed by representation
creates a supplement that makes multiple readings
possible. 1 When it comes to the non-dominant subject
within a culture, representation will always generate
ruptures due to its inability to recreate an authentic
image of self. It is among the most traumatic eras of
Irish history where we find such coercion towards invisibility
and ‘other’.
Art in the public realm has the ability to consider the history of its wide
and narrow context and through its contemporary implications. Breaking the Rule of
Silence approaches performance and the presence of the body in just this way. Taking
place in the architecturally dour Clock Tower of Grangegorman, we are reminded
of the grounds’ history as a psychiatric hospital. Following on from a dark history it
remains the case that a high percentage of women incarcerated in the infamous Magdalene
Laundries had been sent to Grangegorman to be silenced and abandoned. A
formative encounter with culturally-acceptable narratives and political implications of
silence was thought through the history of the Magdalene Laundries.
Initially termed Magdalene Asylums, the Magdalene Laundries were for
any woman who was deemed to have fallen short of the moral standard enforced by
the Catholic order.
Operating from the 18 th to the 20 th centuries in Ireland these institutions
were responsible for the detention of women in a punitive system of gendered degradation
and slave labour. Termed ‘fallen women’, they were swept under the rug of a
corrupt and inhumane system which was acclimated to muffling the voice of anguish,
rendering them servants to silence while conforming to a ‘policy of secrecy’. They
were deemed unworthy of help and forced to labour as penance for their sin. The
emergence of a long-silenced traumatic history of those who survived on the other
side of these detention centres came to light in the 1990s, with closure of the last
of these Catholic regimes in 1996. The news of this sombered an Irish government
celebrating an era of unprecedented economic growth. The McAleese Report of 2013,
which was tasked with investigating these long-running institutions, notably redacted
796 pages of testimony from survivors, further silencing the challenges of the women
and delegitimising their oral histories. The power structures which allowed for the
enslavement of the women within the Laundries don’t seem far removed from the
power structures which have negated these stories from official record. These are
power structures which wish to constrict and constrain. The disturbing effects of
which will always come out one way or another.
It is in the Clock Tower that the 30-minute duration of the performance
takes place. While facing dark prison cells hidden behind large green doors, the performer
sits at a small white table upon which are small black ABC candied letters.

BREAKING THE RULE OF SILENCE
32–33
Context
Self-editing, a deliberate and
conscious refusal to reveal and
conceal visibility, can distort
and rupture representation
of the self and the access
we have to ‘the image of the
other’. In some moments, active
disappearance can require
recognition of who and what
controls and surrounds us.
A formative encounter with
society’s acceptable narratives
began with McDonnell’s
research into The Clock Tower,
Grangegorman.
The small cramped nature of the table highlights restriction and confinement. As
the performer slowly shifts the letters upon the table in an attempt to construct a
sentence her mouth is clattering with the same black letters. From her black oozing
mouth the letters slowly peel out between her lips in an act of refusal. The clatters
intensifies and movement of the mouth seems to become desperate for speech. The
fallen letters stumble as to stain her modest crisp white button up shirt. These are
the haunting fractured words that emit from the body as if rotting from the inside
out. Maintaining a poised posture and complicit stillness her fitted white shirt bears
the stains of that which she cannot contain, her only attempt at illegibility is unintelligible,
through which her developing stains become more apparent. This durational
image created through the seeping mouth and hopeless rearranging of a disjointed
and redacted alphabet is at every pace making visible that which will no longer be
contained.
The rule of silence is not only about the past but the continued oppression
traced to the ever unfolding histories of a bleeding bondaged mouth which will
continue to resist the politicisation of silence. A ‘policy of secrecy’ can only cause
harm. This performance gives rise to the complexities and power structures contained
within the speech act, for if it were not powerful, the mouth would not be
threatened shut.
Breaking the Rule of Silence seeks to reprocess its context as a space of
contemplation, creation and confrontation. The physical intervention of performance
through simple presence can activate and reimagine a history and steer it towards
reflection. The table at which the artist gently caresses the unfinished alphabet all
the while clattering letters against her teeth is reminiscent of the repetition of the
labour performed in laundries. Such temporal processes are evocative of representing
traumatic and domestic cultural histories.
Temporality leads to a critical tension and an acknowledgment of histories
– and the bodies that made and inhabited the past – as well as the relationality of
our own sense of identification, in this body today, with these materialised versions
of human creative action from the past. 2
The work embodies these acts of repetition as an act of refusal, highlighting
the resilience of the voice against the ever present power structures that
attempt to silence the female voice into invisibility against which we must break the
rule of silence.
Sara Muthi
Due to the institutions ‘policy
of secrecy’ for ‘almost a full
century’ women incarcerated
now ‘constitute the nation’s
disappeared’ their lives and
voice rendered invisible to
the conceived notions of a
moral order. Drawing upon
autobiographical notations and
related accounts of historical
events, McDonnell’s work
consciously embodies an act of
refusal.
In her live work, Breaking The
Rule of Silence, black ABC

Justine McDonnell, Breaking The Rule of Silence, live performance,
18 September 2016. Photo: Laura Skehan
candy letters are placed on a
small white table, exploring
restriction and confinement.
The performer sits in front
of dark cells hidden behind
large green doors. The table is
placed in a position that puts
a clear distance between the
audience and the performer. In
the performance her movements
are slow and deliberate as
the letters are moved from
left to right in an attempt
to construct a sentence. The
letters are then individually
taken from the performer’s
mouth. The movement of the
mouth becomes fast and intense
in a desperation and struggle
to speak, only to reveal
silence and black fluid which
seeps from the female mouth.
The performance comes to a stop
when the performer has reached
the end of the table, only to
begin again, engaging in a
constant repetitive struggle
and action. The performance
acts as a way of artificial
rendering of the invisible
and the voiceless, revealing
the life of silence and the
struggle of communication
endured by incarcerated women.
Justine McDonnell, Breaking The Rule of Silence, live
performance, 18 September 2016. Photo: Laura Skehan
Biographies
Justine McDonnell (b. 1992,
Dublin) is an Irish artist
based at Flax Art Studios. She
received a masters in Fine
Art from the University of
Ulster, 2017 and a BA in Fine

BREAKING THE RULE OF SILENCE
34–35
Art from TU Dublin, formerly
DIT in 2015. Her practice to
date has been concerned with:
the curated construction of
the self; the commonly held
belief in the authenticity of
autobiography; the decisions we
make in regards to self-editing
and the complicity of the state
in perpetuating acceptable
narratives.
McDonnell has participated
in numerous group and solo
exhibitions including, The LAB
Gallery (2019) Golden Thread
Gallery (2018) and We Speak
Silent, PS 2 , curated by Clare
Gormley (2017). McDonnell
was selected for the Digital
Arts Studios, Home Residency
Award and The MAC Curatorial
Directions Programme, Belfast.
She is a recipient of the Flax
Arts Studios Graduate Residency
Award and the British Council,
Steward Fellowship Award at the
Venice Biennale.
Sara Muthi is a performance
Curator based in Dublin.
Born (1996) in Transylvania,
Romania, Sara Muthi is a
Dublin-based performance
curator currently undertaking
a Masters in Philosophy at
Trinity College Dublin. She
also holds an MA in Art in
the Contemporary World and
a BA in Fine Art from NCAD.
Her research primarily deals
with performance and how its
definition is challenged by
contemporary practices. Sara
also writes on and curates
performance as managing
editor of inaction.ie. She
acts as the communications
assistant for Block Universe;
London’s leading performance
art festival and their
international projects
including POWER NIGHT (2019)
at E-WERK Luckenwalde, Germany.
Her most recent project, POST-
DANCE (2019), a performance/
lecture commissioned for
the Project Arts Centre was
developed during her INCUBATE
residency at Draíocht. She is
due to present her research
paper Performance & Ontology
at the IAAH/Artefact Symposium
2020, UCD, and hosted a panel
discussion at the ‘Politics and
Spaces of Performance since the
1990’ conference, NCAD.
Justine McDonnell, Breaking The Rule of Silence, live performance,
18 September 2016. Photo: Lori Keeve
Links
www.mcdonnelljustine.com
saramuthi.com
saradmuthi@gmail.com
muthis@tcd.ie
1 Phelan, P. (1993). Unmarked; The Politics of Performance. London and New York: Routledge. p.2.
2 Jones, A. (2012). Seeing Differently: A History and Theory of Identification and the Visual Arts.
London and New York: Routledge. p.6.

In the 21st century,
what does it take to build and establish
a technological university in
the city and in the wider world?
Prof. David FitzPatrick
President, Technological
University Dublin
Universities and all higher education institutions play an important part
in the economic, social and cultural life of our country. For Dublin, as a capital city, the
clustering of higher education helps define the character and nature of the city and
surrounding region and over 100,000 students studying in Dublin bring an energy and
dynamic to the city. TU Dublin students are now an important part of that dynamic.
Designation as a technological university (or TU) is a first for Ireland
but is a well-established concept across the world, demonstrating a clear focus on
knowledge creation, research and innovation, coupled with application and performance.
Like TU Delft in the Netherlands, Ryerson University in Canada, TU Munich in
Germany and Aalto University in Finland, TU Dublin has emerged with a strong focus
on higher technical education in engineering, science, and technology, but we are also
rich in architecture, design, multimedia, business, and the creative and performing
arts. The ambition for our university is to integrate our strengths in the more technical
and process-driven subjects with the creative engagement and critical thinking
that are intrinsic to the arts. Technical solutions – whether in engineering or business
or in media – have social and interpersonal impacts, and all students should have
that understanding and develop the ability to disrupt positively and to interrogate
assumptions.
TU Dublin has its origins in Dublin of the 1880s and the emerging development
of higher technical education in line with the needs of 19 th century society.
Those needs continued to evolve, reflecting the changing nature of disciplines and
research and contributing to the prosperity of the country. At the time of the opening
of the Dublin Technical Schools in 1887, Albert Graves stated that ‘Dublin is ripe for
technical education’. 1 Now, building a technological university for Dublin reflects the
needs of 21 st century Ireland.
TU Dublin has emerged at a period of major change within the national
and international higher education landscape, where traditional boundaries between
institutions have been replaced and in many respects have been redefined by the
manner in which a higher education institution leads and innovates; and in how it
interacts with society, responding to changing needs.
However, the fundamental ambition for TU Dublin remains broadly similar
to the original. In its submission to the International Review Panel, TU4Dublin
Alliance stated 2 its intent to ‘translate our passion for learning, education and research
into accessible life-changing opportunities for students on campus, online and in the
communities we serve.’ The links between education, personal and societal gain and
regional development are central to the technological university model.
From the foundation of the State, Ireland developed a distinctly binary
approach to post-secondary education, with traditional universities on one side and
technical education on the other. In 2011, as we faced an existential and economic

WHAT DOES IT TAKE TO BUILD AND ESTABLISH A TECHNOLOGICAL UNIVERSITY
36–37
challenge not unlike our current situation, the Higher Education Strategy Group
chaired by Dr. Colin Hunt, was asked to set out a roadmap for the role higher education
should play in better addressing the needs of society. In the preface to the
National Strategy for Higher Education to 2030, 3 Dr. Hunt said:
‘For a variety of reasons, Irish higher education is now at a point of transition:
the number of people entering the system is growing and the profile of students
is changing. Unemployment and changing patterns of work bring new urgency and
a much greater emphasis on lifelong learning and upskilling. A high proportion of
the skills that we need now in the workforce are high-order knowledge-based skills,
many of which can be acquired only in higher education institutions. The importance
of high quality research to the teaching mission and to underpinning socio-economic
development has grown significantly over the past decade and will continue to do so
over the next decade.’
Making a New University
One of the recommendations in the Hunt Report was to bring together
the strengths of regional Institutes of Technology so as to further enhance capacity,
performance and impact. This became the mandate for Technological University
Dublin. Although the first of its kind in Ireland, given the many excellent examples
around the world, a high bar has been set. TU Dublin is a member of the new European
Technological University consortium EUt+, designated by the European Commission.
This provides an excellent opportunity for TU Dublin to be part of the creation of a
new EU-wide model of education, equipping students with the knowledge and skills
to drive Europe’s global impact.
Approach to Education
Building on the foundations of its predecessor institutes, TU Dublin is
guided by an educational philosophy that celebrates the creation of knowledge and
the development of conceptual
understanding, with a
clear emphasis on practice
and the application of that
understanding. Students
are supported in gaining
understanding in their field
of study and the ability and
confidence to apply their
knowledge and skills as they
build sustainable careers.
Their studies lead to professional
accreditation and to
internationally recognised
qualifications.
The university
benefits from having a very
distinctive cohort of learners
that includes apprentices,
undergraduates, postgraduates, part-time students blending work with study, international
students, further education students, those returning to learning after time
at work and those with other responsibilities.
However, the purpose is not solely a practical education, but also the
formation of the whole graduate through the combination of the formal, informal and
hidden curriculum. A student-centred framework focuses on providing a unique, tailored
and personalised learning experience. Intellectual, professional and personal
attributes are encouraged in an integrated way, fostering a sense of connection
between the student and the university. Learning, research and engagement are
Grangegorman Campus, October 2020. Photo: Barrow Coakley

brought together in an integrated approach rather than as separate activities. This
approach recognises the importance of using the formal and informal learning often
developed through sports, clubs, and student societies which are a key focus for student
engagement and enhance the overall learning experience.
Creating a Better World Together
This education ethos within TU Dublin is reflected in the university’s strategic
plan. Developed during the first year since its establishment, TU Dublin set out
its strategic intent to 2030 – ‘Creating a better world together’. 4 Through the lens of
the UN Sustainable Development Goals, the University looked at its key endeavours
of teaching, research, and engagement with industry and community and has laid
out a detailed roadmap under three key pillars: People, Planet and Partnership. Every
priority, for students and staff, will respond to objectives identified under these pillars.
The process of creating a new university centres on a shared vision
amongst its staff, students, industry and community partners as well as with its alumni
and a wide range of interested parties on a way forward that will add value – not
only to the Irish higher education landscape but also to society. The development of
the strategy resulted in significant interaction and real opportunities to revisit and
in some cases recast our activities. The creation of the new TU Dublin campus at
Grangegorman is a clear example of creating learning and research environments
that will greatly assist student learning and development. The award-winning masterplan
for the campus is a strong reflection of how the university aims to integrate
with the city and its citizens. Students who come to the campus will learn from the
brilliant architects, designers, engineers and craftspeople who brought the plan into
existence. They will also learn from the way the community interacts with the campus
and the university: a sense of local pride and a shared responsibility to protect and
promote not just the campus but also the university.
The process of developing and sustaining a new university such as TU
Dublin is a process of engagement and communication. Our achievements to date
are a great tribute to my colleagues and students of TU Dublin. The potential for the
future is exciting. As the president of the first technological university in Ireland I am
encouraged and motivated by the immense interest and goodwill there is for the creation
of TU Dublin at home and abroad and I am very proud to be its first President.
1 https://arrow.tudublin.ie/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1071&context=ditbk
2 https://www.dit.ie/media/update/0-2015/DIT%20a%20major%20player%20in%20plans%20to%20establish%20
Irelands%20first%20TU.pdf
3 hwww.education.ie/en/publications/policy-reports/national-strategy-for-higher-education-2030.pdf
4 https://tudublin.ie/explore/about-the-university/strategicplan/2030/#:~:text=…%20a%20Better%20World%20
Together,create%20a%20better%20world%20together.

WHAT DOES IT TAKE TO BUILD AND ESTABLISH A TECHNOLOGICAL UNIVERSITY 38–39

40–41
The
Possibility of
an Archive
Alan
Phelan

The Possibility of an Archive was a special commission
for Culture Night 2015, a large outdoor video projection
on the covered stairwell of a utilities building on
the emerging TU Dublin Grangegorman campus. The
piece became visible after dusk on the perforated
metal sheeting enclosing the stairs, with animated
words moving up and down the four storey structure.
The text was culled from historic records, as well as
current education and health professional glossaries. 1
The piece was planned as a monumental projection for this large blank surface which
would eventually be closed off by adjacent new structures. As a services building,
it looked like an anonymous records storage facility, possibly even an archive, as
they are often blank and windowless. The utility of my descriptive artwork seemed
appropriate and yet this location proved uneasy. There is a new mental health facility
2 nearby, which may be walled off from the university campus but some patients
watched from balconies during the set up. The line of slight prevented them from
seeing the work later that evening however, so again remaining problematic because
of exclusion.

THE POSSIBILITY OF AN ARCHIVE 42–43
The possibility for offensive exposure was therefore close, of expressions
too close to the reality behind nearby walls. Maybe this is why the 2005 novel,
The Possibility of an Island’ 3 by Michel Houellebecq served as an appropriate kind of
inspiration for the title of the work. It just happened to be a book I had recently read
and yet its bleak post-human dystopia was not something I directly inferred. The book
does offer an interesting analogy of a future plight for a cloned humanity riddled with
residual memories, unable to break from history or personal memory.
Grangegorman will always have its history and that will be carried
through the historic architecture as well as folk, local and national records. The task
of representing this in an artwork is all but impossible, and could only be a possibility.
The potential is monumental, the history so tragic as to be unrepresentable. The 22
tonnes of records transferred to the National Archives represent this history.
Access to any of these records is however difficult. It is strict and appropriately
respectful. 4 Meetings with representatives from the health authority were
even necessary to explain my intentions. The sequence of words between the historic
register admission headings were a result of this process, which are also synonyms
for control. 5 This rendered the whole piece devoid of people, stories, conditions –
of any recorded information at all. Regulations protect identity, yet eliminated the
possibility of human detail in this work. Only the categories survive the process, the
classification headings that in themselves describe the medical science of the time.
Through each era, cultural and societal prejudice is revealed; secular or religious
power and morality that was given, accepted or in charge.

Concept
The work was conceived in
response to other archive
projects that were being
planned and discussed in
relation to the former mental
health institutions that were
in the Grangegorman site.
Some documents and artefacts
remain on site but most records
are now held in the National
Archives of Ireland. Patient
confidentiality is strictly
observed and adhered to which
meant that individual patient
stories could not be used
in an artwork. The resulting
work used category vocabulary,
which classified patients
instead. Four time periods were
chosen to reflect the changing
language to describe patients.
As only ledger headings were
used and not actual content
there remains a wealth of
information to be accessed at
some future point.
The glut of terminology offered no judgement, hierarchy or authority; no
success or failure of various health systems and institutions. The spectacle of this was
important to present. The contrast of languages was active, obviously because the
words were moving but working against each other, in opposite directions. A basic
visual device to represent the huge changes that time has brought and see different
systems emerge. A more obvious French intellectual to ground the piece would have
been Michel Foucault but I did not want the work to depend on anything but the
missing detail from the records. His controversial and contested book Madness and
Civilisation offers many insights into mental health over centuries, laying the framework
for institutions like those at Grangegorman. And so to end with a quote from him.
‘Confinement hid away unreason, and betrayed the shame it aroused; but it explicitly
drew attention to madness, pointed to it. If, in the case of unreason, the chief intention
was to avoid scandal, in the case of madness that intention was to organise it.’ 6
Photo: Lori Keeve
Commissioned for Culture
Night by ‘…the lives we live’
Grangegorman Public Art.
18 September 2015, from dusk
to 21:30
Outdoor video projection,
7 minutes duration, looped
I would like to thank the
following for their assistance
in making this project:
Jonathan Sammon — After Effects
designer
John Beattie — technical
support, FSAS
Fran Quigley — audiovisual
specialist, CAVS
Brian Donnelly — archivist,
National Archives of Ireland
Nora Rahill, HSE Art Committee
and Noel Kelly
Alan Phelan — documentation and
photographs unless otherwise
stated
Biography
Alan Phelan works in
photography, sculpture, video,
museum interventions, public
art and collaborations with
other artists, writers and
curators. Phelan studied at
1 On the left side moving up were keywords or terms from education, learning, and teaching; on the right side
keywords associated with mental health, including clinical, diagnostic and treatment phraseology. Both accessed
the massive contemporary professional vocabularies, found through online resources. This filled the sides with a
random stream of words and terminology. These were contrasted by the centre texts, which moved downwards in
small sections. These were headings from registers for patient admissions from 1814–1827; 1863–1868; 1947–1950;
and 1971–1972. Only four ledger books were used from the many held in the National Archives, with the title and
date remaining visible for the sequence while the various different and changing categories unfolded. In between
each sequence was a list of words which expressed the restricted access to detailed personal information.
2 The Phoenix Care Centre is located on the North Circular Road and shares an entrance with the TU Dublin
campus. This is in effect the legacy mental health facility at the original location, open however only since
2013, with 54 beds in comparison to what was there before. As the HSE describes it, there are beds of varying
intervention requirements for service users of the Dublin North City Mental Health Services.
3 Houellebecq, M. (2005). The Possibility of an Island. Translated by G. Bowd. London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson.
4 See the ‘Report on Historical Mental Health Records Seminar’, held at Royal Irish Academy, 16 May 2019,
specifically the paper by Brian Donnelly outlining access parameters. The seminar marked the beginning of
a partnership between the Royal Irish Academy, the Grangegorman Development Agency, the Health Service
Executive, Technological University Dublin, Dublin City Council and the National Archives, Ireland to develop a
3-year project on the history of Grangegorman. Report available on ria.ie
5 For a broader overview of hospital archives see, Survey of Hospital Archives in Ireland, funded by the Wellcome
Trust, undertaken by the National Archives, available at www.nationalarchives.ie/what-we-do/publications/
6 See: Foucault, M. (1965). Madness And Civilization: A History Of Insanity In The Age Of Reason. New York:
Random House. p.81.

THE POSSIBILITY OF AN ARCHIVE 44–45
DCU, Dublin and RIT, New York.
Solo exhibitions include CCI,
Void, RHA, The Dock, The Hugh
Lane, Oonagh Young Gallery,
Golden Thread Gallery, IMMA,
Chapter, LCGA, MCAC, Solstice
and The Black Mariah. Group
exhibitions include TBG+S,
Lewis Glucksman Gallery,
CCA, Derry/Londonderry, EVA
International, Treignac Projet,
Bozar Brussels, and exhibitions
in New York, Shanghai,
Ljubljana, Belgrade, Copenhagen
as well as Kunstmuseum Bonn and
The Whitney Museum New York.
Public commissions include The
Walker Plinth, Derry, Dublin
City Council, St. Michael's
House Special National School,
Raheny, South Council and the
Department of Communications
(DCMNR). He has received
numerous grants and awards
including The Arts Council,
Culture Ireland, Creative
Ireland and the Hotron Éigse
Art Prize. He has completed
several residencies including
NCAD, HIAP, CCI, URRA and FSAS.
If, in the case of unreason, the chief intention
was to avoid scandal, in the case of madness that
intention was to organise it.
Links
www.alanphelan.com/portfolio/
the-possibility-of-anarchive-2015

46–47
THE GOLDEN
BANDSTAND –
Sculpture
Garrett
Phelan

Production in collaboration
with Kevin Murphy, Shadow
Creations.
Commission Support Team:
Garrett Phelan, Artist; Kevin
Murphy, Shadow Creations; Paul
McDunphy, TU Dublin; Maire
Mellerick, Dominick Healy and
Jenny Haughton GDA.
Biography
Garrett Phelan is a Dublin
based artist that continues to
develop a distinctive practice
through ambitious gallery
and site-specific permanent
and temporary projects that
include; Independent FM
radio broadcasts, sculptural
installations, photography,
drawing, animation, film,
publications, posters and
text ephemera. Relevant solo
exhibitions and commissions
include; ‘FREE THOUGHT’ FM,
Douglas Hyde Gallery. Dublin,
(2019); ‘I HAVE NO RIGHT TO
BE SO NEAR’, National Gallery
of Ireland (2018); THE HIDE
PROJECT, commission, Fingal
County Council, Dublin (2017
– ongoing); HEED FM, ART:2016,
Arts Council, Dublin (2016);
‘A VOODOO FREE PHENOMENON’,
Project Arts Centre, Dublin
(2015). ‘NEW FAITH LOVE SONG’,
IMMA, Dublin (2012).
Link
www.garrettphelan.com

THE GOLDEN BANDSTAND – SCULPTURE 50–51

A rendering of Solaris Nexum as seen from the second floor.
Render: Colin Rennie

52–53
Solaris
Nexum
Alexandra
Carr

Heat in the void. Vulcan’s golden seat of chaos wrestles
itself. Isolated, this seemingly unending maelstrom of
fury hangs in the darkness, illuminating its primordial
cousins. The burning orb’s glare reveals everything in
its wake, dashing dreams of secrecy.
Concept
Solaris Nexum explores our
changing connection to the sun
through technological shifts
of various ages. Through
a double-sided surface of
suspended mirrors, Solaris
Nexum is a helical structure
projected onto catenary arches,
allowing continually changing
reflections in response to the
shifting light.
Carr approaches celestial
architecture, advances in
optics, and renewable energy as
paradigm shifting technologies,
drawing together periods of
human history with a potential
future for humankind.
Firstly, the instinctive,
neolithic era, when humankind
was rooted to the environment
and in greater connection to
the ebb and flow of natural
cycles. The panel shape of the
mirrors utilises static and
dynamic triangles from sacred
geometry to acknowledge the
platonic elements, while giving
a sense of movement, evolution
and perpetual change of natural
systems. The sunlight at the
autumnal equinox is directed
through a column of glass
beads, echoing the function
of neolithic sites such as
Newgrange. The solar column
is placed at the centre of the
overall form of the sculpture;
the outer shell of the form
echoes the celestial firmament
and our then skyward-looking
nature.
Secondly the analytical,
mechanistic and deterministic
view of the renaissance brought
about by the shift from a
geocentric perspective of the
universe to a heliocentric
viewpoint, bringing with
it significant religious
The blades of destruction that reach out over aeons, glint with creation.
Sparks of potential float in the ether, effortlessly nudging insignificant
flecks and mineral cathedrals into the vast continuum. Charged seeds collide with
immoveable quanta, their union the launch of infinite possibilities. A volatile age of
renewal writes its code many times over, correcting and overcorrecting the traces of
dawns past, arriving where fragile breath begins.
We form structured clusters of tenderness while invisible threads gently
bind us into a secure embrace. We feel the power of our origins. We look to the earth,
the water, the curve of the horizon. We observe. What is beyond nautical twilight? We
touch the dirt and taste the sea, but cannot grasp the celestial sphere. We can’t tame
the elusive timekeeper, so we frame it.
We build houses to obey its rhythmic whims. Poised with childlike anticipation,
we praise the instant the ray-maker gilds our monolith of permanence. We
rotate around our axis mundi, faithfully existing in cyclic ritual.
Revolutions pass, stone crumbles, stories are mistold, directions diverge
and we are adrift in the forest. The stars, once our guidelight home, are veiled by the
canopy. Lost, we pause a while, we ponder. Our curiosity holds us captive in the maze
we’ve stumbled into.
Close up sketch of how the two -way mirrored triangular paneled
surfaces interact with each other. Render: Colin Rennie
The pause becomes permanent.
In this opaque bubble, we polish, we tinker, we create, we invent. We
make a marvel of our cage and, through colour-splitting trinkets, we build a fortress
of truths. We have conquered the outer sphere and become Gods of our own making.
Masters of our domain, we delve into worlds unknown, through a happenstance
lens; infinite turtles for the taking. Euphoric in our splendour, we chart virgin
territories in the name of reason. We label, sample and cage. We dig. Dig for explosive
jewels. Hypnotic, magnetic, deathly jewels, oozing from below, setting us free.
We no longer touch the earth, we soar like birds. We spread, speed up and multiply.

SOLARIS NEXUM
54–55
repercussions. Two-way mirrors
have been utilised to reference
Newtonian optics that allowed
mankind to delve into the
microcosm, with the inner
mirror surface of the sculpture
representing our inward-looking
phase of understanding. The
structure has been divided
based on a five-fold repetition
of the DNA double helix to
highlight our perceived shift
of place in the cosmos, the
spiral intersections suggestive
of natural forms. Reminiscent
of apparatus for astronomical
observations, the layered
mirrors reference moiré
patterns, parallax and illusion
to remind us to question what
we believe to be true.
Thirdly, a representation of
our current state of being
and an acknowledgement of
our advances in technology
and material science. We are
equipped with the knowledge of
our impact on the environment
and have the means to exist
responsibly, respectfully and
intelligently.
This third age is reflected
in the structure of the
sculpture which is informed
by sun towers; the angling
of the mirrored panels
pay homage to solar panel
orientation, the tracking of
the sun and celestial bodies,
further highlighting our
solar connection. The use of
double-sided mirrored surfaces
references the inward and
outward nature of societal
views, a movement in focus
between the macrocosm and the
microcosm, and brings weight
to the value of the truth
contained within a multitude
of perspectives. Similarly,
through the use of two-way
mirrors, the environment, the
building and the viewer are
reflected in the sculpture,
while being reflected in
itself. As our vision is
challenged through the changing
light, Solaris Nexum provokes
a perspective shift from a
control of the environment to
being responsive to it. It is
an invitation to move towards a
symbiotic and holistic approach
of our environment, with a
view to achieve a technological
utopia in balance with nature.
The sculpture serves as a
monument to solar connection
through the ages of technology,
encourages us to retain a
respect for nature and to
Side view of the sculpture demonstrating the triangular panels orientated
towards the sun, reminiscent of solar towers. Render: Colin Rennie
We jostle for a roosting spot in the thick, black air, clambering over each other to keep
our hearts beating. We falter. Gold flakes fall from our robes and turn to ash on the
rotten wasteland.
Where did our home go? We are the rulers of this land. Did we do this?
Mute with shame, we are paralysed.
The daylight is shrouded by the acrid smoke. We are choking. Some survive
the Minotaur as we crawl from the charred remains of the forest. Refugees of our
own undoing, we build simple dwellings, looking back at our lost friends, speaking in
tongues in their seductive prison, barely recognisable and oblivious to the madness
they have succumbed to. Shapeshifters who have passed their own sentence, refusing
to flee their city, burning ferociously, inching outwards towards us; the ghost custodians
too idle to quench the fire.
An enemy of time, we build vessels of hope to follow a whisper on the
wind of a land so still you can hear the hum of the world – a realm of glistening beacons
swaying silently in gentle adoration. Soon the days will shine brighter until the
sky is ablaze. We will be gone when the inferno consumes our marble, two primitives
merging into delicious chaos before the tale is sucked into oblivion.
We have a slither left.

intelligently live in harmony
with its resources, moving
towards a technologically
symbiotic age. Carr invites
us to look both inwards and
outwards to embrace all spheres
of being into one harmonious
whole.
Artist support: Colin
Rennie, Renée Pfister Art
& Gallery Consultancy and
CConsult Engineering.
Every fragment of star stuff within us, aches
to feel the pulse of the timeless and yearns for the
wisdom of the cosmos. We are humble in our voyage
forwards while safe in a blanket of contended, respectful
unknowing.
Commission Support team:
Alexandra Carr, Artist; Paul
Horan and Darragh Power, TU
Dublin; Jenny Haughton GDA,
Simon Carter of Feilden Clegg
Bradley Studios.
This work will be installed in
the TU Dublin Central Quad by
summer 2021.
Biography
Alexandra Carr’s work responds
to natural processes and
phenomena, is experimental in
nature and includes drawing,
kinetic works, video and new
media. Working in partnership
with MIT, Oxford and Durham
Universities, she collaborates
with world-leading researchers
including engineers and
theoretical physicists,
focusing on the intersection of
art, science and technology.
Studying at Central Saint
Martins and Camberwell College
of Art, she subsequently
exhibited at the Fondation
Cartier in Paris, in
collaboration with Jean-Paul
Gaultier, was commissioned by
seminal musicians Radiohead,
was shortlisted for the Arts@
CERN COLLIDE International
Award 2016 and longlisted for
the Aesthetica Art Prize 2017,
2019 and 2020.
She exhibits internationally
including the Verket Museum,
Sweden and project spaces in
Iceland.
Carr had a Leverhulme funded
residency at Durham University,
investigating medieval
and modern cosmology in
collaboration with historians
and cosmologists.
She is a fellow at The
Institute of Advanced
Studies working on ‘Material
Imagination’ to produce
biological smart materials.
Link
www.alexandracarr.co.uk
www.instagram.com/
studioalexandracarr
The large and small rings of the metal hanging system are loaded
with the bespoke brackets and levelled ahead of welding at
Architectural Metalworkers Ltd. Photo: Alexandra Carr

SOLARIS NEXUM
56–57
The polycarbonate parts, once cut by a computer numerical control (CNC) machine, are placed back
into the offcut ‘skeleton’ to be transported from workshop to studio. Photo: Alexandra Carr

Walker & Walker, Endless Play, 2020 (ongoing), aluminium,
stainless steel, Hawthorn tree, theatrical lighting

58–59
Endless Play
Walker
and Walker

Édouard Manet, Music in the Tuileries Gardens, (1862),
© The National Gallery, London. The Hugh Lane Bequest, 1917
A central tenet in our practice is the consideration of binary structures
such as night/day, one/zero, negative/postive, etc, as creating a limiting dialectic.
These form an undesirable resolution by the suggestion that one or the other should
finally achieve some privileged status. We are interested in opening up a more nuanced
interrelationship between what is seemingly oppositional.
In the installation Endless Play we are creating an environment which
creates a paradigm shift between an agent and/or a passive recipient, between the
audience and/or the performers. Endless Play consists of a fabricated structure of
horizontal forms making a banked seating, cut through with an opening for a tree to
grow through, and lit by a sequence of theatre spotlights.
The installation is influenced by Edouard Manet’s painting Music in
the Tuileries (1862) that is housed in the Hugh Lane Gallery in Dublin and has long
intrigued us, not least because it plays with similar concerns to Diego Velázquez’s
painting Las Meninas. Credited with introducing a greater psychological complexity
to art, in Velázquez’s painting the viewer stands in the place of the King and Queen
whose portraits Velazquez is painting,
whereby the relationship between the
observer and the observed is brought
into question.
Manet’s painting occupies
a similarly relational space. The
painting depicts a contemporary
urban gathering, an audience for the
suggested unseen and unheard symphony
of the title. The viewers are
situated seemingly where the musicians
in the orchestra should be. The
transient, the fleeting and the contingent,
were elements that Manet
delighted in. Where else is the music
of the title coming from, if not from us,
the viewers? In many respects classical
in its composition, in the background a horizontal axis is signalled by the last line
of the figures’ heads and the vertical axis by the trees, – the only means of light is a
small triangle of light which illuminates the scene. The uniqueness of the paintings’
limited depth of field and the dominance of the vertical and horizontal axes adhere to
the structure of the sculptural installation.
Minimalist in form, the
installation is punctuated by a single
tree creating a vertical dynamic and
a rupture. Lit from above by a series
of spotlights, the isolated tree bears
reference to Samuel Beckett‘s play
Waiting for Godot, which was inspired
by a painting Two Men Contemplating
Caspar David Friedrich, Two Men Contemplating
the Moon (c. 1825–30), Metropolitan Museum
of Art . 34.9 x 43.8 cm
the Moon by Caspar David Friedrich, a
citation Beckett rarely gave.
In addition, a number of
text based neon artworks will reside
within the interior spaces of the buildings
which open out onto the Quad.
These neon texts are written in reverse and thereby are read correctly when viewed
as reflections on the windows, each text appearing to hover outside in the open space
beyond the window, along with the viewers own reflection.

ENDLESS PLAY 60–61
The horizontal aspect of the installation, the banked seating and the
floating texts, echoes the manner in which Caspar David Friedrich created paintings.
Friedrich unlike his predecessors who used a valley or a river as the line of sight, used
pictorial devices such as flanking and overlapping rocks, mountains, or trees to lead
you back to an abrupt horizon. The text punctuates the sight line of the viewer, creating
discontinuous moments of passage to the site of contemplation, the social scene.
Introducing a fragmented and temporal paradigm into the act of viewing and creating
a tension with the larger sited sculpture, the neons augment the dominant concepts
at play; the sense of an event, the shifting, coalescing dynamics between those sitting
on the work looking out or those viewing it looking on.
A final part of Endless Play will consist of a short scripted scenario
between two protagonists. Introducing a fictional play, an imagined happening set
within the dynamics of the installation, this script will be framed and hung in its vicinity
for viewers to read and contemplate, creating a sense of expectation or suspense for
an imagined past or future occurrence.
Walter Benjamin in his Arcades project speaks of how Charles Baudelaire
viewed loitering as a means to facilitate exchange. At its heart, Endless Play is
a vehicle for students to gather both as performers and audience, roles that become
interchangeable with passers by. The West Quad is a convivial space within which
Endless Play makes performative the everyday act of social exchange, and the relationship
between protagonist and/or audience. It is both an active celebration of social
gathering and a monument to it.
In between Correggio’s Mystical Marriage and Titian’s Allegory
of Alfonso d’Avalos (missing Mona Lisa), August 22, 1911

Artist support: CConsult
Engineering, Robert Mueller,
Bartenbach, 33 Trees Ltd,
David Walker and Grace Weir.
Commission Support Team: Joe
and Pat Walker, Artists; Paul
Horan, Collette Burns, Teresa
Hurley and Paul Mc Dunphy, TU
Dublin; Jenny Haughton and Pat
O'Sullivan, GDA; Shih-Fu Peng,
Glenn O'Brien, Simona Yonkova,
Heneghan Peng Architects.
Biography
Joe Walker and Pat Walker
are brothers who began
collaborating as Walker and
Walker in 1989. They corepresented
Ireland at the 51 st
International Venice Biennale
in 2005 with their film
installation Nightfall and have
exhibited widely nationally
and internationally. Their
film Mount Analogue Revisited
was listed in Senses of Cinema
as one of the best films
of 2010 and has been shown
internationally.
Recent exhibitions include
at The Irish Museum of
Modern Art, Dublin; Magazin4,
Bregenz, Austria; Artspace
Boan1942 and Thomas Park
Gallery, Seoul, South Korea;
Salzburger Kunstverein,
Salzburg, Austria; Museum of
Modern Art, Rio de Janeiro;
Galleria Civica di Modena,
Italy; Dublin City Gallery,
The Hugh Lane; Sheppard Fine
Arts Gallery, Reno, USA;
The RHA Gallery, Dublin;
Gracelands, Ireland; Gimpel
fils, London UK; Glassbox,
Paris France; Floating Ip,
Manchester UK; Christopher
Grimes Gallery, LA; Cheekwood
Museum of Art, Nashville; and
Spencer Brownstone Gallery,
New York USA.
Endless Play is intended to
be situated in the TU Dublin
West Quad when the building
is constructed.
Link
www.walkerandwalkerartists.com

ENDLESS PLAY 62–63
all is present in the absence of
Walker & Walker, All is present in the absence of all, 2020, offset print

Fergus Martin, Sky, 2016, acrylic on aluminium, 249 × 118 × 4cm, installation view, Green On Red Gallery, Dublin

64–65
The blue of the
sky, the green
of the grass, the
red of a rose
Fergus
Martin

The new HSE Residential Care Neighbourhood (RCN)
for Grangegorman in Dublin 7 will be made up of five different
‘households.’ All of these, except for the day care
centre, will be peoples’ homes. Some of these households
will be home to elderly people with dementia,
others to elderly people from the nearby community.
I am making five different paintings, one for each household
of the RCN, to be seen and enjoyed by the people
who live and work there, as well as those who visit. The
paintings could also be rotated and give each household
a new work at different times.
My starting point was Sky, a painting from 2016.
It points to the sky and lifts the heart.
I want the work to make people feel happy, even on the greyest days.
I would like it to feel fresh, as if always seen for the first time.
For some people with memory loss, everytime they see the paintings
could be like the first time and I would like those times to be like a welcome, with
arms wide open.
The Irish Museum of Modern Art Azure Dementia-Inclusive Programme
made several visits to my 2019 exhibition at IMMA with people with dementia and
their carers and the responses to Sky were always happy ones. The colour of Sky gave
much pleasure and led many people to want to discuss the painting.
I would like the paintings to be like beams of light, to calm and also to
stimulate. I want them to make people feel good.
Study for paintings for the RCN Chalk pastel on paper

THE BLUE OF THE SKY, THE GREEN OF THE GRASS, THE RED OF A ROSE 66–67
Maquettes for six paintings for the Residential Care Neighbourhood; acrylic on foamboard
Biography
Fergus Martin’s work encompasses
painting, sculpture and
photography and is included in
public collections including
the National Gallery of Ireland;
IMMA; Hugh Lane Gallery;
Crawford Art Gallery, Cork;
the Office of Public Works; as
well as private collections
in Ireland and abroad. Awards
include the Irish America
Culture Association Award
2014, the Curtin O’Donoghue
Photography Prize RHA 2010, the
Pollock Krasner Foundation New
York Awards 2006 and 1999.
I am aiming for colours that are healing –
the blue of the sky, the green of fresh grass. The
paintings would also be strong markers of a place
– blue is the dining room. They would announce the
place they’re in.
I would also encourage the RCN to have ongoing facilitated sessions with
an art educator for residents and staff to participate in – to bring an Azure-type experience
to the people who live there and their carers and families for shared discussions
in the hope it would add to the enjoyment of the work for all.
In 2019 he had a solo exhibition
Fergus Martin Then and Now
at the Irish Museum of Modern
Art, and in 2020, his sculpture
Barrel was installed in the
grounds of the Royal Hospital
Kilmainham/Irish Museum of
Modern art. Also in 2020, his
sculpture, Oak, was installed
at the International Criminal
Court, The Hague, commissioned
by the Department of Foreign
Affairs, a gift from the
Government of Ireland to
the Court.

Colour studies notebooks for paintings for the RCN, 2020
Born in Cork, Martin studied
painting at Dun Laoghaire School
of Art from 1972–1976. From
1979–1988 he lived and worked
in Italy, where he lectured
in English Language at The
University of Milan. In 1988,
he returned to painting and had
his first solo exhibition at
Oliver Dowling Gallery, Dublin,
in 1990. In 1991, he attended
The New York Studio School of
Drawing, Painting and Sculpture.
Martin was also part of the
collaborative duo Fergus
Martin and Anthony Hobbs, whose
photographic projects were shown
in Venice; Dublin; Brussels;
St Johns, Newfoundland and
Melle, France. Their work is
in the collections of The Arts
Council of Ireland and The Irish
Museum of Modern Art, and the
collection of Ville de Melle,
France.
Martin is a member of Aosdana.
He is represented by Green On
Red gallery.
Artist support: One Off Design.
Commission Support Team: Fergus
Martin, Artist; Derek Dockrell
and Kevin Sheridan, HSE; Jenny
Haughton and Des Marmion, GDA;
Valerie Mulvin, McCullough
Mulvin Architects.
Link
www.fergusmartin.com

New Colour studies notebooks for paintings for the RCN, 2020
THE BLUE OF THE SKY, THE GREEN OF THE GRASS, THE RED OF A ROSE 68–69

Joy Gerrard, Dusk/Dawn, 2014, handblown Jerpoint glass, 600 × 400 × 300 cm

70–71
Phoenix Care
Centre Art
Oisín Byrne
Joy Gerrard
Curated by Aisling Prior
Oisín Byrne, Long live the weeds and the wilderness yet, 2014, silk and screen print

Joy Gerrard
Dusk/Dawn
The primary aim of the Phoenix Care Centre, a new mental health facility
replacing St. Brendan’s Hospital on the Grangegorman site in Dublin 7, was to be a
place of safety and recovery for its service users. Any artworks commissioned for the
centre would need to evoke feelings of ‘calm and of peacefulness’, while also symbolising
‘hope and possibility’. The chosen artworks should be ‘exquisitely sensitive’
to their context. 1 The concepts, materials and methods that constitute art practices
tend to evolve organically, typically driven by a responsiveness to changes within the
making process. Controlling the outcomes of this process, inevitably uncertain, and
determining that these outcomes conform to a set of unambiguous, a priori conditions,
requires dexterity on the artist’s part. For a commission such as this one, the artist
must combine a willingness to have their work experienced and interpreted within a
strict set of conditions, whilst remaining faithful to the values of their wider practice.
Aisling Prior stresses the importance of this latter aspect. It’s imperative commissions
are made within the canon of the artist’s gallery and museum work because, in the
end, ‘It’s the artist being selected, not the proposal’. 2
Vastly experienced in the curation of such delicate balancing acts, Aisling
Prior has trod a uniquely sensitive path between the needs of public and other institutions,
and the requirement of art practices to evolve according to their own, inner
logic. Prior is clear about her general approach, avoiding seeking original ideas from
artists, their unique commodity, at the outset of a process, preferring instead to outline
the opportunity as clearly as possible, before inviting them to consider whether
it might dovetail with their ongoing concerns. Her confidence in an artist’s ability to
understand and respond creatively and sensitively to the commission context and
circumstances, can sometimes temporarily separate her from the commissioning
body, who are taken on a journey of trust during the curation process. In winning over
the selection panel for the Phoenix Care Centre commissions, Prior told me how the
language used by the artists in their proposals at the shortlist stage played its part.
Joy Gerrard’s description of her suspended glass spheres – animated by the daily
passage of natural light through the atrium of the building – were to be primarily
experienced and enjoyed by the service users of the centre, as Prior said ‘a circadian
gift of reassurance and of consolation’. Or how the serpentine lines of Oisín Byrne’s
silk wall-hanging would be enlivened by their proximity to an open window, ‘Wafting
gently in the incoming breeze’. 3
It feels distinctly reassuring that such ephemeral acts can bear on the
imaginations of those charged with the concrete act of spending money. You can’t
really buy the passage of light, after all, or pay for a gentle breeze, but you can certainly
pay for objects that bring these qualities into play. Only one commission was
originally envisioned, but as the selection panel couldn’t decide between two of the
five shortlisted proposals, Prior suggested they commission both. With some adjustments
and modifications made to the proposals by the artists and to the budget by
the client, the solution to commission both artists was agreed; the resulting works
combining so well together that it might have been the plan all along.
Together, the collection of suspended glass spheres, measuring from
between 15 cm to 5 cm, that make up Joy Gerrard’s Dusk/Dawn look like a cloud of
bright bubbles. They certainly appear ephemeral; light and airy, like the bubbles a
child might have blown from a canister filled with water and washing up liquid. The
spheres vary in diameter between 6 and 12 cm. Some are delicately coloured, while
others remain clear. Though carefully assembled into what the artist calls ‘a hanging

PHOENIX CARE CENTRE ART 72–73
cloud of glass’, they also have the sense of an informal gathering, as though hanging
out together for the sheer hell of it, as much as for any designated purpose. 4 When
the light hits them in a certain way, the bubbles appear about to burst, as though
suspended on the threshold of their material viability. Ostensibly simple (if delightful),
this collection of glass spheres also resonates with other areas of the artist’s
work. Gerrard has long been preoccupied with gatherings of various kinds, especially
large groups of people framed by urban landscapes; crowds congregated in protest
against prevailing systems and prejudices. Dusk/Dawn was actually made before this
tendency in the artist’s work gained the prominence it has now, and it’s interesting to
consider how this gentle gathering of objects prefigures the more robust gatherings
– as seen, for example, in her RHA exhibition ‘Shot Crowd’ (2017) – appearing later on.
Gerrard’s current work might be considered overtly political in its general
themes, yet here she manages to fold her developing concerns into a more gentle,
nonconfrontational outcome. Mindful of the requirement for calm and hope, Gerrard’s
original proposal mentions that in similar settings she herself had often ‘wished for
something beautiful to look at’. In the same proposal she describes her theme of the
returning day – the Dusk/Dawn of her title – and how the phenomena of sunrise and
sunset, however banal they might seem in constructions of conventional sentimentality,
are also beacons of hope. ‘We subconsciously know, that no matter what else
happens, or is going on in our lives, that this is the most universal symbol of time
moving, and life passing and being lived.’ 5
Despite relatively prescriptive circumstances, the work remains open to
interpretation. Gerrard’s delicate spheres might be oxygen bubbles rising from a deep
well, filtering a sub-aqueous light, captured and solidified before bursting upon the
surface air. Suspended in the double height atrium space, they rest at the level of the
upper floor, visible through the glazed partitions surrounding them. The occupants
of this floor can encounter the spheres head on, as though the spectacle were lifted
up to meet them. From the ground floor reception level, the massed objects appear
more cloud-like, floating above the unsuspecting visitors below. The transparent orbs
might also be thought bubbles, hanging above the heads of this ever changing cast
– receptacles for their thoughts and private reveries.
Dusk/Dawn detail, 450 transparent and coloured glass spheres
of various sizes, suspended from steel wires, the overall
measuring approximately 6 4 3 metres

Oisín Byrne
Long live the weeds and
the wilderness yet 6
Commissioned for Phoenix Care
Centre, North Circular Rd,
Dublin 7. Client; HSE and
Grangegorman Development Agency.
Biographies
Joy Gerrard lives and works in
Belfast. She graduated with a BA
from NCAD, Dublin and an MA and
MPhil from the Royal College of
Art, London. Gerrard is known
for work that investigates
different systems of relations
between crowds, architecture
and the built environment.
Recent solo exhibitions include
‘supermarket’ in Stockholm with
Ormston House (2019) and ‘Shot
Crowd’at the Royal Hibernian
Academy, Dublin (2017). Selected
group exhibitons include:
‘Protest and Remembrance’,
Cristea Roberts Gallery,
London (2019); and ‘Crossing
Lines’, Highlanes Gallery,
Drogheda, and F.E. McWilliam
Gallery, Banbridge (2019).
She has installed multiple
public installations since 2004
including major works in the
London School of Economics,
Chelsea and Westminster
Hospital, for Tideway (London)
and Facebook (London and Dublin)
Gerrard has just completed
a residency at the Centre
Culturel Irlandais in Paris in
2020 and is an Associate Member
of the RHA, Dublin.
Aisling Prior, an independent
curator, has curated several
international and national
exhibitions such as ‘See
Through Art’ at the Hugh Lane,
‘Ireland and Europe’ at the
Iveagh Gardens, ‘Art in The
Life World’ in the Old Swimming
Pool, Ballymun, ‘Something
Else’ Kilkenny Arts Festival,
2009 and TULCA 2014, Galway.
She curated the annual group
show, ‘Hermione’ at Alexandra
College, was a curator for
‘Periodical Review’ at Pallas
Projects in 2018 and of ‘Agnès
and I’ for the Black Church
Print Studios in 2019. She was
Public Art Advisor to the Arts
Council of Ireland and Editor
of www.publicart.ie from 2012
to 2015. As Artistic Director
A sense of reverie is more immediately apparent in Oisín Byrne’s pure
silk wall-hanging, made for the same foyer space. In an image screen printed, and in
places sewn into the light-weight fabric, a figure of uncertain gender is outlined in
fluid strokes. Garlanded with vines, and with closed eyes suggesting sleep, the heavy
head is bowed under a gentle cascade of leaves. Draped from on high on a simple,
wooden horizontal rail, the fabric hangs free from other constraints, creasing a little
across its breadth, pleasingly feeling its own weight. Bordered on three sides by broad,
green bands, the image remains open at the top, suggesting its continuation upwards
into the surrounding space, and by implication, to somewhere beyond it. This soothing
banner has a clear affiliation with other works by Byrne. In a practice ranging across
a variety of media and approaches, depictions of the human figure assume a central
place. Byrne seems preoccupied by figures at rest, or sleeping. His banners and wall
hangings in the group show, ‘In The Line of Beauty’, IMMA (2014) depicted single
figures lying in bed with the bedclothes pulled up to their chins. Seeming to occupy
a liminal state between sleeping and wakefulness, the figures conveyed a sense of
inexorable drift, as though avoiding the defining poles of one state, or another.
Oisín Byrne, Long live the weeds and the wilderness yet (detail),
2014, wall-hanging / screen printed and embroidered silk
Byrne’s more recent film work, Glue (2017) is a 50-minute portrayal of his
friend, and fellow artist, Gary Farrelly. Farrelly – as depicted in the film – is an agitated
figure, alternating between bouts of mania and narcolepsy in a colourfully striped
shirt. Byrne is interested in indeterminate states, and how energy flows between them.
Banners and wall hangings are often associated with displays of certitude,
useful for identifying a specific message or tribe. Byrne’s redeployment of
them here (and in his practice more generally), in the service of a seeming lassitude
(his garlanded figure might be Bacchus sleeping it off) is reminiscent of an opiated
poeticism typified by the French artist, Jean Cocteau. Affectionately nicknamed ‘The
Frivolous Prince’, Cocteau – dramatist, novelist, visual artist, filmmaker and poet – in
reality was anything but. In his 1929 novel, ‘Les Enfants Terribles’ his sibling protagonists
torment each other in a deadly game of one-upmanship. I’ve no idea if this story
served as a model for the mutual affections and antagonisms on display in Glue, but

PHOENIX CARE CENTRE ART 74–75
of the internationally acclaimed
Breaking Ground, the Ballymun
Regeneration Ltd art commission
programme (2000—2008), she
produced over 40 artists’
projects with emerging and
established artists. She was
the director of Visual Artists’
Ireland (VAI) from 1991—1998.
She holds a BA in Philosophy
(UCD) and a 1 st class Hons MA in
Curatorial Studies (IADT). She
was co-curator of Fingal County
Council’s 2017—2020 public art
programme ‘Infrastructure’. She
is a member of the Programme
Board of the RHA.
Oisín Byrne (b.1983) is an
Irish visual artist, writer and
film-maker based in London.
He received his BA from NCAD
Dublin, and his MFA from
Goldsmiths University London.
Byrne’s work has been exhibited
internationally in institutions
including Salzburger
Kunstverein, Goldsmiths Centre
for Contemporary Art, Witte de
With Centre for Contemporary
Art, the Irish Museum of Modern
Art, and Princeton University.
His work is substantially
represented in the Irish State
Collection. His writing has
been published in Eros Press
and Pilot Press, with upcoming
writing in MA Bibliotheque’s
anthology work ‘ON CARE’ and
in The Happy Hypocrite’s final
edition ‘Without Reduction’.
Byrne also works as a creative
consultant to filmmaker Sophie
Fiennes, with ‘Grace Jones:
Bloodlight and Bami’ premiering
at Toronto Film Festival. He
is an associate lecturer at
Central Saint Martins and London
College of Communications.
John Graham has a BA
(Printmaking 1993) and MFA
(Media 2006) from the NCAD.
With a foundation in drawing
and printmaking, his art
practice has also included
video installations, writing
and curatorial projects. He has
exhibited widely in Ireland
and abroad, most prominently
with the Green On Red Gallery
in Dublin and the Yanagisawa
Gallery in Japan. His articles
and exhibition reviews have
been published by the Visual
Artists’ News Sheet, Paper
Visual Art Journal and Enclave
Review, among others. John lives
in Dublin and is a member of
the Black Church Print Studio.
He lectures in fine art at the
Yeats Academy of Arts, Design &
Architecture, IT Sligo.
www.johngraham.ie
the cover of my paperback copy of the novel, from a painting by Cocteau, is certainly
reminiscent of Byrne’s silken image. Interested in identities that are ambiguous, contested
or otherwise unfixed, Byrne’s work feels distinctly contemporary, while at the
same time harking back to a previous era with its own transitions and tribulations.
Paris in the 1920’s and 30’s was certainly protean, and Jean Cocteau was joined in his
explorations of complex identities by a cast of famous peers that included the Paris
based, American photographer Man Ray, conceptualist Marcel Duchamp and early
gender bender, Claude Cahun.
Of course none of this need be apparent for Byrne’s drapery to be
enjoyed. Like Gerrard’s bright bubbles, its effectiveness is not tethered to a clever
idea so much as to that ‘exquisite sensitivity’ mentioned in the original commissioning
brief. Aisling Prior told me how simply beautiful she found all of the work (Gerrard’s
project included six framed works on paper), and how everyone involved, in an often
unashamedly and perhaps even intentionally emotional process, were delighted with
and uplifted by the artworks. 7 Of course it’s the life of the work afterwards that really
matters, within the daily rounds of the Phoenix Care Centre itself. Whether artists,
curators or audiences, as artworks take on a life of their own we inevitably move
away from them. If we’re lucky, and remain alert to it, a little of their beauty might
come with us.
John Graham
1 From the commissioning brief.
2 From phone conversation between Aisling Prior and the writer, 12/06/20.
3 Ibid.
4 From the artist’s original proposal for the work.
5 From the artist’s original proposal for the work.
6 Byrne’s title comes from the last line of Inversnaid by Gerard Manley Hopkins.
7 From phone conversation between Aisling Prior and the writer, 12/06/20.

The Life of Loans:
On the Politics of Belonging
and Co-existence
Christina Kennedy
Senior Curator Head of
Collections, Irish Museum
of Modern Art
George Warren, Green Centaur,
2015, on loan from the OPW
Alice Maher, The Axe (and the Waving Girl),
2003, on loan from IMMA

THE LIFE OF LOANS: ON THE POLITICS OF BELONGING AND CO-EXISTENCE 76–77
Art is good for us. None of us quite understand how or why but therein
lies its power. The life of art – the life of loans – is reflected in the time in which they
exist and the level of interest in them. Artworks are only as meaningful as access to
them is possible. All art in public collections is there for and because of the public.
It is the duty of those of us who care for our National Collections, to make them live,
to make them accessible and meaningful for as wide an audience as possible. It is
important to open the Collection out, to encourage new thinking. Works are there for
our reinterpretation. Everyone’s readings are their own and narratives are as open as
there are people to engage with the work.
IMMA is hugely committed to the principle of sharing the National Collection
of Modern and Contemporary Art. 23 years of national programming of the
Collection has resulted in over 200 exhibitions, (with more than 2,000 works lent),
throughout Ireland, from Derry to Kerry. This has been due in no small measure to the
programming efforts of my colleague IMMA curator Johanne Mullan, whose collaborative
practice with arts offices, galleries, civic spaces, hospitals, festivals and venues
normally outside the scope of contemporary art, has brought the true meaning of ‘Art
for the People’ to life. Lending works from the National Collections is based on sharing,
trust and collaboration, on the politics of belonging and co-existence.
IMMA Collection works range from painting, sculpture and work on paper
to photography, video, performance art, digital art and installation. We are continuously
researching how best to address the acquisition and preservation of time-based
and ephemeral artworks that so many artists pursue today through performative,
conceptual, collaborative and participatory practices, so that these works too may be
seen beyond the museum.
When considering loans, IMMA has a responsibility to ensure appropriate
conditions of care are undertaken by the borrower including; a suitable physical
location; that the artist’s installation specifications for the work are met; the correct
environmental conditions, security of the artwork, transport, insurance, the cost of
routine conservation; informational signage for audience engagement with the work
and so on. Once loans are approved, we collaborate assiduously with venues and
curators to help them meet criteria to make the loans happen.
Since 2015, Alice Maher’s The Axe (and the Waving Girl, 2003), has been
on loan from IMMA to TU Dublin where it is installed on the Grangegorman campus, at
the top of the Cultural Garden. It is a unique artwork of two parts, cast from bronze and
painted. It draws on the artist’s abiding interest in nature and culture, transformation,
folklore and memory. A miniscule girl is waving towards a monumental axe, which is
leaning precariously against a tree. The work plays with scale, distance and closeness,
a disruption of the natural balance and a degree of apparent menace. Young students
from nearby St. Paul’s CBS (The Brunner) interpreted the piece: ‘…it teaches children
how to deal with fear/life; it is about male/female; child/parent; the axe is the tool of
the good woodsman; it saves the child; it is also threatening and scary…’ By now the
sculpture has become an established meeting point.
George Warren’s large, expressively carved Green Centaur (2015), on
loan from the Collection of the Office of Public Works, also harks to a mythological,
fantasy world. Located in the foyer of the Greenway Hub, its woodland presence is so
strikingly in contrast with the sheer surfaces of the architectural setting that it evokes
‘a voice both at odds with and in perfect sync with our time’ as artist Patrick Graham
described Warren’s approach to his art.

The Primary Care Centre
To coincide with its opening in 2018, an exhibition of artworks in various
media was installed in the Primary Care Centre on loan for three years. It also inaugurated
a novel lending scheme, with a modest annual fee to the artist and which, if the
art is purchased in the meantime, the artist will replace with another work.
As HSE Executive Derek Dockrell remarked: ‘Art has the ability to
encourage reflection and thought. Perhaps one is more prepared to let this happen
while in healthcare buildings, to contemplate a piece and wonder…’ The works by ten
esteemed artists include painting, sculpture, photography and archive assemblage
and are thought provoking, personal, empathetic and uplifting.
Memory is evoked through familiar domestic spaces, thresholds, windows
and textures in the works of Mary Burke; the close relationship of mother and
young son is redolent in Catriona Brocklebank’s imaginative evocation. Space, nuance
and light are the focus of Helen Gorey’s sublimely refined orchard-inspired, colourfield
paintings while Marie Holohan’s vividly coloured, striated and patterned horizons
hover between reality and abstraction.
David Beattie’s photographs explore perceptions of light and the passage
of time, as day transitions to night, its movement tracked on a pendant glass light
shade, while the intensely detailed drawings of urban glimpses of truncated streets
and quotidian objects, are characteristic of Dorothy Smith.
Julie Merriman’s palimpsestic surfaces are the result of using typewriter
carbon on paper and notational marks based on systems and methodologies used by
cartographers, mathematicians, architects to denote place, structure and concept,
that overlap to illicit new readings. Wall-mounted, painted geometric timber sculptures
are playfully calculated by Gemma Fitzpatrick, from comparatively analysed
statistics that relate to her own day-to-day.
Frieze (2003) is one of a series of photographic projects by Martin &
Hobbs. The two artists have separate solo careers as Fergus Martin and Anthony
Hobbs. Frieze consists of 11 large scale photographs that form a tableau portraying an
array of gestures of an individual figure, (Martin), that mimic the respective sight lines
and postures of each of the apostles in a 16 th century wall painting ‘The Assumption of
the Virgin’, by Rosso Fiorentino. The 12 th apostle according to the artists is the viewer.
Another edition of this work is in the Collection of IMMA.
Alan Counihan’s installation Personal Effects, with related photographs,
video and soundtrack, is the only work made in direct response to the former psychiatric
institution, St. Brendan’s Grangegorman. Profoundly moving, it was assembled
from personal items found in the attic of the hospital that had been removed from
patients and never returned, including handbags and suitcases, birth certs, letters,
family photographs, mirrors combs, prayer books, diaries etc.
The therapeutic effects of the arts on health and well-being are well
appreciated if still not fully understood. Art helps people express experiences that
often are too difficult to bring to mind, or put into words. Artists can often give powerful,
aesthetic expression to ideas, emotions and situations that are often at the limits
of experience, not so easily articulated through other means.
It is in works such as Counihan’s that we find art that can test and expose
society’s implicit value commitments, particularly in current times as we seek to
reconsider so much of what has been taken for granted. In time to come, the artworks
that are acquired or remain on long term loan as part of ‘…the lives we live’, their
archives, how they were programmed, the history of their prioritisation, why they are
of interest (whether borrowed or collected), will throw light on the aspirations, ethics
and aesthetics of this contemporary cultural moment and, to paraphrase an assertion
of Charles Esche, may provide another background against which things can be
ordered and inform society’s recollections in time to come.

THE LIFE OF LOANS: ON THE POLITICS OF BELONGING AND CO-EXISTENCE 78–79
IMMA looks forward to developing further its relations with TU
Dublin, the HSE Primary Care Centre, and Educate Together Primary School within
the rejuvenated locale of Grangegorman and its neighbourhoods, in the heartland of
Dublin 7.
Alan Counihan, Personal Effects, 2012, photograph, Grangegorman Primary Care Centre

Mary Burke, Equilibrium, 2003, oil pastel
on canvas, 120 × 120 cm
Gemma Fitzpatrick, Taken from Diaries, 2014
Marie Holohan, Hospital, acrylic on canvas, 100 ×100 cm

PRIMARY CARE CENTRE ARTWORKS 80–81
Catríona Brocklebank, Mother and Son, 2018, oil pastel on canvas, 40 × 30 cm
Helena Gorey, Raw Sienna (from What You Need for Painting series),
2003, oil on paper, 50 × 50 cm

Julie Merriman CompilerVIII, 2016, typewriter carbon
film on paper, 120cm × 120cm
Dorothy Smith, Traffic Island with Cable Ties,
Pencil on Paper, 38 × 56cm

PRIMARY CARE CENTRE ARTWORKS 82–83
David Beattie, Day and Night, 2011, photographic print
Martin & Hobbs, Frieze detail, 2003, Archival Pigment Print

84–85
Stories
Between Us –
‘Fill the Gap’
Moira Ingle and Marta Stefan enjoying a game of Jenga at the first workshop
held at the National Museum Museum. Photo: Lori Keeve
Janine
Davidson

Stories Between Us was an intergenerational public
arts project in partnership with the National Museum
of Ireland – Decorative Arts & History, Collins Barracks,
Henrietta Adult Community Education, Phibsboro
Active Retirement Association, St Gabriel’s National
School and the Grangegorman Development Agency.
This was an object-based oral history project, that used
themes of past times, recreation and play, to encourage
both older and younger people to share their stories
and create a box of handling objects reflecting their
different perspectives. This memory box of objects
was selected to encourage playful and practical interactions
between intergenerational groups.
Bespoke memory box of objects to encourage play
and interaction between intergenerational groups.
Photo Lori Keeve; Memory box: Martin Brennan carpenter
Concept
Stories Between Us initiated
by artist Janine Davidson is
an art-based intergenerational
project involving partnering
with The National Museum of
Ireland – Decorative Arts &
History, Collins Barracks and
St. Gabriel’s National School
in the Dublin 7 area. Project
participants included 5 th and
6 th class students of St.
Gabriel’s National School and
senior citizens from Henrietta
Street Adult Community
Education (HACE) and Phibsboro
Retirement Association. The
curatorial team included the
artist Janine Davidson, Helen
Beaumont and Aisling Dunne
from The National Museum of
Ireland, Education Team; Dr.
Muldowney, Dublin City Council
Historian-in-Residence and Anna
One year on from Stories Between Us exhibition at the National Museum,
I invited Mary Cashin, Abdirahman Calawi, Séamus Mc Cabe Jones, his Mum Caoimhe
Mc Cabe along with Irina Pampareu and her Mum Irina Fiodorova, to join me in a conversation
to capture their reflections and thoughts about the project.
What follows are memories of an intergenerational process of play.
Irina P. enjoyed playing cards with Lorena and two other adults, she
enjoyed weaving as well. Mags had introduced us to the weaving called ‘fill the gap’, a
simple technique using card and cotton thread to create a knotted friendship bracelet.
Mary’s favourite was the weaving, and playing with the plasticine – she really enjoyed
that. Abdirahman also liked the weaving and enjoyed the Tai Chi that was orchestrated
by Mary Hayes. The weaving was in some ways a metaphor for the project as
Michael from HACE had poetically put it: ‘The weaving is like the diversity of Ireland
today, the younger generations from different cultures coming together and changing
Ireland, it’s going to be an interesting next 50 years.’
Caoimhe still has the clay boot that Marie made to represent the story
that Séamus had told in the interview session. She says it is really nice that they still
have it, and the conkers, ‘you pick them up from time to time, and have a look at it, after
a while you pick it up again, its just nice to have’. A tangible reminder that illustrates
the object-based nature of the project. Séamus liked ‘playing Jenga with the adults

STORIES BETWEEN US 86–87
O’Loughlin Project Leader and
Community Liaison Teacher, St.
Gabriel’s National School.
In September 2018 Janine
Davidson and members of the
Museum’s education team visited
each group to introduce
the project. In October and
November 2018, participants
met at the Museum to play
games and share stories.
During these sessions, smaller
groups of both younger and
older participants came
together to be recorded talking
about their childhoods,
hobbies, and experiences of
play and pastimes. Dr. Mary
Muldowney provided expertise
on collecting and recording
oral histories at these
intergenerational sessions.
A memory box of objects was
selected to encourage playful
and practical interactions
between intergenerational
groups.
The Stories Between Us
exhibition in the National
Museum at Collins Barracks
opened on 8th May 2019 and ran
from then until March 2020.
Visitors could engage with
the exhibition through the
display of personal artefacts
donated by the participants
and the tactile, specially
created ‘Memory Boxes’. They
could watch a short film
of the project and listen
to an audio recording of
some of the participants’
interviews. Further elements
included a flipbook of
participants’ drawings and
writing. An exhibition booklet
accompanied the exhibition,
with articles providing a range
of perspectives, a catalogue
of the donated objects and
a pull-out family activity
sheet. During May–June 2019,
primary schools were invited to
take tours of the exhibition,
facilitated by the artist
Janine Davidson and project
participants from St. Gabriel’s
NS. In August 2019 family
audiences engaged in the ‘Games
on the Square’ open air event
and workshop facilitated by
the artist as part of Heritage
Week 2019.
Additional support was provided
by The National Museum of
Ireland, Collins Barracks
Education & Outreach Team –
Edith Andrees and Lorraine
Comer. Also Dr. Arlene
Crampsie, School of Geography,
UCD, Director, Oral History
and the conkers, it was all good’. Séamus said he would never have played conkers if
he hadn’t been introduced to the game in the group. Caoimhe thinks you need someone
with the know-how to do it. It looks simple but there is a bit of technique involved;
this had been previously shared by John O’Flynn, Lenny Dunne, David King and Pat
Gately. On more than one occasion during the project, they had recalled their boyhood
winning formulas for conker matches, like heating the conkers in the oven to harden
them or coating them with varnish.
Abdirahman was one of the tour guides at the Stories Between Us exhibition
in the museum, giving him an invaluable opportunity to talk to his peers about
their work. We discussed how one of the schools from East Wall that had visited the
exhibition have a conker tournament every year which the whole school embraces.
Mary thinks a conkers tournament game would be a great idea in schools, as it keeps
up a very old tradition; ‘they used to do that years ago to keep it going to keep old
games ongoing’. We discussed how the project brought up old games and illustrated
the difference of indoor and outdoor play. Street games in particular. Séamus plays
a lot of football on the street; his mum says they don’t have a garden, which is also a
factor. He goes over to Grangegorman a lot now as he also plays basketball.
Mary has been making masks for her daughter for her acupuncture practice.
Our conversation has inevitably shifted from talking about past times to what we
are all doing to pass the time as we collectively experience restrictions of movement.
Irina has been drawing; she showed us a fantastic drawing of Harry Potter and a
beautiful water colour landscape. Her mum also showed us her painting. Abdirahman
has been reading a lot of Skulduggery Pleasant. Irina P. misses going to the beach as
the weather is really nice, she normally goes to the beach at Bray or to Dollymount in
Clontarf. Mary sneaks out for quiet walks to the little park in front of her house, she
peeps out first then does a couple of laps of the park to keep her fit, ‘otherwise you
would go crazy’.
Janine Davidson demonstrates the task to participants, Stories
Between Us workshop, 2019, National Museum of Ireland,
Collins Barracks. Photo: Lori Keeve
Irina P. tells us her Mum is a single child and so is her grandmother and
her grandmother before her so she is from a very small family. She only has two
cousins on her Dad’s side but she doesn’t get to see them. We discuss the differences
and similarities between family size and how this is changing. Abdirahman misses his
cousins and family, he has a very large extended family, his mum is one of fourteen.
Caoimhe tells us that Séamus’s grandmother was one of eleven. Mary’s husband Jim
was one of nine. Caoimhe tells us that families are definitely getting smaller as her
mother only had four kids and she only had one.
We talk about the importance of play…

Network of Ireland; Dr.
Carmel Gallagher, Lecturer,
School of Languages, Law and
Social Sciences, TU Dublin;
Dr. Gary Granville, Emeritus
Professor of Education NCAD;
Anne Fitzpatrick, Lecturer,
School of Languages, Law and
Social Sciences, TU Dublin;
Martin Brennan, carpenter for
Memory boxes; Oisín McFarland,
Film Editing; Language
Communications Studio; Office
of Public Works for assistance
in exhibition installation.
Photography by Lori Keeve,
Brian Cregan, Aisling Dunne
and Janine Davidson.
Stories Between Us featured
on 8 May, in The Irish Times
and on 6 November 2019 as part
of RTÉ News2day. Discussions
continue with the artist,
The National Museum, TU
Dublin and Henrietta Street
Adult Community Education
about further creative
intergenerational initiatives.
Mary says ‘it keeps you going, keeps you young, she loved the interaction
between the children and the older groups, it was great fun. I think everyone benefited
from it. You have to do play things no matter what age you are; it keeps you connected
somehow or another. It’s too easy to get stuck in a rut and do nothing’. Irina P. enjoys
that ‘play allows you to use your imagination and creativity’.
Abdirahman, ‘I think play is a really good thing because it connects, if
you play with a kid… instead of just telling them with words it connects better to their
brain so I think it’s a really good thing… it helps build an image in your head.’ Mary
explains that ‘learning through doing as opposed to being told, is much more fun…
learning through interaction’.
Stories Between Us, uses the object as a catalyst for story telling, bringing
together old and young to explore intergenerational play as an artistic medium
engaging with the notion of community through collective experience. The joyful
instinct to play and its role in learning, as well as the importance of play in developing
social bonds, emotional resilience and physical well being was central to the project.
Janine Davidson
Biographies
Janine Davidson is a
multidisciplinary artist who,
over the past two decades, has
developed an artistic practice
that is committed to helping
others engage in contemporary
arts practice. Over this
period she has worked with many
diverse groups and institutions
on multifaceted projects
and initiatives. Davidson’s
practice explores individual
experience and collective
memory, the social space in
which we learn and how we learn
from each other.
Janine Davidson, B.A, H.Dip,
MFA, Projects have been funded
by Arts Council of Ireland, the
British Council, CDETB, Digital
Hub, Dormant Account Funds,
Dublin City Council Community
Grants, Dublin Port Authority,
Fundación Botín, National
Learning Network, Royal Ulster
Academy and Grangegorman
Development Agency.
The National Museum of Ireland
(NMI) collects and preserves
objects relating to the history
and culture of Ireland, and
its place in the wider world.
The Museum invites the widest
range of people to engage in
learning experiences, using
the collections and exhibitions
as inspiration. NMI Education
develops specialised programmes
and services for and with
schools, families, adults and
communities, including tours,
conferences, performances,
Tai Chi directed by Mary Hayes in the
courtyard as part of the getting to know you
workshop. Photo Lori Keeve

STORIES BETWEEN US 88–89
long-term projects and
community exhibitions. Objectbased
learning through the
use of Handling Collections
is central to our programmes,
stimulating memory, fostering
historical empathy and
encouraging creative thinking
and interactivity using all
the senses. The project team
included Helen Beaumont,
Education & Outreach Officer,
and Museum educators Dr. Edith
Andrees (to October 2018) and
Aisling Dunne (from October
2018).
Phibsboro Active Retirement is
a voluntary organisation for
older people with a national
membership of over 24,500
people and over 550 local
associations. Betty Haynes set
up Phibsboro Active Retirement
in 1989. In 2003 Maura Murphy
established the art group.
The art group is based at St.
Peter’s Court, Phibsboro Road
meeting on a weekly basis.
Classes are subsidised by
Active Retirement Ireland and
partly funded by Dublin City
Council community grants.
These plasticine figures representing an older and younger
person holding hands, were created by one of the participants
as a response in an evaluation exercise. Photo: Brian Cregan
St. Gabriel’s National School
is located in Stoneybatter in
Dublin 7 and has a rich history
dating back to 1895. Principal
Suzanne Comerford, is proud of
the school’s participation in
the project. The commitment
and enthusiasm of the children
who participated was clearly
evident and they gained
valuable insight into their
community, as did those who
viewed the exhibition. A
special note of appreciation
should be made for teacher,
Anna O’Loughlin, who worked
hard to engage young
participants.
The Henrietta Adult and
Community Education (HACE) a
service of the Daughters of
Charity Community Services
was set up in 2002 and is a
dedicated Community Education
provider for adults in the
North Inner city who are
educationally, socially or
economically disadvantaged.
HACE provides on average
25 part time courses
and activities for its
participants, the majority of
which are held in the evening.
Links
www.janinedavidson.com
www.museum.ie/en-IE/Museums/
Decorative-Arts-History/Engage-
And-Learn/Schools-Educational-
Visits/Primary
This conversation with some of the participants took place via a ZOOM meeting recorded on 8 May 2020.
Thanks to all who contributed to this text. HACE – Henrietta Street Adult Community Education, Dublin 7,
learners: Margaret Maxwell, John O’Flynn, Leonard Dunne, Pat Gately, David King. St. Gabriel’s NS students
past and present: Abdirahman Calawi, Irina Pampareu, Lorena Ariesan and Séamus Mc Cabe Jones. Parents of
students: Caoimhe Mc Cabe and Irina Fiodorova. Phibsboro Active Retirement Association, learners: Mary Cashin,
Mary Hayes and Marie Mills.

TU Dublin School
of Creative Arts
Kieran Corcoran
Head of the Dublin School
of Creative Arts, Technological
University Dublin
In late 2011 the TU Dublin School of Creative Arts (then the DIT School
of Art, Design and Printing) took the momentous decision to relocate from a number
of north inner city buildings to the long awaited new DIT (now TU Dublin) campus in
Grangegorman. This was in the middle of the worst recession since the Great Depression
in Ireland and shortly after the arrival of the infamous IMF troika. In fact, February
2012 saw the postponement of the Grangegorman campus project due to the state of
the public finances and all new building on the campus was put on hold. Education,
however, is always a long march and we believed that if we moved immediately there
was an excellent chance that we could play a leading role in securing and developing
a new creative arts centre on a magnificently appointed site at the northwestern edge
of the old Georgian city centre of Dublin. Repurposing a number of beautiful cast
limestone buildings from their original function as mental health medical facilities
to a series of art and design studios and workshops, we started the new academic
year in September 2014. Such a move is always fraught and despite the dislocation,
our students and staff celebrated their achievement with a fantastically successful
graduation exhibition Lift Off in 2015.
From September 2020 we will be joining with our colleagues in the TU
Dublin Conservatoire, School of Media and Languages, Law and Social Sciences in a
new 17,000 square-metre centre for the creative performing and media arts. Bringing
all the visual arts together with Music, Drama, Film, Gaming, TV, Journalism, Languages
and the Humanities and Social Sciences in a custom built building with new
art and design studios, concert and recital halls, theatre and TV studios will be a first
for Irish university education. Such a building brings with it a whole new series of
challenges and makes us consider questions about how to create a multidisciplinary
space for the arts in a technological university or how to make sure that this wonderful
new facility actually engages with the wider metropolitan and national community.
Just over one hundred
years ago, Walter Gropius confidently
stated that ‘the ultimate purpose of all
art is the building’ (Manifesto of the
Staatliches Bauhaus, 1919). Memorably
depicted in Lionel Feninger’s woodcut as
a crystalline cathedral, he dedicated art
and design education to its design and
construction. As a simple expression of
the essence of the modernist project it
was perfect. But no such simple answer
exists today. Any attempt to discuss the
relationship between art, education and
society in general must face the fact that
key ideas such as society, art, culture
and education are themselves undergoing
radical transformation. We are living
in an age where the impact of technological change – the emergence of big data,
climate change, migration, social exclusion and new political models – has challenged
accepted notions of the purpose of society, the role of work and, in particular, the
practice of art and design. Defining the nature and role of a multidisciplinary arts
Fine Art student Ellen Duffy, Assembling Agency

TU DUBLIN SCHOOL OF CREATIVE ARTS 90–91
space in a Technological University on a new campus in a living city quarter with a
historic and varied past is now quite a challenge.
It is possible to look at the purpose of a multidisciplinary arts space
located within TU Dublin from a number of different points of view. Given the size
and scale of this new centre it can address key developmental challenges for the
Irish cultural and heritage sector. The schools located in this new centre have a long
tradition and history of professional practice based education across music, film, art,
drama, design, etc, and this wide discipline mix can open up a new space for research
and enquiry through practice in the development of new forms of creative practices.
For example the core studio based approach in art and design education is part and
parcel of the TU pegdagogical model and can (and has been) utilised to develop new
hybrid art and design practices that have addressed various social challenges across
housing health and community engagement. Additionally, the combination of a wide
range of disciplines from across TU Dublin can provide arts organisations across Ireland
with graduates with a deep understanding of the arts combined with the skills of
marketing, management, law, coding and business. But most importantly the energy
of nearly 3,000 musicians, artists, designers, film makers, actors, directors and theorists
of culture, media, politics and society all under the same roof can become an
extraordinary resource for all and in time inspire new directions across all areas of
our cultural life.
None of these ambitions can be achieved unless we create a place that is
outward facing and is willing to engage at all levels with the professional disciplines,
the diverse communities of practice in the local city area and provide a space where
all feel welcome and at home. The new centre must be a vibrant arts space at the
heart of this old city quarter and not an aloof academic building with occasional public
events. As part of this process, the TU Dublin School of Creative Arts runs the annual
Summer Studio programme where artists and curators are given free studio space
over the quiet summer period as a way
of addressing the studio accommodation
crisis in Dublin. Lecturers in the school
have also run workshops for primary
schools across the northern city and
have been heavily involved in bringing
their knowledge and expertise into the
art classes of local secondary schools.
Since 2014 we have been
working hard on the idea of creating a
vibrant arts space and several initiatives
have been launched through ‘…the
lives we live’ Grangegorman Public Art
programme that have opened out the
university and its campus to involve for
example, all the local schools, heritage
groups, pensioners groups, minority
communities, local arts festivals and new migrant groups. The school will mark its
involvement with the ‘…the lives we live’ by hosting a major international conference
called ‘Public Art Now’ in 2021 in the new East Quad building. The conference is being
coordinated by the school with the active involvement of The Arts Council, Dublin
City Council, Fingal Council, Visual Arts Ireland, The Irish Architecture Foundation
and Create and will focus on the practice, policy and theory of public art. The key
themes of the conference are ‘Public Art: Processes and Publics’, ‘Public Art and the
Anthropocene’ and ‘Ecologies of Place and Space’ and will feature a wide variety of
mobile workshops where participants can visit and experience important public art
projects in Dublin and, hopefully, in the rest of Ireland.
Fine Art student Leah Millar, Construct

Katie Staniford, Transducer
At a strategic level the arts will have a key role to play in TU Dublin in a number of
distinct ways. The goal of an engaged university can be realised though a vibrant creative
arts community and environment based around the new university performance
and exhibition spaces. A new campus with a creative arts centre at its heart can act as
a catalyst for active engagement with a wide range of diverse communities in Dublin,
Ireland and further afield. Looking at key policy initiatives, the centre can address
the challenge of climate change in the development of new educational programmes
in the arts which focus on raising awareness of such issues and educating art and
design practitioners on how to address the Anthropocene in their practice. In the
current context, a focused multidisciplinary research programme on an alternative
and sustainable model of creativity, innovation and entrepreneurship using models of
contributive income to address the phenomenon of precarity and unequal distribution
among all artists will be very necessary. Finally, the arts are essential to helping the
new university develop a distinct mission by imagining new ways of living and new
forms of expression which can help shape how the interaction between technological
development and societal change manifests itself.

Kevin Smith, Love in Technicolour
TU DUBLIN SCHOOL OF CREATIVE ARTS 92–93

94–95
Time as
Form
Nasir El Safi
Hina Khan
Hichem
Nala
Curated by Anita Groener
Nasir El Safi, Human and Devil, 2019, acrylic on canvas
Hina Khan, Destiny Unknown, 2019, cloth, paper tape,
installation on Culture Night

An exhibition of refugee artists work presented on
Culture Night 2019 in TU Dublin, Grangegorman. Sponsored
by the Grangegorman Public Art Programme,
this event was hosted by Spirasi & TU Dublin.
Biographies
Nasir El Safi is from Sudan
where he worked as a journalist
with several human rights
organisations and newspapers,
writing about extremist
religious groups, women’s
rights and fighting illiteracy.
He is the author of several
documentaries and an active
member of the International
Organisation of Journalists.
Arrested a number of times
in Sudan and dismissed as a
result of his human rights
activities, Nasir arrived in
Ireland in 2017 and lived in
Direct Provision. In 2019 he
received refugee status. In
his paintings he addresses the
impact of trauma, violence
and war in Sudan and the
effect of Direct Provision.
In 2015 the world watched in real time how thousands of Syrian refugees
walked into Europe as they were forced to leave their homeland. It was the
biggest exodus of people since WWII, one of the most appalling sights to witness.
Today, five years later, we just passed the midpoint of the COVID-19 pandemic, a
rampant virus that caused thousands of people to die and millions to lose their
jobs across the world. As we slowly come to grips with the ruthless fallout of this
pandemic, our attention digresses toward the gut-wrenching racist scenes played
out through police brutality in North America, which killed another black person.
It has opened a wound so deep, embedded in history, that the response
in anti-racist protests have reached all corners of the globe.
At the time of writing this I am sitting in my studio at home. The window
is open, I hear children playing in the garden next door, birds are singing. The dog
has nestled herself at the base of my chair. Imposed by a strict quarantine rule we
have been confined to home for nearly three months. Home became a specific and
fixed location, the only place we were allowed and supposed to be, so collectively, as
a nation, we would curb the virus. In the context of writing this text, the account of
the pandemic confinement together with the swell of anti-racist protests across the
world, including Ireland, serendipitously merged in my mind. Riven by conditions of
endemic uncertainty, it is not an understatement to say that we live in a liquid, unpredictable
time. If anything, no matter when and where we live, it is our need and desire
to belong. A place where we can feel at home, a place where we feel safe. According
to the German philosopher Martin Heidegger ‘home (as an act of dwelling) is the
essence of being, the essence of being in the world.’
From both a spatial and a temporal perspective, for migrants, home is
an intense biographical transition. Their trajectory through acculturation demands
varying interpretations and adjustments of home that inevitably shift over the course
of time. For refugees, who forcibly had to flee their homeland, home is defined by the
absence of it in the present moment. For refugees, home is a place in the past or is
mapped out onto the future. This is particularly rife when he or she is confined to
prolonged living in a refugee camp or, in Ireland, in Direct Provision. Being trapped in
this system, sometimes for years, the effect on people who live with severe traumatic
memories, is detrimental. Stuck in no man’s land, the essential process of homing
stagnates and becomes corrupted. This way people cannot assimilate to the new
culture of their adopted country. Going through the Direct Provision system in Ireland
denigrates and isolates, it sets and keeps people apart. When asylum seekers
receive refugee status (this can take years of waiting) and are allowed to leave the
Direct Provision system they face further racial prejudice trying to find accommodation
and work. The Direct Provision system labels people as different, it marks them
as the other. The process of othering is insidious. Othering is based on the conscious
or unconscious assumption that certain identified groups, such as refugees, pose a
threat to another group. While anxiety about difference and change is natural, othering
is not. Othering is socially and culturally constructed through the language we
use, a rhetoric that purposely sets out to normalise othering, driven by the media and
political agendas. The opposite to othering is belonging. Belonging does not insist
that we are all the same, it means we recognise and celebrate our differences.

TIME AS FORM 96–97
Nasir was a recipient of a
Summer Project Studio in the
School of Creative Arts, TU
Dublin Grangegorman Campus to
make work for ‘Time as Form’
exhibition. Sorcha Pollak
wrote about him in ‘New to the
Parish’, the Irish Times series
published on Wednesday 18
September 2019. Nasir is based
in Tuam.
Hina Khan is a miniaturist /
visual artist from Pakistan.
She uses a mixture of
traditional and innovative
techniques. Hina’s work
portrays social issues, such as
immigration and human rights
abuses linked to prostitution,
gender discrimination and child
abuse. Hina has a Masters in
Fine Arts from Fatima Jinnah
Women University, Pakistan. She
studied Visual Research Methods
in NCAD. Hina was the first
recipient of the Create and
Fire Station Artists’ Studios
one-month Artist Residency
Award in June 2018 during
refugee week. Hina’s experience
of living in a Direct Provision
Centre has had a marked impact
on her work. Since receiving
refugee status Hina and her
young family are based in
Kinsale. She was artist in
residence in Uillinn, WCAC in
Skibbereen, West Cork in 2019
and so far has exhibited in
several places in Ireland.
Hichem is a self-taught
artist from North Africa.
Tortured by an oppressive
regime and escaping systematic
dehumanisation, Hichem embarked
on a long and difficult journey
before he found a safe place
in Ireland. Over the last
number of years he found a
vocabulary in art enabling him
to deal with the imprint of
trauma. Through the very act
of painting and drawing, his
extreme experience is released,
allowing for the healing of
mind and body.
Nala is from Sri Lanka where
she studied art. Nala started
painting when she was 17 years
old watching Tamil movies
(Kollywood). She works in
acrylics, water colors, ink,
charcoal and oil pastel on
paper and canvas. She does lino
cuttings and wood etchings. She
has studied art in Sri Lanka
and at IT Sligo. Nala has Irish
citizenship. The TU Dublin
Summer Studio Residencies
began in 2012 when the Fine
Art Department was based in
One of the happiest memories during the lead up to the ‘Time as Form’
exhibition was how Nasir transformed from when I first met him in Spirasi. At that time
he was living in a Direct Provision Centre in Galway. The mentoring programme Natacha
and I set up for the artists in this exhibition allowed Nasir to temporarily relocate
to Dublin so that he could access the summer studio he was awarded in the TU Dublin
School of Creative Arts in Grangegorman. These new circumstances introduced a
normality in Nasir’s life. For the first time since living in Ireland he felt whole again. He
was able to feel at home through simple everyday activities like eating, working, cooking,
sleeping. Such an ordinary universal pattern of living turned out to be the tonic
for a traumatised body and soul that very much helped Nasir in the healing process.
The artists in this exhibition are all survivors of torture. I met Hichem,
Hina, Nala and Nasir through Natacha O’Brien in Spirasi, the humanitarian, intercultural,
non-governmental organisation in Ireland. Spirasi works with asylum seekers,
refugees and other disadvantaged migrant groups, with a special concern for survivors
of torture. Pushed on a journey not of their choosing, these artists are forced
to continually rethink every strap of their existence in relation to the world they find
themselves in. Their art is a visceral index of grief, the very fabric in the process of
recovery and rehabilitation, unravelling and stitching together memories in response
to where they are now. Symbolic representation, narratives and motifs in these artists
work point to the complex of trauma, to systems of torture, oppression and subjugation.
Their biographical continuity is a fragmented history due to colonisation and
related systemic violence, scars that cut deeply into their personal lives.
Irish people learned the anguish of racial prejudice first-hand, through
years of colonial suppression and mass emigration from this island, knowing empirically
how certain practices dehumanise immigrants. Yet we continue to support the
inadequate, immoral private enterprise of the Direct Provision system back home. The
racial injustice, alive in Ireland today, continues to compound the predicament of refugees.
The current global protests are a wakeup call. In the article in The New Yorker,
June 1, 2020, ‘Byran Stevenson on the Frustration Behind the George Floyd Protests’
the civil rights lawyer Bryan Stevenson talks about the history of enslavement of
black people but his words ring through for racial injustice anywhere ‘…the fiction that
certain people aren’t as good as white people, and aren’t the equals of white people,
and are less evolved, less human, less capable, less worthy, less deserving than white’.
What is needed in the world and what we need right now in Ireland is an urgent unbiased
discourse that will engender a new paradigm of a shared, inherent humanity and
integration for all on this island.
Anita Groener
Nasir El Safi in TU Dublin Summer Studio, 2019

Hichem, Blindfolded, 2019, oil on canvas
Portland Row. The impetus was
the awareness of the lack
of Dublin studio spaces, the
availability of our studios
during the summer and the
opportunity for our students to
engage with other artists.
A call is sent out and the six
successful applicants (five
artists, one curator) are given
a rent free studio from June
to September. Those selected
are asked to engage with our
students during the academic
year. The spaces are offered
solely for the purpose of
assisting artists/curators to
complete a body of work for
exhibition. The residency has
attracted wonderful applicants
including Eithne Jordan, Vera
Klute and Kate Strain.
Time as Form exhibition, Culture Night, 2019. Photo: Lori Keeve
What is most heartening is that
our graduates such as Laura
Smith and Jane Fogarty who had
contact with residency artists
when they were students, have
now as artists themselves
availed of the programme.

TIME AS FORM 98–99

Trish McAdam, 2020, Asylum Woman’s Face Pre-1900 (charcoal drawing and photographic layer)
– reconstructed for print (140 × 72 cm), from Confinement (still)

100–101
Confinement
Trish
McAdam
Questioning Socially-Acceptable Norms
Finding The Voice
Confinement opens with a Great Black-backed Gull
floating over a map of Dublin, watching those below,
earthbound. When I moved into Henrietta Street in
1977, it had neglected housing at one end and the
King's Inns, opposite the nuns hostel, at the other, and
the ruins of Grangegorman, a mental Asylum, beyond.
Strange bedfellows. At night, the street upheld a long
held reputation of the area, coined by a visiting bishop,
1727, who declared the local population ‘lewd and
unruly’. By 1977 the artists, escaping the catholic norms
of our suburban or rural upbringings were joining in.
I was a young unmarried mother with a six-week old
baby and the people I feared most were the nuns and
the lawyers. The tail end of Magdalene Laundry times,
the nuns would call around during the day to save me,
offering scapulars, but I wanted their thinking nowhere
near my child’s virgin mind.

I watched seagulls for hours; nature’s urban scavengers, in tune with the
locals, not sweet like a country lark or suburban blackbird, or timid like a pigeon, but
tough, noisy, streetwise, their immaculate white feathers, as incongruous as a local
child’s dress on communion day.
When, 40 years later, my research for this film began, to rediscover the
area, it was a little seagull like, somewhat chaotic and gut-led. Things would ‘pop’ out
at me, on the street, on a page or screen, in a library, in conversation, or institution,
like the concepts of seagull observing generations of humans arriving in the area; the
tribal, the democrats, the oligarchs and Spartans bickering over laws, ideology, control
of land and technology, with the poor and unwell habitually shunted to the margins.
As my filmmaking began, my focus became more eagle eyed, fact-checking
ignorances, searching historical records, human memory and experiences, to
invent a dialogue between the ‘subjectivity’ of individual oral records and the bias of
‘objectivity’ of the recorded fact.
I found my seagull voice in Tony Rudenko, a reimagined monologue of a
dead man, a friend from my Raheny childhood, me lower middle class, him working
class. I went to university, Tony went to… the Royal Ballet, Billy Elliot style, danced
with Nureyev, escaped via Mexico and returned to Ireland where I introduced him to
Henrietta Street, and he went on to live there for 34 years, long after I left, until his
death in 2014. This urban maverick voice with all its irreverent, self-taught artist flow,
voiced by Aiden Gillen, a Dublin inner city northsider, who, coincidentally, had known
Tony in London.
Rendering the Past into the Digital Future
After discovering in the National Archive pre 1900 patients admission
photographs in the record books of The Richmond Asylum, I gained permission to
choose a limited number to make charcoal drawings from, to be used publicly for
the first time, anonymously without names or medical details. The photographs were
faded but as I drew, each of their timeless human emotions emerged, expressions one
might see today on the faces of the globally marginalised, migrants, homeless or those
with mental or physical health issues.
Working with Marc Sherwin, motion graphics, we digitised, inspired by
J. Lochhead’s BBC documentary, Inside Einstein’s Mind www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/
p03c19k0/player, in which Lochhead illustrated Einstein’s theory of spacetime, using
the potential temporality of a roll of film, cutting single frames from the film roll and
placing them on top of each other, creating a stack of time. We layered my charcoal
drawings of our space, our place, our faces into Adobe After Effects, and used its virtual
camera to move forward and backward through frames, in time to the ghost like
digital recordings of composer Roger Doyle.
Trish McAdam, 2020, Asylum Multiple Men’s Faces Pre-1900
(charcoal drawings layered) – reconstructed for print
(140 × 72 cm), from Confinement (still)

CONFINEMENT 102–103
The Ever Present, Unresolved, Societal Mental Health Issue
I knew Paul Caviston, psychiatrist FRCPsych, from his visits to the madness
of Henrietta Street in his student days and he became an advisor and collaborator
on the project. Among others I spoke to, Paul was present in St. Brendan’s before it
was shutdown, early 1980s. I asked Paul’s permission to print this note.
Concept
Confinement, a 34-minute
digital film, comprising
hand drawn charcoal drawings,
photographs and live footage,
Super 8 and Go Pro, screened in
a video format with narration
and music. It is screened and
projected in both indoor and
outdoor environments.
I was a medical student in the 1970s in Dublin
when I had my first encounter with Psychiatry. It was
in 1976 at Saint Brendan’s Hospital or Grangegorman,
as it was more usually known.
One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest was showing at
the cinemas. R.D. Laing and Foucault peppered our
conversations over coffee and sorting out the world.
But then came the shock of the appalling reality of
the psychiatric wards we encountered on our student
placements.
Terms / practices/ traditions such as asylum,
refuge, hospitality, shelter, care or therapy had
no presence, and had been abandoned by the staff.
I was hit by the squalor of incarceration and
neglectful institutionalisation. Broken windows,
dirt, darkness and indiscriminate use of compulsory
detention restraint, multiple doses of ECT and
forcible sedation allied to views of patients as
somehow ‘totally other’. Psychiatric nurses acted as
custodians and patrolled the wards jangling keys on
lengthy chains.
My abiding and vivid memory is saying to myself
‘surely there is a better way to treat people
in distress than this barbarism’. It was just so
obviously wrong! Now with the gift of hindsight
we can see that these abuses were part of a much
more systemic pattern of abuses including Magdalene
Laundries, Children’s Homes, and widespread Clerical
Abuse to name but a few. Ireland of course is not
unique in this respect but it has an unfortunate
history of exporting difficult people and wallowing
in sentimental exceptionalism.
My medical year produced a significant number of
psychiatrists who’ve made reforming contributions
to Psychiatric practice. Sadly there remains
significant resistance to change and the genuine
engagement and egalitarian collaboration with
patients as persons.
Confinement was premiered in
the Honorable Society of the
King’s Inns, Henrietta Street,
on 21 February 2019. Special
thanks to Mary Griffin, CEO
and Under Treasurer for her
support. Confinement was later
shown as part of the Dublin

International Film Festival
in the Lighthouse Cinema
in Smithfield. In May 2019
Confinement was screened in
the Irish Film Institute. From
December 2019–January 2020 it
was part of ‘Utopia Dystopia’
exhibition, at the Lexicon
Gallery, Dun Laoghaire.
Biographies
Trish McAdam is a filmmaker
and visual artist. She began
filmmaking after a period in
the 1980s in New York's East
Village where she was hugely
influenced by the maverick
artists she met there. She
was a founding member of
Temple Bar Artists’ Studios
(1983) and a founder chair
of The Screen Directors
Guild of Ireland (2001). Her
films have a sociopolitical
perspective, fictionalized
reality, narrative documentary
on big screen big or small
screens – Snakes and Ladders
(1997), Hoodwinked (1998), No
Enemies Liu Xiaobo (2012) and
Strangers of Kindness (2015).
The Butler Gallery presented
a solo exhibition of new work
in 2016. She is currently in
development on a feature The
End of Romance, as writer/
director with producers Kees
Kasander and Edwina Forkin,
which is funded by Irish Screen
and Creative Europe. She has
an MA in Visual Arts Practice
2011, is a Member of Aosdána
(2017).
Actor Aidan Gillen provides
the voice of the narrator in
Confinement. He is an Irish
actor known for his portrayal
of Petyr ‘Littlefinger’ Baelish
in the HBO series Game of
Thrones (2011–2017), Dr. J.
Allen Hynek in The History
Channel’s Project Blue Book
(2019–present), Tommy Carcetti
in the HBO series The Wire
(2004–2008), Stuart Alan Jones
in the Channel 4 series Queer
as Folk (1999–2000), John
Boy in the RTÉ series Love/
Hate (2010–2011), Aberama
Gold in the BBC One series
Peaky Blinders (2017–2019),
Queen's manager John Reid in
Bohemian Rhapsody (2018), and
CIA operative Bill Wilson in
The Dark Knight Rises (2012);
he also hosted seasons 10–13
of Other Voices (2011–2016).
Gillen has won three Irish Film
& Television Awards and has
been nominated for a British
Academy Television Award, a
British Independent Film Award,
and a Tony Award.
Film as a Dialogue
A film is not a thing in itself; it is about the experience of watching it.
The first screening of Confinement, hosted by CEO Mary Griffin, The
Kings’ Inns, Henrietta street, February 2019, was followed by a discussion between
Catriona Crowe (Archivist), Dr. Paul Caviston and the artist, introduced by John Rogers
(Senior Counsel).
Afterwards, John Rogers told me ‘I first saw Confinement on my computer,
sitting in a room in the King's Inns. I was conscious that I was sitting in the
storyline of the film, with Henrietta Street on my right and Grangegorman to my left,
and it sent a shiver down my spine’.
Watching Confinement for the first time, myself, with an audience, in a
site specific setting, with Henrietta street artist, Mick O’Dea’s large painting of Tony
Rudenko at the entrance, was like watching it anew, the kind of physical gathering we
recognise, because of its absence in COVID-19 times, as essential to human sanity.
At the discussion after, Catriona Crowe, having experienced difficulties
herself gaining access to historical mental health archival material, suggesting a society
that continues to feel shame, even by association, around mental health issues,
burying it as an uncomfortable or taboo subject.
Now we are in yet another global, technical, political and economic transition.
To what we are transitioning, I do not know. A chance to accept mental health
issues, we are, after all, only human. Time to flip the shame away from the individual
and address the underlying societal causes that can be cured?
Confinement – Opening Sequence (screenshot)

CONFINEMENT 104–105
Roger Doyle composed the
sound for Confinement. He is
an Irish composer best known
for his electroacoustic work,
for which he was made a Saoi
of Aosdána. Also known for
his piano music for theatre.
Doyle founded the music theatre
company Operating Theatre with
Irish actress Olwen Fouéré and
wrote and performed on piano
onstage for the Steven Berkoff
version of the Oscar Wilde play
Salome which played in Dublin’s
Gate Theatre, in London's West
End and on three world tours.
Doyle has also composed scores
for several films including
Budawanny, and the documentary
Atlantean by Bob Quinn and Pigs
by Cathal Black. Doyle attended
the Royal Irish Academy of
Music for three years, studying
composing and at the Institute
of Sonology at the University
of Utrecht in the Netherlands
and the Finnish Radio
Experimental Music Studio.
Marc Sherwin provided motion
design for Confinement. He has
over 20 years experience in the
film business as both a graphic
designer and editor ranging
from television programming,
commercials, music videos to
feature and short films and
has collaborated with Trish
McAdam on a documentary and
five short films.
Psychiatrist Dr. Paul Caviston
provided advice. He has a BAO,
Royal College of Surgeons,
Ireland 1979, a MB LRCPSI,
Royal College of Surgeons,
Ireland 1979, a BCH MB BCh,
from the National University
of Ireland 1979 and a
FRCPSYCH, 2002. Caviston is
visiting consultant, Child &
Adolescent Psychiatrist, at
the Priory Hospital Chelmsford,
and an Honorary Consultant
Psychiatrist in Adolescent
Services for the National
Health Service in Brookside.
Orla Barry provided advice.
She is an Independent
Consultant in Mental Health
and Social Voluntary Sectors.
She is Chairperson of Gateway.
She was CEO of Mental Health
Ireland (2013–2017), Director,
Mental Health Reform (2010-
2013) and Director of Services
Focus Ireland (1994–2010).
Mick O’Dea, The Sentinel of Henrietta Street, acrylic on canvas,
150 × 120 cm; by kind permission of the artist
Confinement has received
additional funding from Dublin
City Council.
Links
www.trishmcadam.com

I See Birds Flying Over the White House, Venice Biennale 2017.
Photo: John Beattie, October 2017

106–107
The Aesthetics
Group
Jeanette Doyle
Cathy O’Carroll
Mick O’Hara
Connell Vaughan

Reading, Writing, Performance
The Aesthetics Group is a research group affiliated with
The Graduate School of Creative Arts and Media (Grad-
CAM). The group include researchers and practitioners
from a variety of backgrounds such as philosophy, visual
art, digital media, theatre and performance. Since 2012,
the group has collaboratively engaged with aesthetic
theory, practice and policy to develop new critical
positions in aesthetics and related fields. An important
outcome of this research involves performative pedagogy:
the group collaboratively write texts around
which performances are enacted. This method of ‘pedagogical
performance’ serves to explore the potential
of performance as a vehicle for mobilising philosophic
and artistic languages and forms as research.
The group’s early work considered the idea of the avant-garde in contemporary
art and the role of the amateur in the digital age. As part of this project,
the group interviewed philosopher Bernard Stiegler. The resulting paper questioned
Stiegler’s mobilisation of the avant-garde in contemporary art. Both an extract of this
interview and response were published in the journal In/Print 2015, Vol. 3.
In Grangegorman, the group’s work includes research on the contemporary
criteria for Arts funding in Ireland and internationally. This project engaged the
European community of philosophers of art. A co-written paper (‘Turn, turn, turn: Civic
Instrumentalisation and the Promotion of Autonomy in Contemporary Arts Funding’)
was published in the Eurosa journal
(2015, Vol. 7). As part of this research
project, the group worked with curator
Kate Strain to develop the paper into
a performance: ‘A 100% Unique Press
Conference.’ This was presented at the
European Society for Aesthetics Conference
in June, 2015. The conference
was organised and hosted by Grad-
CAM and was the largest aesthetics
conference to take place in Ireland in
a decade.
The Inhuman Gaze Conference 2018, Paris;
Photo: Fiona O'Hara, June 2018
In 2016, the group engaged
with Doris Sommer’s book The Work of
Art in the World and developed a performance:
‘A Re-turn to Schiller’. This
involved a live feed link on the topic
of ‘the Educational Turn in Aesthetics’
between the Creative Agency in Local Communities conference in TU Dublin Grangegorman
and the European Society for Aesthetics 8 th Annual Conference in University
of Barcelona. The seminar in Dublin hosted an audience of art practitioners and educators
including Doris Sommer.

THE AESTHETICS GROUP
108–109
In recent years, the group has completed two significant research projects
that interrogated the politics of the aesthetic gaze and the multiple forms it takes.
In October 2017, the group performed a ‘research poem’ I See Birds Flying Over the
White House at the Research Pavilion in the context of 57 th Venice Biennale. This piece
was developed in response to Michael Bell-Smith’s original artwork Birds Over the
White House (2006, courtesy of the artist and Foxy Production, NY) which the artist
specially repurposed for the performance. A large-scale high-definition moving image
of Bell-Smith’s work was projected
onto the floor of the Pavilion, which
allowed the group to question the invasion
of airspace over the White House,
performing a critical interrogation of
the artwork through a collaboratively
written script delivered by four voices.
The recitation of this research poem,
through interlocution and movement,
opened a space to consider the politics
Writing process; July 2017.
Photo: Mick O'Hara
of the aesthetic gaze within a specific
territorial space.
Critical reflection of this
work was later presented by the group
as an academic paper entitled ‘A Post-
Digital Aesthetics of the Inhuman
Gaze: Reflections on I See Birds Flying
Over the White House’ at ‘The Inhuman
Gaze Conference,’ Centre Culturel Irlandais, Paris, June 2018. The presentation
marked the third iteration of an ongoing reflection on the politics of post-truth and
the aesthetics of the post-digital.
In April 2019, in response to group member Jeanette Doyle’s exhibition
at the AC Institute, NY, the group performed a Culture Ireland funded piece From A
to Z and Back Again. The work interrogated the aesthetics of language and politics in
the digital age. By responding to Doyle’s set of treated digital prints, which referenced
each letter of the alphabet, the performance offered a playful critique of the contested
nature of words and their constituents in both their analogue and digital registers.
In the context of the current crisis (COVID-19 pandemic) and the foregrounding
of the digital realm as the site of engagement, the group’s focus is on
different registers of representation. For example, artworld websites and social media
posts necessarily privilege digital access over material exhibition. Here, the group
recognise that display itself is intrinsically technical and operates according to practical
contingencies and ideological frameworks. Accordingly, the group continues to
research the aesthetics of language and politics in the digital age. The group are
in the early stages of a project focusing on the aesthetics of [dis]play and digital
archives with the Irish Museum of Modern Art (IMMA) giving attention to the poetics
of interruption, the relationship between the archive and its delivery in terms of digital
mediation and performance.

Crocosmia × croscosmiiflora corm found in the garden of Spirasi, 2015.
Photo: Sean Breightaupt

110–111
Crocosmia ×
Clodagh
Emoe
Approaching an Understanding of Place
‘One bench. All my world.’ 1
In September 2018 two public artworks for Crocosmia × were
launched in the TU Dublin campus at Grangegorman and IMMA
(Irish Museum of Modern Art). An intervention of planting Crocosmia
× crocosmiiflora (more commonly known as Montbretia)
to surround tiered concrete steps by the playing fields in TU
Dublin and a metal bench at the edge of the front lawn in IMMA
transformed these once neglected sites into intimate spaces,
for people to sit, gather and meet.
Nine poems written and read by individuals seeking asylum
in Ireland, in their native languages including; Kinyarwanda,
Luganda, Croatian and Urdu were transmitted at the site of
these works. This text begins with the first line from one of the
poems, Vukovar, Croatia by Siniša Končić. For Končić, a citizen
of former Yugoslavia, the small bench is more than a site, it
is the place he goes to find meaning – looking across to the
other side of the river, now a different country, he asks, ‘Different
country, same people/What kind of life is there?/How does
the lilac smell there?’

Senior Infants, D7 Educate Together with Mary Conlon,
Head Gardener, RHK/IMMA, OPW. Photo: Clodagh Emoe
The artworks Crocosmia × were informed by the collaborative project,
The Plurality of Existence in the Infinite Expanse of Space and Time (2015–17) and
Crocosmia × (2017–18). This short text reflects on these two projects to approach an
understanding of place not as a site or geographically fixed point, but as a space of
meaning. This understanding of place is proposed by cultural geographer Yi-Fu Tuan. 2
Tuan’s approach is useful when reflecting collaborative and participatory art projects
that bring together the physical activity of gardening with the reflective processes of
poetry because he registers thought and emotion within the experiential continuum.
The brief accounts of The Plurality of Existence… and of Crocosmia × tease out how
by coming together we enacted meaning through our shared aim to open up dialogue
on diversity in Ireland. Focusing on the metaphor of Crocosmia × as a poetic device to
promote inclusion and belonging, I hope to show how we ultimately created intimate
spaces of inclusion and belonging, not just as public artworks but more importantly,
on a conceptual and emotional level through the processes of making these artworks..
The Plurality of Existence in the Infinite Expanse of Space and Time
The name Crocosmia was first used for a group of collaborators who
worked with me on a project, The Plurality of Existence… Although gardening was
not the main focus of the project, it laid its foundations enabling me to gradually and
gently introduce myself to the community of Spirasi. Spirasi is situated on the North
Circular Road, across from the entrance of TU Dublin campus, Grangegorman. Spirasi
is Ireland's only non government organisation for survivors of torture. We formed a
group of equal partners by coming together every week and engaging in a common
goal. Over time we created a space where tacit knowledge could flourish. According
to the British Hungarian polymath, Michael Polanyi, tacit knowledge is a series of
skills, ideas and experiences that is not codified or easily expressed as Polanyi states
‘we can know more than we can tell.’ 3 Developing on this Polanyi observes that many
individuals are unaware of the knowledge they possess. This is often the case for
many individuals living within the system of Direct Provision whose agency and sense
of selfworth have been eroded through social exclusion and isolation. For Polanyi,
tacit knowledge is often only revealed in practice and through close involvement
and cooperation. Our coming together at weekly meetings in Spirasi, to work, and
in so doing share stories and ideas gave individuals a new awareness of the value of
their knowledge and their contribution to the project. We formalised our collaboration
with the name Crocosmia. A beautiful, vibrantly coloured wild flower whose corm we
found when gardening. This plant, so ubiquitous in Ireland, is in fact a hybrid of two

CROCOSMIA × 112–113
African species. While acknowledging that our group had also been uprooted from
their land, the image of these wild flowers growing along the hedgerows in the Irish
landscape offered a gentle and evocative reminder that diversity enhances place.
The Crocosmia collaborators were: Jean-Marie Rukundo Phillemon
(Rwanda), Siniša Končić (former Yugoslavia), Annet Mphahlele (Uganda), Saida Umar
(Pakistan), Peter Rukundo (Rwanda) and Marie Claire Mundi Njong (Cameroon). Our
collaboration was built on support, understanding and trust that encouraged dialogue,
opening up a space for each unique voice within the group to emerge and evolve into
a series of poems that revealed the hidden narratives within our community. The
poems of Crocosmia informed an exhibition, a series of site-specific public artworks
and an anthology of poetry. In foregrounding difference, these poems affirmed the
universality of life by revealing how our emotional experiences are shared. In celebrating
difference we challenged the conception of community that reaffirms the notion
of sameness, advancing a new conception of community that is centred on relations
formed across categories of nation, race and culture.
Crocosmia ×
Crocosmia × evolved in 2017 to open up dialogue about diversity in Ireland
through metaphor. Metaphor has a particular capacity to operate in a non-didactic
way, suggesting and encouraging more explorative forms of thought. The metaphor
of Crocosmia × could raise awareness for diversity in Ireland by gently provoking a
re-examination of received notions of ‘native’ and ‘foreign’. Working with Hallah Farhan
Dawood (Iraq), Ragad Farhan Dawood (Iraq), Papy Kahoya Kasongo (DR Congo),
Fatemeh Bastanalam (Iran), Mohamad Fadaie (Iran), Romeo Kibambe Kitenge (DR of
Congo) we aimed to cultivate Crocosmia × crocosmiiflora as a positive, affirmative
metaphor for diversity in Ireland through participation and exchange. For Crocos-
Context
Crocosmia × is a cross
cultural, intergenerational
participatory art project
brings poetry and horticulture
together to explore a new
reading of community that
is inclusive and centred
on relations between race
and culture. This project
developed from The Plurality
of Existence in the Infinite
Expanse of Space and Time
(2015–2017) a collaborative
Papy Kahoya Kasongo with children from D7 Educate Together
preparing artwork for TU Dublin Grangegorman. Photo: Lori Keeve

project with individuals
seeking asylum in Ireland.
Crocosmia × aims to cultivate
Crocosmia × croscosmiiflora,
(known as Montbretia) common
to Irish roadsides and
native to South Africa as a
new metaphor for diversity
in Ireland. By involving
the wider community in
the creation of two public
artworks for TU Dublin
Campus Grangegorman and
IMMA (Irish Museum of Modern
Art) the project aims to
question received notions
of what is ‘native’ and what
is ‘foreign’. Introducing
large clusters of these wild
flowers transformed previously
overlooked, neglected sites
into intimate places for
people to sit, gather and
meet. Crocosmia × is located
in TU Dublin by the stepped
area beside the playing
fields and along the edge
of the front lawn of the
main museum building of the
RHK, IMMA. Crocosmia × is
cyclical artwork that comes
to life every year when the
wild flowers bloom. Crocosmia
× was launched in TU Dublin
as part of Culture Night on
Friday 21 September 2018.
The event was launched by
Jacquie Moore, Grangegorman
Public Art Working Group
with Ragad Farhan Dawood
and Paula Quirke, Spirasi,
Charlotte Salter Townsend,
National Botanic Gardens and
readings by Marie Claire
Mundi Njong, Jean-Marie
Rukundo Phillemon and Siniša
Končić. In September 2018
poems written and recited by
individuals seeking asylum
were transmitted above the
artwork.
Collaborators/poets include:
Jean-Marie Rukundo Phillemon,
Siniša Končić, Annet
Mphahlele, Saida Umar, Peter
Rukundo and Marie Claire Mundi
Njong.
Artists/gardeners include:
Hallah Farhan Dawood, Ragad
Farhan Dawood, Papy Kahoya
Kasongo, Fatemeh Bastanalam,
Mohamad Fadaie and Romeo
Kibambe Kitenge.
Associated collaborators:
Andres Mokake, Integration
& Psychosocial Coordinator,
Spirasi Paula Quirke,
Rehabilitation Coordinator,
Spirasi, Derek Bowden,
Grangegorman Estates
mia × we extended our place of work beyond the garden of Spirasi and brought our
creative actions out into the wider community. In seeking to share our metaphor by
including others in the realisation of the artworks we brought people together who
might never have met. Instead of simply purchasing the plants from a garden centre,
we exchanged poems for plants, issuing a call for plant specimens in the Irish Times
newspaper. Gardeners from large garden estates, rural farms, suburban gardens and
inner city backyards responded to our request for plants to include in the public artworks
at TU Dublin Grangegorman and IMMA. In exchange each gardener received
a copy of our anthology The Plurality of Existence… Although time consuming, the
process of collecting plants from gardeners all across Ireland created small intimate
moments for conversations to open up. Coming together with others created momentary
spaces that allowed us to share our metaphor and its meaning. We extended the
dialogue about diversity in Ireland with children and young people by connecting with
local schools; D7 Educate Together Primary School, St. Paul’s Secondary School and
St. Joseph’s Secondary School, developing a series of workshops for senior infants
and transition year students that brought art, poetry and horticulture together. Situating
these physical, creative, reflective activities outside of the classroom positioned
our dialogue in an informal space. More intimate personal accounts seemed to unfold
in this space, so that the concepts of inclusion and belonging that we explored resonated
on a deeper level.
The invitation to uproot our activities from the garden of Spirasi to the
nursery in the Royal Hospital Kilmainham/IMMA from curator Janice Hough and head
gardener Mary Conlon linked the participants and the young people to the most prestigious
cultural institution for modern and contemporary art in Ireland. Mary and her
team worked closely with us and encouraged us to use this official site as if it were
our own, giving the group a sense of ownership of this ambitious project. Although
the participants and many of the young people had never visited this cultural institution,
the welcome that Mary and her team extended instilled in all of us a strong
emotional feeling of inclusion and belonging. Being part of a team instilled the necessary
confidence required to realise two public artworks and participate in the public
launch of the works in IMMA and TU Dublin Grangegorman. On Culture Night, Ragad
Dawood Faran gave a public address at the launch of Crocosmia × in Grangegorman
alongside Jacquie Moore, Deputy Art Advisor, OPW/Public Art Working Group, Paula
Quirke, Spirasi and Charlotte Salter Townsend, National Botanic Gardens. For the
launch in IMMA Papy Kahoya Kasongo gave his public address sharing the podium in
the Museum with Janice Hough, curator IMMA, Leo Walsh, National Botanic Gardens
and Aisling Hearns, Spirasi. In his address he spoke about what the project meant to
him, describing how he extended the project to the community in the Direct Provision
Centre in Mosney. He described how he cultivated the metaphor by bringing a team
of residents together to plant these beautiful hybrid flowers of Africa at the main
entrance of the centre.
The permanent sign beside each artwork in IMMA and Grangegorman
acts as a reminder of the metaphor of Crocosmia ×, a metaphor for diversity that
appears every summer with the blooming of these vibrant hybrid flowers by the bench
on the front lawn of IMMA, the tiered steps on the TU Dublin Grangegorman campus,
on the grounds of Mosney and the local schools in Dublin 7. The names of the main
participants are listed with the artist on these permanent signs. This gesture does
more than acknowledge these individuals’ contribution to the project, it bears witness
to their capacity to enact place in a unfamiliar ‘foreign’ place through their collective,
creative activities. Their noble willingness to involve the wider community in their
project extended this space of inclusion and belonging to others. Like Končić’s bench,
Crocosmia × reminds us that we can approach an understanding of place not just
as a fixed site where the artwork exists, but as a dynamic, experiential space where
concepts of inclusion and belonging were cultivated, explored and felt.

CROCOSMIA × 114–115
Coordinator, Himzo Kazar,
Grangegorman Estates Gardener,
Mary Conlon, OPW, Head
Gardener of IMMA/RHK and her
gardening team: Derek Doyle,
Therese Thynne and Cathal
O’ Suillivan, Janice Hough,
Assistant Curator: Residency
& Artists' Programmes, IMMA,
Charlotte Salter Townsend,
National Botanic Gardens,
Anna Donnelly, Senior Infants
Year Coordinator, D7 Educate
Together Primary School,
Val Roe, Transition Year
Coordinator, St. Paul’s
Secondary School Brunswick
Street, Siobhan Earley,
Transition Year Coordinator
St Joseph’s Secondary School
Stanhope Street and Terry
Finnegan, AAL Ltd.
Gardeners from throughout Ireland participating
in the project. Photos: Clodagh Emoe
Lead artist Clodagh Emoe is
interested in experience,
perception and the
transformative capacity
of art. Her collaborative
projects seek to create spaces
that invite thought and instil
agency. Emoe’s work has been
commissioned both nationally
and internationally;
Serpentine Gallery, London,
Taipei Biennial, Museum of
Contemporary Art, Seoul, Nýló,
Reykjavik, documenta XIII,
Kaisel, Hugh Lane Municipal
Gallery, Project Arts Centre,
IMMA, Visual, Centre for
Contemporary Art and Maynooth
University. She has initiated
multilayered collaborative
projects that include Mystical
Anarchism (2009-2013) with
philosopher Simon Critchley,
Creating the Common/The
Unveiling (2010) a theatrical
event parodying a failed
unveiling of a monumental
sculpture and The Portal
(2019), with playwright Shane
Mac an Bhaird, a play written,
produced and performed by
thirty young girls. Clodagh
has received awards from
the Arts Council of Ireland,
Culture Ireland, Dublin City
Council, South Dublin County
Council, European Cultural
Fund and AHRB, UK. She has
recently been nominated for
the David and Yuko Juda Award
UK.
Grant aided by Dublin City
Council, Community and
Neighbourhood Award Supported
by IMMA and OPW.
Links
www.clodaghemoe.com/
crocosmia-x
Crocosmia × permanent sign located by the
artwork, TU Dublin campus, Grangegorman.
Photo: Clodagh Emoe
1 Siniša Končić, ‘Vukovar, Croatia’, The Plurality of Existence in the Infinite Expanse of Space and Time,
Crocosmia and Clodagh Emoe, Dublin 2017, 27.
2 Tuan, Y. (2001). Space and Place, The Perspective of Experience. 2nd ed. Minneapolis:
Minnesota University Press.
3 Polanyi, M. (2009). The Tacit Dimension. 2nd ed. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. p.4.

Grangegorman
Luke McManus
Local resident
The doorbell rang at 9am on my first Saturday in Grangegorman. The
man at the door was soberly dressed, respectable even. Respectable, but concerned.
‘Hello. I don’t want to worry you. But a plane is going to crash into your
house.’ This was not what I had expected him to say.
‘You don’t need to panic. Probably won’t happen until about 11.’ He did
that wag-gly hand thing to indicate this was an approximation. ‘So you have plenty of
time to get out. And take some of your belongings too.’
‘Bye now’, he said as if to say: if he wasn’t panicked, why should I be? He
walked off up the street towards the North Circular Road, every now and then raising
his arm to point at the sky, as if tracing the trajectory of an incoming jet.
I went back to bed. But as 10.55 became 10.56, I was gripped by a mild but
increasing anxiety. What if, in four minutes times, I died? Immolated in an explosion
of aviation fuel and twisted metal… I couldn’t honestly say that I hadn’t been warned.
And if that happened, my last living thought would be the self-reproach
of someone who had been told exactly what to do to save themselves, but had instead
decided against action, in favour of lying in bed reading a trashy novel.
My watch ticked on to 10.59. OK, I thought. Here we go. Deep breath.
Twenty years later, I’m still happily alive and living in that house. There
isn’t any lesson or moral to this story, except maybe that, sometimes, complacency is
precisely the right strategy.
–
After that start, my first year in Grangegorman was uneventful. I had
presumed that interacting with people who see the world through a unique, distorting
lens would be a weekly occurrence, but the doorbell remained silent. I’d been living in
the heart of Arbour Hill for the previous three years, and by comparison to the bustle
of Stoneybatter, the new neighbourhood seemed quiet. Eerie even.
The road suddenly widened as you came up the hill, where the decrepit
old prison loomed to the right. You kept coming, past the glum Nurses Home and then
the Murder House where two women had been savagely killed three years previously.
On the left ran St. Brendan’s Mental Hospital, the rundown Victorian granite buildings
giving way to a cheap mess of 1950s medical buildings that looked like a temporary
solution, left to moulder permanently. Then a rusted railing punctuated by tall thin
poplars which gave the upper end of the road the look of a tatty cemetery.
There never seemed to be anyone around. On winter’s evenings the enormous
width of the road was unnervingly dark in the fog. Drivers would step on their
pedal to roar through this uncanny zone.
Even my house was a strange beast – built in the 1980s on a threecornered
site where a terrace of cottages ended and before the high asylum wall
veered in to join the line of the road. Two rooms were narrower at the back than at
the front. There were bars on the windows and the smell of cat lingered. The yard was
a dreary triangle.
The living room and kitchen were upstairs, looking over a wild meadow
and beyond stood a grey building, the kind of gloomy edifice that warrants sudden
illumination by a bolt of lightning. And finally, you could see the stubby top of the
Wellington Testimonial peeping.
It was a suitably odd house for an odd place, a place whose name resonated
with those older than me, a name that always got a reaction.

GRANGEGORMAN 116–117
‘Yer going to Grangegorman?’ said a taxi driver, wheezing, laughing. ‘So
it’s got like that, has it buddy?’
‘Grangegorman? It was the first place I ever worked’ said my aunt, baring
her teeth and inhaling sharply while shaking her head in a characteristic expression
of horror. ‘In the early sixties. It was…awful.’
‘Grangegorman? As in, the murders?’ The murders had been exceptionally
grisly, perfect fodder for the morbid tastes of tabloid newspapers. The police
hadn’t helped – they arrested an innocent suspect for the killings, who subsequently
committed suicide. The real killer was caught eventually, but the neighbourhood still
resounded with a low-level dark energy.
But most people just said ‘Grangegorman? Where exactly is that? Is it
near… Cabinteely?’
Grangegorman was either a locus of suffering and insanity, or a nonplace.
Either way it was a dead zone, a place to be circumnavigated, not entered. A
blank space on the map.
–
The mechanic at the top of the street has been here for 50 years. He
points at the rusty railing with the grass tangling out through it that marches down
the hill. The railing sits on top of a low wall, about three feet high. ‘I remember when
that wall went all the way up. A old asylum wall high enough to keep in patients. A
fella took over the hospital and decided it was too divisive. That he wasn’t running a
prison. So he knocked it down to that height there.’ The mechanic gestures to his hip.
‘They did a rollcall three weeks later and around a third of the patients
weren’t there anymore’ He cackles. ‘They weren’t too long getting that railing up after
that. Took a bit longer to find all the patients.’
20 years on now. The house had plenty of room to improve, and though
still odd, is no longer drab. The neighbourhood is reinvigorated – Stoneybatter and
Phibsboro are crammed with interesting people of all kinds and the streets of Grangegorman
are now living, with builders, students and locals availing of the open spaces
and the views of the mountains that were previously hidden.
The Nurses Home, the temporary/permanent 1950s buildings and the
Murder House are all gone. Where the latter stood there’s a 1980s flavoured mural
by a street art collective, topped with towering buddleias – the in-house weed of
Dublin dereliction.
And now people say: ‘Grangegorman? It is all change around there, will
be great for the area’.
Sometimes I wonder. Are the somnolent avenues that surround UCD and
DCU interesting, vibrant places to be? What about the introverted fan-lit terraces on
the south side of Pearse Street? All life was sucked from them by Trinity’s remorseless
strategy of acquiring and repurposing them to face inwards, until the street became
an urban Potemkin village.
Maybe it will be different in Grangegorman. TU Dublin are lucky. Lucky
to be moving to where five fascinating places: Broadstone, Phibsboro, Smithfield,
Stoneybatter & Cabra, converge. Lucky that they are creating their home in enlightened
times, where permeability and place-making and community gain are part of
the project brief. Lucky the whole thing ever happened, truth be told, given the Great
Economic Depression around the time it all began.
When you remove people’s privacy by building over their back walls, it is
a deeply invasive act. Sensitivity and respect is key. In the early days of the development,
it seems both were sometimes lacking.
The elegant presence of the new and proposed campus buildings helps
some sensitive architects of note are creating remarkable buildings here, and the
public art that will accompany them will help make the area a more interesting and
creatively vibrant place. I was lucky enough to represent the community in the assessment
of the proposals for the place.

But even now, it seems strange that such a vast site in the heart of such
an overcrowded city district contains no permanent family housing at all, public or
private. No one whose face will eventually become familiar, as life ticks along at the
weekends, in the evenings, in the holidays, noone to add another layer of social fabric
to the Grangegorman quilt.
Instead the plots nearby, where such housing could have gone, have been
snapped up by private student housing and aparthotel developers taking advantage
of tax breaks and planning fast-tracks to maximise profits.
You would wonder how their business model of accommodating international
students for nine months a year and tourists for the other three looks in
the post-pandemic world. Either way, few of those who sleep in these sleek new
buildings are likely to ever become a long-term resident of the area. And maybe that
doesn’t matter…
But the people I know who care most about these streets aren’t checking
into AirBnbs or working on research projects. They have been here for a long time:
some for many decades. The woman across the road who regularly cleans the public
footpath outside her house with boiling water. The woman down the road who carefully
sweeps up the leaves on the street into perfect little piles. The people who can
tell me exactly what is going on on these streets, though I still can’t figure out how
they know. They slip my six year old son ripe bananas and crumpled fivers, despite my
protests. They kept Grangegorman going back in the grim times, when the freezing
fog was thick with coal-smoke.
They still keep it going now.
Luke McManus is a documentary
filmmaker, who lives in
Grangegorman. He has won three
IFTAs, a Celtic Media Award,
the Radharc Award and the Best
Irish Film Award at the Dublin
International Film Festival.
He is an elected community
representative on the Community
Liaison Committee and the
Consultative Group of the
Grangegorman Development
Agency. He was part of the
agency’s Public Art Selection
Panel in 2019 and is also one
of the team who programmes the
annual Stoneybatter Festival.

Community make use of Grangegorman green spaces. Photo: Marie-Louise Halpenny
GRANGEGORMAN 118–119

120–121
What Does
He Need?
To Be Frank photoshoot. Photo: Luca Truffarelli
Fiona Whelan
Brokentalkers
Rialto Youth
Project

What Does He Need? (2018+) is an ongoing project by artist/writer Fiona
Whelan, theatre company Brokentalkers and Rialto Youth Project (RYP), exploring
how men and boys are shaped by and influence the world they live in.
This cross-sectoral, cross-city and cross-community project builds on
an initial collaboration between Whelan, Rialto Youth Project and Brokentalkers in
2016. This resulted in the National History of Hope performance (Project Arts Centre,
2016) as the final public manifestation of a four-year intergenerational project
between Rialto Youth Project and Whelan, exploring contemporary equality issues for
women and girls living and working in Rialto.
Shifting the focus to men, the aim of What Does He Need? is to create
significant public dialogue about the current state of masculinity. In order to
accomplish this ambitious remit, What Does He Need? operates at the intersection
of collaborative arts practice, performance, qualitative research and youth work, situating
the project most recognisably within social practice/socially-engaged art as a
wider internationally-recognised field.
In doing so in an Irish context, the What Does He Need? team (Fiona
Whelan, Rialto Youth Project and Brokentalkers) plays consciously and provocatively
at the often fraught boundaries between participatory and professional theatre and
arts practices, community art, community development and youth work, particularly
as What Does He Need? combines short-term and longitudinal modes of engagement
with participants and publics. What Does He Need? ’s core modes of engagement
include a one-day dialogical workshop aimed at adults and young people and an
eight-week programme for children and young people which holds strong youth work
values, seeking to educate young people in relation to the complexities of their class
and gender position. So far, the What Does He Need? project has plans to further
manifest as an in-progress dance/theatre piece To Be Frank, and planned creative
and pedagogical interactive exhibition, both of these works created in response to
the research gathered in the project.
What Does he Need? workshop. Image courtesy of Create
Brokentalkers’ 2018–2020 Create / Collaborative Arts Partnership Programme
(CAPP) and Grangegorman Development Agency residency, presented the
opportunity to seed the cross city nature of this project. Focusing the residency specifically
on the development of the one day workshop, the What Does He Need? team
engaged with the Children and Youth Action Group of the North West Inner City
Network led by community worker Fidelma Bonass. Through ongoing engagement
and critical reflection with community and youth workers on both sides of the city, the
team recognised the value of the place-based nature of the workshop. This emphasis
harnesses specific local knowledge – exploring how masculinity can develop differently
in different places, and considering how boys and men are shaped by the

WHAT DOES HE NEED? 122–123
specific places in which they live, and how they in turn influence them. In the near
future, it is intended that this one day dialogical workshop could arrive in any place,
drawing on a diverse set of knowledges and lived experiences.
The What Does He Need? one-day dialogical workshop operates in two
key ways. One, as an immersive and to some extent theatricalised experience led
presently by Whelan and/or Brokentalkers who take participants through a narrative
journey that starts with the creation of a fictional boy, who is always born into the
place in which the workshop is located. Two, this workshop functions as a research
method for the project team who then archive the boys that are created through this
method and use their learning to continue revising the workshop in its current form.
Over time, it has involved both single-sex and mixed-gender groups of varying ages
and sizes, as the team has explored what differing conditions enable in terms of the
central task.
At the beginning of this workshop, participants meet a boy at birth and
then journey with him as he encounters a series of complex dilemmas at different
stages of his life all the way up to fatherhood. In response to each dilemma, the group
engage in dialogue, discussing the boy’s needs and taking on responsibility for them.
Fiona Whelan, What Does He Need?
Workshop Drawing, 2020
Biographies
Brokentalkers are led by coartistic
directors Feidlim
Cannon and Gary Keegan. They
have been described as ‘one
of Ireland’s most fearless
and path-breaking theatre
companies’.
They devise original,
accessible live performance
and explore new forms
that challenge traditional
ideologies of text-based
theatre.
Their working method is founded
on a collaborative process
that draws on the skills and
experiences of a diverse group
of contributors from different
disciplines and backgrounds.
Some are professional artists,
performers, designers and
writers and others are people
who do not usually work in
the theatre but who bring an
authenticity to the work that
is compelling.
Brokentalkers make work that
responds to the contemporary
world, using elements
such as original writing,
dance, classic texts, film,
This boy therefore becomes the co-creation of the group, who has been
brought to life explicitly from the perspective of the specific place in which he is made,
drawing on the knowledge and lived experience of those in the room.
The role of the boy’s co-creators are to nurture him and to support him in
collectively confronting crises of empathy and ethics he encounters over the course
of his growing up with sexuality, relationships with women, pornography, violence, and
ultimately, fatherhood, featuring as key themes. The gentle but persistent questioning
of ‘what does he need’ that drives this dialogical workshop forward invites the group
to take ownership of this boy from within their community, but from the remove of
fiction which invites critical distance and opens space for shared interrogation of their
assumptions and/or blind spots.
To date, 13 boys have been created by different groups engaged in one
or other of the projects' two modes of engagment. The makers range from a group of
five year old boys engaged in a long-term programme with RYP, to a mixed gender
adult group based in Dublin 7 who were immersed in a one day experience at Whelan’s
studio in IMMA. The boys created include Luke from Greek Street flats; Finn from
Queen Street flats; Finn, Conor-George and Stevie from Dolphin House and Kroose
from Fatima.
Moving from community centres to theatres to gallery spaces, What
Does He Need?’s iterations engage different types of participants and audiences even
as all of its manifestations centralise the same dialogical, empathetic and searching
interrogation of contemporary masculinity’s complexity. As a project, What Does He

interviews, found materials and
music to represent that world
in performance.
Brokentalkers also work within
the participatory arts sector,
collaborating with communities
to produce works of artistic
excellence as well as providing
quality arts experiences for
participants.
Charlotte McIvor is a Lecturer
in Drama and Theatre Studies
at the National University
of Ireland, Galway. She is
the author of Migration and
Performance in Contemporary
Ireland: Towards A New
Interculturalism and the
co-editor of The Methuen
Companion to Interculturalism
and Performance (with Daphne
P. Lei), Interculturalism
and Performance Now: New
Directions? (with Jason
King), Devised Performance in
Irish Theatre: Histories and
Contemporary Practice (with
Siobhan O’Gorman) and Staging
Intercultural Ireland: Plays
and Practitioner Perspectives
(with Matthew Spangler) and has
published in multiple journals
and edited collections.
She is also a theatre and
creative arts practitioner
whose most recent work is
with NUI Galway’s Active*
Consent programme, for which
she directs the Creative Arts
and Communications Unit. In
2019, she directed and produced
Active* Consent’s inaugural
national third-level theatre
tour of The Kinds of Sex You
Might Have in College, an
original play she co-devised
with students featuring a
company of professional
alumni actors.
Create is the national
development agency for
collaborative arts. Their
mission is to lead the
development of collaborative
arts practice by enabling
artists and communities
to create exceptional
art together. Create do
this through professional
development, mentoring,
project development support,
commissioning and project
opportunities, advocacy and
policy development as well
as research and training.
We also manage the Artist
in the Community Scheme for
the Arts Council. Founded in
1983, Create believes that by
working together, artists and
communities can purposefully
Need? literally workshops group’s and audiences’ ability as place-based communities
to more proactively support the experiences of young men living in their midst
collectively by opening a held space in which to lay bare assumptions and consider
alternative scripts for how each boy’s story might develop over time, against the backdrop
of a range of systemic realities.
What Does He Need?’s ongoing creation of boys ultimately pushes us to
recognise that one frank shared conversation about contemporary masculinity’s challenges
and how to best support boys and men will not be enough, rather, we need to
keep talking and creating and re-imagining our individual and shared answers to the
prompt: ‘what does he need?’ In doing so, What Does He Need? models the sensitivity,
care and mutual ongoing responsibility communities must share for how they nurture
their evolving understanding of what it means to be a young boy or man today, leaving
artistic traces of the team’s ongoing research to guide others on our necessarily ongoing
wider societal interrogation of the lived experience of contemporary masculinity.
What Does He Need? receives advisory support from Professor Kathleen
Lynch (Equality Studies, UCD), Professor Sharon Todd (Education, Maynooth
University) and Sheena Barrett (DCC Arts Office) which has been key to the project’s
development. The project is also supported by Artist/Researcher Susanne Bosch who
is journeying with the project over time to explore the transdisciplinary methodology
at work.
What Does He Need? team with Charlotte McIvor
In the context of Create’s lead role in the European funded Collaborative Arts Partnership Programme (CAPP),
we were awarded a community-based residency in Dublin 7. Create invited Brokentalkers to engage and
through their existing collaboration with visual artist Fiona Whelan and the Rialto Youth Project. The residency
was expanded to include a focused and in-depth development of transdisciplinary, cross-sectoral practice.
Brokentalkers and Whelan refined their workshop methodology as a central aspect of What Does He Need? –
a significant collaborative project exploring masculinity. Engaging with the CYAG, and CAPP artist, researcher
Susanne Bosch, the residency facilitated local and international exchange. Here, academic Charlotte McIvor
reflects on this rich intersection of artistic and community practice and the cross-city expansion of What Does
He Need? to Dublin 7.
Ailbhe Murphy, Director Create

WHAT DOES HE NEED? 124–125
explore how collaborative arts
engage in distinct, relevant
and powerful ways with the
urgent social, cultural and
political issues of our times.
Dr. Fiona Whelan is a Dublin
based artist, writer and
lecturer at the National
College of Art and Design.
Her art practice is committed
to exploring and responding
to systemic power relations,
most specifically as they
relate to class and gender
inequality. Fiona has a strong
commitment to long-term crosssectoral
collaborations. Since
2004 she has worked closely
with Rialto Youth Project
exploring lived experiences
of systemic inequalities with
young people and adults.
This work typically manifests
as visual, performative or
dialogical encounters in which
multiple power relations are
exposed and interrogated. Since
2016 she has explored the
cross disciplinary potential
of this work with theatre
company Brokentalkers. Her
writing focuses on the complex
relationality, labour and
ethical challenges of this
practice and includes cowriting
with sociologist Kevin
Ryan, in a collective writing
platform ‘Two Fuse’. In 2019,
Fiona received her PhD at the
Centre for Socially Engaged
Practice-Based Research at TU
Dublin. www.fionawhelan.com
The Children & Youth Action
Group (CYAG), North West Inner
City (NWIC) is an inter-agency
network of projects, groups
and agencies who work with
children, young people and
their families. The aim of the
group is to work in partnership
to ensure the interests and
wellbeing of children, young
people and their families.
What Does He Need? workshop with Children & Youth Action Group of the North West Inner City Network.
IMMA studios, April 2019. Photo: Susanne Bosch
The work of the group is action
based and involves organising
training and events, lobbying
for enhanced services for
the NWIC and collating and
disseminating information.
We work from a community
development approach, using
creative methods in many
aspects of our work. The CYAG
is the recognised Child &
Family Support Network (CFSN)
for this area.
Links
www.create-ireland.ie
www.fionawhelan.com
www.brokentalkers.ie
www.rialtoyouthproject.net

Hundreds of men, women, and students wear a bonnet for a special photo art installation to remember thousands of women transported
from the Richmond Penitentiary in the 1800s. Photo Damien Eagers. Permission to use RTÉ Nationwide images was given by producer Niall Martin.

126–127
Wear a Bonnet
– Living Art
Installation
Christina
Henri

On 3 March 2017 artist Christina Henri held a public
event, Wear a Bonnet – a living art installation in the
shadow of the Clock Tower building in Grangegorman
to remember the 3,215 convict women and their
508 children who were transported from the Grangegorman
depot to Tasmania, then Van Dieman’s Land,
between 1840–1853. The event mirrored a similar occasion
Henri held in Hobart, Tasmania in May 2015, where
these women and children arrived after transportation.
Modelled on ideas from Quaker social reformer Elizabeth
Fry, Grangegorman depot was opened in 1836, the
first exclusively female prison in the British Isles. The
prison’s main function with respect to female convicts
was to provide employment training.
All participants were loaned a bonnet which were typical of those worn
by female servants at the time of transportation. The majority of the bonnets were
made over the past number of years by inmates and staff of the Irish Prison System
and each one represents an individual woman who was transported from Ireland in the
1800’s. Since 2004 Tasmanian artist Christina Henri has used bonnets as symbolism,
highlighting the lives of women and their children transported to Australia from Ireland
and Great Britain. The artist has chosen a cloth bonnet, taken from an original 1860’s
servant’s bonnet, to symbolise the lives of the convict women whose stories have
been shrouded by a veil of amnesia for far too long. As the artist-in-residence at the
World Heritage Site, Cascade Female Factory, Hobart (2003–2015) Henri invited global
participation through the sewing and wearing of heritage bonnets, adorned with the
names of transported women and their children. Since 2010 Henri has visited Ireland
annually involving the Irish in her ‘Roses from the Heart’ project. Each bonnet is hand
stitched with (where known) the women’s name and age on one side, and the name of
the transportation ship with the year the woman left Ireland on. Henri’s ‘Roses From
the Heart’ project has seen the creation of 25,000 bonnets to date around the world.
Local resident Monica takes part in the
commemoration event, 2017. Photo: Lori Keeve

WEAR A BONNET – LIVING ART INSTALLATION 128–129
Students from Rathgar (Quaker) Primary School
learned the history of the bonnets before taking
part in the event. Photo: Lori Keeve
The event on 3 March 2017 was documented by RTÉ Nationwide. People
travelled from Australia, Northern Ireland and from across the Republic of Ireland.
Some descendants of the women whose lives were being valued were present. Attendees
included the then Lord Mayor of Dublin, Brendan Carr; Australian Ambassador to
Ireland the Hon. Richard Andrews; Director and Dean, College of Arts & Tourism, TU
Dublin, John O’Connor and GDA CEO Ger Casey. Quakers Roger and Joan Johnson
facilitated a bus load of students from Newtown School, Waterford. Students from
Rathgar Primary School also attended along with pupils from all the schools in the
Grangegorman area.
Context
This initiative has been
supported by the GDA, TU
Dublin, The Irish Prison
Service (IPA), the Australian
Embassy, RTE Nationwide, The
Religious Society of Friends
(Quakers) and many arts
and crafts organisations,
historical societies, schools
and museums.
Biography
Dr. Christina Henri is an
artist from Tasmania, the
island State of Australia.
Since 2003 she has been the
honorary artist in residence
at the Cascades Female Factory
Historic Site in Hobart.
Christina uses art as a tool
to give meaning to history.
Her work Roses from the
Heart is a Memorial to the
25,566 women sentenced to
transportation to Australia as
convicts (1788–1853). It has
become a documentary by RTÉ
Nationwide. Henri has a PhD
in Visual & Performing Arts
from Launceston, University
of Tasmania (2011). In 2015
she gave a public lecture:
Grangegorman to Tasmania’
to TU Dublin. See
rosesfromtheheart.tumblr.com
Participants donned commemorative bonnets
made all over world for the event in Grangegorman,
March 2017. Photo: Lori Keeve

Anthony
Chang

130–131
Robert
Incarceration
Altars
Bernie
Masterson
Mark

I come from a painting background and have worked
extensively with Educational Services to Prisons. My
practice explores the human condition in social, political
and cultural contexts, generating a space to engage
with complex issues, raise questions and promote critical
dialogue. My work is interdisciplinary in nature,
sometimes collaborative, and often deals with challenging
subject matter regarding our responsibilities
as individuals, as communities, and universally. I seek
to find alternative points of view in order to critically
analyse and create new conversations around humanity’s
shared concerns.
Warren
In this collaborative exploration with the men from the Mountjoy Prison
Campus, I investigate new perspectives and make us question our assumptions, in
relation to negative stereotypes. My work evolves as a personal response to real-life
stories and situations encountered.
Incarceration Altars investigates the relationship between person, place
and object, through a series of images and prisoners’ narratives to contextualise the
different worlds of prison identity and private identity.
Objects provide links to those identities and are also used to reflect on
other themes such as ‘mourning and memory,’ ‘transition and passage,’ ‘meditation
and new vision,’ and how they serve as a marker in a significant life situation such as
incarceration. The objects become an instrument, a channel of emotional connectedness
to a vast structure of recollection involving thought, feeling and memory. 1
…man’s sentimental attachment to objects is
one of life’s greatest consolations. 2

INCARCERATION ALTARS 132–133
Paul
Context
Incarceration Altars (2017),
video, film, catalogue was
produced and mediated by Bernie
Masterson in collaboration
with residents from Mountjoy
Prison Campus. The project was
undertaken with the support
of the Irish Prison Service
(IPS) and the City of Dublin
Educational Training Board
(CDETB).
Professionals associated with
production include an essay by
Professor Aislinn O’Donnell,
Maynooth University School of
Education; Eamon Sinnott and
Partners for the catalogue
design and print run; Kieran
Moylan, Principal Officer, Care
& Rehabilitation Directorate,
(IPS); Stephen O Connor,
Organiser of Prison Education
(CDETB).
In 2017, five videos from
Incarceration Altars were
screened in Rathdown House,
TU Dublin. During 2018,
it was screened at LOOP
Festival Barcelona, Spain,
curated by Natalia Foguet
Angela Garcia (Safia Art
Contemporani Barcelona) at
Damer House Gallery, Roscrea,
Co. Tipperary (June), and at
the Irish Prison Education
Association Conference,
Irish Prison Service College,
Portlaoise, Co. Laois. In
2019 it was shown at the
European Prison Education
Association Conference, held
in TU Dublin. Also in August
2019 Incarceration Altars #3
was screened in ‘Irish Short
Reels Series’, Contemporary
Irish Arts Center Los Angeles,
curated by Screen America &
Screen Ireland.
1 Turkle, S. (2011). Evocative Objects: Things We Think With. 2nd ed. Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press.
2 Pamuk, O. (2012). The Innocence of Objects. New York: Abrams.

Primary stakeholders involved
in the new Grangegorman
Campus are the Health Service
Executive, TU Dublin and the
local community. The Mountjoy
Prison Campus is a part of the
local community, built just
25 years after the Richmond
District Hospital (which became
St. Brendan’s Hospital) in
1850; both institutions dealing
with invisible communities.
The Grangegorman community
public arts initiative
increases the visibility
of this disenfranchised
group within that community
while fostering local civic
engagement and inclusiveness.
It embraces multiculturalism
in the development of social
change giving voice to new
and different perspectives
from demographic profiles to
affect positive change and
enhance community cohesion.
In doing so, Incarceration
Altars substantiates the prison
community as an integral
part of the local community
by providing equality of
opportunity where difference
is welcomed and participation
is valued. It facilitates
sharing our communal past and
present experiences through the
creative process, to promote
respect, a sense of pride
and achievement for all of
the participants both within
the said community and with
their partnerships. The aim
of Incarceration Altars is to
recognize the importance of
creativity as a tool for human
development and self-encounter
in the context of prison and
to promote the development
and personal autonomy of the
prisoner as a person within
the local community. It also
provides a platform to make
a comprehensive body of work
that bridges the gap between
previously ‘separate’ art
traditions and digital media,
tested against the ‘real world’
situation of contemporary
practice.
All photos are courtesy of the
artist Bernie Masterson.
Biography
Bernie Masterson was born
in Ballymoney, Co. Antrim,
Northern Ireland, and now
lives and works in Dublin.
Recent exhibitions include:
‘Open Submission Exhibition’
Highlanes Gallery ‘The Janet
Mullarney Prize’ winner 2020
curated by Seán Kissane, Joy
Gerrard and Jerome O Drisceoil,
Officer Julie Heffernan Portlaoise at the IPEA Conference
Dave

INCARCERATION ALTARS 134–135
Exhibition Launch, Rathdown House,
Grangegorman Campus, 2017. Photo: Lori Keeve
Highlanes Gallery Drogheda;
Eva Gore Booth, curated by the
Hamilton Gallery, MoLI Dublin,
(Nov 2019); ‘Irish Short Reels
Series’, Contemporary Irish
Arts Center Los Angeles USA,
(Aug 2019); ‘Nineteen Hundred
and Nineteen’, The Hyde Bridge
Gallery, Sligo and The Irish
Consulate in New York, USA
(Sept-Nov 2019); ‘St. Brigid’s
Day’, curated by Martina
Hamilton, The Hamilton Gallery,
Sligo, 12 Star Gallery, London
(2018); ‘Homeland: Of Memory’,
LOOP Festival, curated by
Angel Garcia and Natalia
Foguet, Safia Art Contemporani,
Barcelona, Spain (Nov 2018,
2019); ‘The Royal Ulster
Academy Annual Exhibition Open’
(2018); ‘Homeland: Of Memory’,
curated by Therry Rudin and
Patricia Hurl, Damer House
Gallery, Roscrea, Co. Tipperary
(2018, 2019); ‘Glitch Festival:
Digital Traces’, curated by
Mathew Nevin and Ciara Scanlan
of MART, Rua Red Gallery,
Dublin (May 2017). Masterson is
also a recipient of the Douglas
Hyde Gold Medal (1996) for
painting from the Oireachtas.
John
Links
www.berniemasterson.com

Spoken word opera, Dublin 7 Educate Together, 2016. The conductor guides
the choir’s vocal speed in swinging arm circles, ranking up and grinding down
the pace at which the question is spoken: What is school for? Photo: Louis Haugh

136–137
The
Masterplan
Jennie Guy
John Beattie
Ella de Búrca
Karl Burke
Naomi Sex
The Masterplan: Re-wilding the Orchard
Between 2016 and 2017, curator Jennie Guy, the Grangegorman Development
Agency (GDA), Dublin 7 Educate Together National School, Technological
University Dublin (TU Dublin) and The Brunner (St. Paul’s CBS Secondary School)
worked together to develop new relationships during a period of major urban redevelopment
in Dublin 7. The collaboration took shape through Art School, a curatorial
project Guy developed in 2014, placing contemporary artists in educational settings
to cultivate sporadic communities of practice-based research. In a piece she wrote
for Transactions 1 , Guy wrote of this project as being one often involving symbiosis,
in which the students and artists are affected by each other. In this way, Art School
offers the possibility for transformation through mutual exposure, a kind of re-wilding.

Grangegorman has a long history of institutional use, including being
the site of an orchard for one of Henry VIII’s deans 2 . In contrast to this monocultural
approach, Guy chose a different gardening style, one that involves building connections,
letting go and tending to the unanticipated. The project was structured with two
beginning nodes, each with a different school and different artists, different agreements
and considerations. From these beginning points, each branched out in its
own way, instigated by the artists’ approaches and engaged by the dynamics of the
student groups. The overall collaboration was titled The Masterplan.
Node I: The Masterplan
Residency with John Beattie and Ella de Búrca and Fourth, Fifth and Sixth Class
students curated by Jennie Guy D7 Educate Together National School, Dublin
April – September 2016.
The first gathering point began in the summer of 2016, between May
and June, when Guy invited artists Ella de Búrca and John Beattie to work with the
fourth, fifth and sixth class students of Dublin 7 Educate Together National School.
At the time the school was housed in prefabricated buildings in Grangegorman Lower,
awaiting its eventual building which would be located within the development site.
The project responded to this context by rooting itself within this transitory state,
seeing its potential for imagining alternatives of what a ‘school’ could be.
Ella de Búrca and John Beattie worked with the students to develop a
sort of operatic parliament based around three central questions:
What is school for? What was school for?
What will school be for?
Biographies
Jennie Guy is a curator,
artist, writer and educator
based in Dublin. In conjunction
with her independent practice,
Guy is the Manager of the
Artistic Programme and
Operations at Fire Station
Artists’ Studios in Dublin.
She holds a BA in English
literature and History from
Trinity College and an MA in
Visual Arts Practices from the
Institute of Art, Design and
Technology. She is the founder
and director of Art School,
an experimental framework
that explores strategies for
placing artists within sites of
education. Recent curatorial
work includes ‘I Sing the
Body Electric’(2018), an Art
School project developed as
part of EVA International;
the exhibitions ‘It’s Very
New School’ (2017) and ‘Field
Recording’(2018) as curator
in residence at Rua Red Arts
Centre; Artists’ Exercises
(2016), an online platform
for distributing artists’
educational strategies.
One student records another’s answer to one of the questions.
The recordings were edited into a sound work that was then
installed in Rua Red as part of It’s Very New School, 2017.
Photo: Louis Haugh

THE MASTERPLAN 138–139
Students, school staff and families gather to view the screening
of their documentary film work at Lighthouse Cinema,
Smithfield, Dublin 7. Photo: Lori Keeve
In addition, Guy regularly
consults, manages and curates
major public art commissions
in Ireland. Recent commissions
curated by Guy include Ruth
Lyons’ Iontaise / Iontas
(2020), Adam Gibney’s Your
Seedling Language (2019) and
David Beattie’s Reflectors
(2019). She is the editor
of Curriculum: Contemporary
Art Goes to School which was
published in the autumn 2020
and will be internationally
distributed by Intellect Books.
John Beattie is a visual artist
originally from Co. Donegal
and is currently based in
Dublin, Ireland. Beattie’s
practice takes the form of
staged productions using still
and moving image. His work
readdresses cultural moments,
objects and events which become
reconfigured and reinterpreted
through his approach. Examples
include PERFORMING NGI.988
(2016), A Line of Enquiry
(2013) and the two-part film
An Artist, The Studio, and all
the rest… (2006–2012). In 2020,
he is an artist in residence at
The Centre Culturel Irlandais
(CCI) Paris, where he will
continue the development of his
work and research on Mondrian
and the Paris Studio.
For the spoken word opera a conductor brought each group into choral
unity, guiding the speed and volume of the chanted questions. When the conductor
jumped the choir broke into a flurry of individual answers to the question, bringing
the multiplicity of perspectives gathered into view.
This process was documented along with a variety of other exercises in
film and script-writing, all exploring multivocality and community, and edited into a
film work which was then screened in the Lighthouse Cinema, accompanied and contextualised
by an essay by Brian Fay. 3 The project became public once again during
the exhibition It’s Very New School 4 in Rua Red, 2017. Here the project was distilled
into the form of a white and floating bookshelf with a series of white books lying face
up, separated by a couple of fingers’ width. On each spine a different answer to one of
the central questions is printed as the title, with serifs underlining their exclamatory
tone with Roman confidence. From underneath, inlaid, a discreet set of speakers play
out the spoken word opera.

Removing the wax from the copper plate to uncover the etched drawing.
The nitric acid will have corroded the unprotected areas,
leaving the drawing scratched into the metal surface.
Ella de Búrca works through
performance, sculpture and
poetry to focus on how humans
construct meaning, particularly
from a female perspective. She
is especially interested in how
we perform as ‘viewer,’ and the
discourse surrounding active
versus passive experiences. Her
work is usually site-specific
and temporary. She is currently
pursuing a practice-based PhD
at KU Leuven, Belgium. Selected
exhibitions and performances
include: ‘Pirouette,’ The Hugh
Lane Municipal Art Gallery,
Dublin, Ireland, 2019 (solo
performance), ‘Flat As The
Tongue Lies,’ U.C. Irvine,
California, 2018 (solo
show), ‘Post-Peace’ at the
Württembergischer Kunstverein,
Stuttgart, Germany 2017.
Naomi Sex is a Dublin-based
visual artist and lecturer in
Fine Art at TU Dublin.
Node II: I’ll be in your camp: Will you be in mine?
Workshop series with Karl Burke and Naomi Sex and Transition Year students
curated by Jennie Guy, St Paul’s CBS and Technological University Dublin (TU
Dublin) September 2016 – April 2017.
The second node of The Masterplan split into two branches that crossed
over and grew in different environments. For this, artists and lecturers at TU Dublin
Grangegorman Karl Burke and Naomi Sex were invited to work with transition year
students from The Brunner, also located in Dublin 7. This phase was titled I'll Be in
Your Camp, Will You Be in Mine and took place first in TU Dublin and then in The
Brunner, having the effect of bringing two communities together who might not have
met otherwise.
In November 2016, students from The Brunner were invited to TU Dublin
to work with Naomi Sex to get experience with traditional printing techniques whose
method has carried on to this day in the production of microelectronics. They learned
the process of etching – a process that involves inscribing wax-coated copper plates,
exposing these plates to nitric acid, removing the wax, allowing the ink settle into
the corroded scratches and then using a large hand-cranked press to print the inksoaked
topography. Having access to these tools and to this tuition opened up the
possibility of learning this precise craft and of gaining new insight into the labour of
image reproduction before our current era of internet excess.
In April 2017, Karl Burke went to visit the students at their school and
delivered a set of classes in sculpture. He introduced the students to the One Minute
Sculptures of Erwin Wurm, whose sculptural practice involves working through poses
in which either he or his models engage with objects in odd and unexpected ways,
producing encounters with these objects that are otherworldly. Burke challenged his
students to come up with their own One Minute Sculptures, reimagining their relationships
with objects and with each other. In another class Burke asked them to redefine
their classroom by marking out spaces using the furniture at hand and the mark-making
capacity of electrical tape. The students built and marked out fort-like structures
and futuristic bridges and took part in group critiques where they learned the skills
of presenting and giving constructive feedback. Each guided the others through their
processes, the turns the structures took and the difficulties encountered – one student
remarked that it was difficult to know when to stop.
Usually a masterplan invokes the idea of a centralised and aloof genius,
predicting events and interactions like a rational oracle with spreadsheets, maps and

THE MASTERPLAN 140–141
She writes scripts and works
with actors and minimal
scenographic elements to
produce understated theatrical
gallery-based events. In
2016, she produced a touring
performance entitled Cheek By
Jowl which was awarded The Arts
Council Visual Arts Touring
and Dissemination Award and
The Fingal County Council
Artist’s Work Scheme. Other
works include the curatorial
project ‘6iX Degrees’(2014)
at IMMA and the performative
event ‘The Synchronised Letter
Series’(2013) which featured
in nine key Irish educational
institutions simultaneously.
diagrams – however, this project wasn’t top-down in its approach, more like sideways
and stir crazy. Established art practices were brought into contact with both
children and irreverent teenagers – the classroom was extruded into uncertain and
new terrain. Students from both The Brunner and Dublin 7 Educate Together found
themselves thinking through processes that were both odd and quite specialised
that the usual curriculum might not have opened up. This gives the students another
set of lenses for viewing the world around them. Ambiguity is not often lingered on
in problem-solving school time but it might be the most useful zone for orientation
during times of uncertainty and flux, times when looking at things obliquely becomes
necessary to gain new footing.
Jennie Guy and Fiona Gannon
Karl Burke is an artist,
musician and lecturer in Fine
Art at TU Dublin. Interested
in exploring the poetics of
space, Burke creates schematic
architectural environments that
probe issues such as proportion,
transparency and delineation
using simple material such as
wood and box steel. Burke’s
sculptures, spare and elegant,
often incorporate a single
module that is presented in
different aspects. There is an
experimental, even, playful
attitude in the work. His
pieces partner the space in
which they are shown to unlock
a choreography of possibilities
about interior space, both
actual and metaphorical, and
how it’s is constructed and
encountered.
Fiona Gannon is an artist,
writer and researcher living
in Dublin. She graduated with
a BA in Visual Arts Practice
from the Institute of Art,
Design and Technology in 2013.
She worked as a Research and
Communications intern at Studio
Olafur Eliasson until autumn
2014 and completed her MA in
Art and Research Collaboration
from the Institute of Art,
Design and Technology in
2016. Since graduating, she
has written for publications
such as Paper Visual Art, Art
Monthly and Critical Bastards,
and has been focused on
research around posthumanism
and infrastructure. Recent work
includes Into the Dark with
the Light On (2017) published
by arc public press, and I
Sí (2018), performed in the
Phoenix Park with collaborator
Liliane Puthod.
Links
www.jennieguy.com
www.artschool.ie
Discussions of Erwin Wurm’s sculpture series with students led to students making their own variations of the work.
A One Minute Sculpture performed by one of the transition year students of The Brunner. Poured for one minute,
the volumetric relationship between two kettles is made apparent and almost solid in vivid blue.
1 Guy, J. (2016). How People Come Up With Ideas, Transactions #2 Field and Academy: Knowledge and Counterknowledge
in Socially Engaged Art, 19–20.The piece examined practice and potential in the field of contemporary
art, drawing different perspectives from artists, academics, educators and other arts professionals. Available
online at transactionspublication.com.
2 King Moylan, T. (1945). The District of Grangegorman (Part III). Dublin Historical Record, 7(3), 103.
3 Brian Fay is an artist and Senior Lecturer in Fine Art at Technical University Dublin.
4 It’s Very New School’ is an exhibition that took place in 2017 at Rua Red Arts Centre, Co. Dublin. The exhibition
was curated by Jennie Guy, and featured work from artists John Beattie, Sarah Browne, Ella de Búrca, Priscila
Fernandes, Mark O’Kelly, Maria McKinney and Sarah Pierce. The majority of these works drew from Art School
workshops and residencies that these artists had been involved in.

Installation on Constitution Hill, October 2018, House Visit 1

142–143
House Visit 4
Home On
The Grange
Emmett Scanlon
Aisling McCoy
Paul Guinan

We visited many homes in the Grangegorman Neighbourhood for this
project. It is a socially diverse part of the city, with a range of building types, home to
a variety of people. As a trio – an architect, a photographer and a graphic designer
– we worked in collaboration with the inhabitant-participants we encountered. We
made work for and with them, gathering their stories as we went, taking photographs,
printing papers, singing songs about home.
Our aim was to probe our common understanding of architecture. Architects
are, of course, the creative professionals typically charged with making the
building designs in our built environment. Architects design schools, hospitals, theatres,
even housing. But while architects are experts in some aspects of architecture
they do not exclusively own architecture – architecture belongs to all. Someone else
may have designed the building you live in and the rooms you use, but once inside,
your architecture work begins. In fact, the main products of architects – the buildings
and rooms within them – remain inert and static unless people occupy and use
them. So, no matter how brilliant the original design, no matter how many awards that
building won, or how long ago the rooms were built, houses need people. Home on the
Grange wished to acknowledge and reveal the creative work done by people in their
homes and to return such work the discourse of public art and architecture.
Home and the desire for one, is something we have in common. How
we make a home does seem to vary though depending on our age, gender, ethnicity,
ideology, and economic capacity. This means our homes are as individual as we are.
If an identical row of houses looks the same, you can be sure, once inside, things are
radically different. While each interior we visited had consistencies, as we lingered, we
started to see physical and spatial evidence of lives-lived and personalities formed
through space, over time and across generations. Homes and how people assemble
and create them within the physical built shell they occupy never fail to surprise; they
are each exotic and eccentric, personal and particular.
As we sat down, swirling around all of us, inside and out, was a national
discussion on housing and homelessness. Often, such discourse is binary. Positions
are taken – you must be for or against public housing; you are on the left or right;
want tall buildings or not and so on. This tendency toward the binary breeds assumptions
about people and their homes, but these were undermined by our time spent in
Grangegorman.
The first to be undermined was the notion that one could say that certain
communities of people are fixed and stable; that it is possible to point and say, yes,
that is both who and what they are depending on what form of housing they occupy.
People who live in leafy suburbs are more or less the same; people who live in public
housing in the city centre are together for a reason, and so on. This position simply
builds prejudice and feeds the production of housing. Once a community is labelled, a
lifestyle which can be marketed and commodified through built form is not far behind.
The second notion that was clearly untrue is that people today are now
so very individual that, really, they do not have much in common at all. Within a pair
of homes divided by just a 250 mm thick wall very different lives are being lived. Many
neighbours are only that in principle but not in practice. People live beside each other
but never meet or talk, nor do they wish to. Individuals seem concerned only with
themselves. Community, like it was in the good old days, is gone.
If you sit down and talk to people, they rarely talk about their own home
in binary, absolute terms. As we met people, each tended to talk about how their
home is the place from which they both step in to and out of the world. This seemed
consistent, regardless of how individuals have secured their house or apartment or
how they believe houses or apartments should be provided for others.
When you talk to people about their home, what you find is that the
individual experience of home is certainly framed by the physical and material form
around it – be it an apartment, a house, a shed or just one room – but a home’s existence
is sustained by the people within it and who move through it.

HOME ON THE GRANGE 144–145
Context
Home on the Grange is a
community-based public art
project exploring aspects of
homes and how people live in
the Grangegorman neighbourhood.
Specifically the project
acknowledges homemaking as
a creative act and Home on
the Grange aims to harness
this latent creativity of
local inhabitant-participants
to explore individual and
collective domestic identities
in Grangegorman.
Home on the Grange, by Emmett
Scanlon, Aisling McCoy and in
collaboration with Paul Guinan,
explores aspects of the entire
Grangegorman neighbourhood by
focusing on something we have
in common – the need for a
place to make home. The artists
and inhabitant-participants
developed the work in tandem
using visual, textual and
graphical means.
This was a process-led public
art project which evolved
and developed over time and
in collaboration with the
artists and participants.
During the course of the house
visits, two publications were
produced containing drawings,
photographs and stories.
The aim was to return this
work to the inhabitants of
Grangegorman as the work
proceeded. A concert was held,
Songs About Home. Aisling McCoy
photographed all homes visited,
generating a substantial
record of lives lived in the
area. This work was put on
public display in five site
specific installations across
Grangegorman in October 2018 to
conclude the project.
Biographies
Emmett Scanlon is an architect.
His work is concerned with the
relationship between people
and buildings and the role
and purpose and impact of
architecture on our everyday
lives. His practice ranges
across building and spatial
design, public art, exhibition
making and curation, research,
teaching and writing. In
2018 he was Assistant to the
Curators, Shelley McNamara and
Yvonne Farrell, for FREESPACE,
the 16 th International
Architecture Exhibition,
Venice. He is Assistant
Professor at UCD School of
Architecture.
The life of a home is nourished by the physical objects of family and
memory that act as a kind of supporting cast in our everyday domestic dramas; a
home is enriched by the difference found in the relationships we make in the outside
world; a home is the place, from which, amid noise, and confusion and mess, emerges
our confidence to go forth, to set out, to head back.
When you ask someone ‘why do you want a home?’ or ‘what does a home
mean to you?’, people tend to focus less on the object of the house itself but on the
opportunity having a home provides for them or for their family. But we rarely give
air time to a discussion about opportunity. We fail to remember that an opportunity
to participate is fundamental to the assembly and the social sustainability of our
communities.
During Home on the Grange we saw this opportunity in action. We saw
people imagine home as a place to build from scratch, from the ground up. A home,
through the action of its’ making and its physical and material reality became a transient
trace for a temporary collective. It was also a tangible, permanent record of
a collective political philosophy in the form of a squat. Others saw their home in
the adjacent, forgotten spaces that they found and appropriated beside their homehome,
turning a disused pram-shed into a place of industry and local gathering. Such
acts afford a young man the chance to step out and step up, into the centre of his
family and community and, in a sense, out into that city that someday awaits all young
men beyond the doorstep. Others found a brand new home in this welcoming city.
In conversation they recalled, in a tone of voice so giddy with excitement, that their
house, their home, is now close to parks where it is possible for them to walk freely
in the company of dogs.
House Visit 3

He is Architectural Advisor to
the Arts Council and is both
an advocate for opportunities
and supports for architects
to develop their creative
practices and to access work
and for greater inclusion of
all people in discussions and
processes of architecture
design, production and use.
Emmett is currently completing
his PhD by research, entitled,
What Do Houses Do All Day,
a study into the some
House Visit 5

HOME ON THE GRANGE 146–147
relationships between the Irish
and their houses, at the TU
Braunschweig, in Germany.
Aisling McCoy is an Irish
visual artist whose work looks
at how we inhabit space. Her
background as an architect
is central to her practice,
which investigates the
conflict between architecture
as an intellectual concept,
created through images, and
its translation into built
form. She’s particularly
interested in the ideological
aspect of inhabitation and the
role of both architecture and
photography in constructing
the ideal. A graduate of the
MFA Photography programme
at the Belfast School of
Art, Aisling’s work has been
exhibited internationally.
She is the recipient of the
Arts Council of Ireland Next
Generation Award, TBG+S
Project Studio Award, Belfast
Exposed Futures and Institut
Français Cité Internationale
des Arts Residency Award. She
has been a selected artist at
PhotoIreland New Irish Works
and Circulations Festival de
la Jeune Photographie, has
been shortlisted for the
Kassel Photobook Festival Dummy
Award and nominated for the
Prix Pictet.
Paul Guinan is an Irish
graphic designer. He
works with a network of
clients and collaborators
on typographically-led
communication, identity,
exhibition and interface design
projects. He was a co-founder
of SET Collective (2013–2015),
a group exploring the role
of architecture in cinema
through self-publishing and
screening events. SET was part
of the travelling Archizines
exhibition, now housed in the
National Art Library at the
Victoria & Albert Museum.
Since 2015 he has worked with
FRANC, an independent journal
mixing fashion editorial with
literary content. FRANC has
been awarded entry to the 100
Archive, an annual initiative
recognising the best of Irish
communication design. He is the
owner-operator of Sunday Books,
an online shop specialising in
publications related to visual
culture and critical theory.
One week, a few days apart, two homemakers, who on a television talk
show would be seated left and right, such is our desire to put people in their houseboxes,
invited me outside to look at their world as viewed from their terraces. Both
talked about how they understood their home is only a small part of a wider builtplace,
a built-place they feel a need to protect and sustain for themselves, for others
and for strangers. Their home is a dynamic, moving thing, not an object to be pinned
down or possessed but something that is, among their best allies in their everyday
negotiations with the world and the people inside and outside your walls. Homes not
so much territorially on, but generously for, the Grange.
Emmett Scanlon
House Visit 2
Links
www.emmettscanlon.ie
www.aislingmccoy.com
www.paulguinan.com

Aughrim – Barley, tea, seed, whiskey. Image: Clare Anne O’Keefe

148–149
Grown
Home
Clare Anne O’Keefe
Hilary Murray

Grown Home is a digital cabinet of curiosity that captures
the culinary folklore of Dublin 7 by documenting
food habits, ways and rituals. Grangegorman/Stoneybatter
is a vibrant and diverse area, deeply connected
to its food-producing and market histories, it is also
quickly evolving to embrace new culinary cultures. In
Grown Home this urban village is viewed through a
culinary lens and contextualised by prescient cultural,
architectural, historical, and geographical pathways.
Grown Home takes the prosaic act of ingestion out of the cafes, kitchens
and streets of Dublin 7 and places it within the Art context asking how ‘…the lives we
live’ are influenced by what we ingest. As food memories are recalled, recipes shared
and fare tasted the similarities of consumption are emphasised and the differences
of varied food systems celebrated.
Grown Home employs a cyclical methodology of SEED BANK CULTIVATE.
SEED by gathering the Dublin 7 residents response to Grown Home participatory and
interactive food instillations, BANK by sifting and sorting the visual, verbal and gustatory
data, preserving it in an accessible digital repository and CULTIVATE by creating
synergistic food-art responses to the community testimony. These photographs of
food are rarely just about food: they hold up a mirror to intimate lives. Photographing
food is ubiquitous in today’s society but placing this familiar practice in an Art framework
raises deep-seated questions around ideas of family, tradition, class, gender,
race, health, pleasure, and disgust.
Grown Home embraces the interplay of food and the digital format using
social media and food art interactions to engage the Stoneybatter/Grangegorman
community while also disseminating this data to the larger digital community. Curating
the culinary responses and documenting the interactions within an online platform
connects the ephemeral nature of ingestion and social media with the enduring substance
of culinary folklore and digital footprints.
Grown Home has invited the Dublin 7 community to engage and direct
this culinary investigation by creating participatory and interactive installations during
Stoneybatter Pride of Place events large and small. The residents and visitors to
Dublin 7 have tasted, shared, remembered, journaled, considered and imagined while
tasting, mixing, cooking and talking with us. This community of eaters has shaped the
artwork and continue to direct Grown Home. Thank you to all these culinary artists.

GROWN HOME 150–151
Make a Salad
#stoneybatterfestival #GROWNHOME
#FLUXUS #Alison Knowles #foodart #digitalart
#grangegorman #communityart #cityvillage
#prideofplace #globalirish #tudublin
#instructionbasedart #digitalresilience
#theliveswelive #grangegormanpublicart
#revealinggrangegorman #creativeireland
#irishpublicart
EAFP Granola
Honey drenched oats mixed with insectpollinated
fruits and flowers directly inspired by
Equality for all Pollinators
#stoneybatterfestival #GHkitchen #granola
#equalityforallpollinators #doubleexposure
#GROWNHOME #foodart #digitalart
#stoneybatter #grangegorman #communityart
#cityvillage
Green tea, Dublin 7 Honey, Oat Milk,
Pumpkin Praline, Cocoa Paste
#GHstock #icepop #oxmantown
#culturenight2018 #GROWNHOME
#foodart #digitalart #stoneybatter
#grangegorman #communityart #cityvillage
#prideofplace #globalirish #tudublin
#instructionbasedart #digitalresilience
#theliveswelive #grangegormanpublicart
#revealinggrangegorman #creativeireland
#irishpublicart
Maple Leaf Fritters
#leafybatter #GROWNHOME #TURF
#digitalart #stoneybatter #grangegorman
#foodart #imovie #foragedfood #freefood
#japeneseirish #globalirish #tudublin
#mapleleaves
Gaze
#GHGaze #press #oxmantown
#backofthecupboard #GROWNHOME #foodart
#digitalart #stoneybatter #grangegorman
#communityart #cityvillage #prideofplace
#globalirish #tudublin #instructionbasedart
#stayconnected #isolationart #digitalresilience
#theliveswelive #grangegormanpublicart
#revealinggrangegorman #creativeireland
#irishpublicart

Context
From 2017–2020 Grown Home
participated in a wide number
of local events in the
Grangegorman neighbouhood.
These include; the Stoneybatter
Pride of Place Committee/
Stoneybatter Festival;
Grown Home kitchen on the
25 June 2017 as part of the
Stoneybatter Festival, Manor
Street; Grown Home stock on
19 September 2018 as part
of Culture Night in Rathdown
House, Grangegorman Campus,TU
Dublin; Grown Home yard on
23 June 2019 in the GIY
area, Manor Street and Grown
Home salon on 20 Sep 2019 on
Grangegorman Campus, TU Dublin.
Associated professionals –
Seaneen Sullivan, Bord Fáilte
Food Ambassador and Brian
Clarke – Digital Photographer.
All images courtesy of Clare
Anne O’Keefe.
These leaves are a little different
in Japan but it makes me comforted to see
them here on the campus. They are salt
preserved first where I am from Minoh,
Osaka but I can make them without salting.
Rin, 31

GROWN HOME 152–153
Biographies
Clare Anne O’Keefe is a
food designer and member
of the Irish Food Writers
Guild. She is the creator of
collaborative food and drinks
events set within an Arts
context including a series
of interactive dinners for
Dublin’s Science Gallery. Other
collaborations include PROBE,
(TCD), where she developed
a cooking demo of insect
pollinated dishes with Dr. Jane
Stout, Art Meat Flesh at the
Smock Alley Theatre with Oran
Catts and Centre for Genomic
Gastronomy, The Subnatural and
Monto with Bridget O’Gorman and
Climate Change Curated Dinner
with Dr. Shaun O’Boyle. Clare
Anne was a co-curator of the
Lunchbox series of workshops
and performances at ArtBox
Gallery. She has spoken at
universities, food festivals
and symposiums and has
appeared on both RTÉ radio and
television. She is currently
working on a project involving
culinary memory and the Irish
Diaspora.
Dr. Hilary Murray works
in liminal research and
communications, has a PhD in
Neuroscience and an MA in
Contemporary Art Practice.
After spending time in Palo
Alto’s Cantor Arts Centre,
she worked in the Collections
department at The Irish
Museum of Modern Art before
becoming the RUA RED Curator in
Residence. Dr. Murray directed
and curated ArtBox Gallery in
Dublin’s North in City (MONTO).
The gallery’s focus is new
media and explorative researchbased
work as well as academic
interaction shows including The
Anti-Room, DEMOCRACY (a series
of performance events), and
Fiona Marron, PROVING GROUND in
association with the UCD Art in
Science Residency and off-site
projects include Intelligent
Machinery at Farmleigh, Dublin
and Attitude Precedes Form with
Black Church Print Studio at
the Library Project. ArtBox is
now in a digital iteration. Dr.
Murray is based at The Insight
Centre, Dublin.
Links
Grown Home is a live and
evolving net-art work,
collaborating with Dublin 7
residents, documented by an
Instagram stream. Please engage
@gdagrownhome.
I try to be healthy but convenience
is key for me. My girlfriend loves green tea
and I like a beer. My neighbour Lukas got me
into the hot sauce, he is Lithuanian but mad
into Thai. I don't even remember buying
the custard powder.
Iain, Oxmantown Road

154–155
NatureRx
Kaethe
Burt-O’Dea,
Bí Urban
Bumble Bee Monitoring in Lifeline Territory – Recording species in an abandoned field on the
Royal Canal at Broombridge which is home to a diverse range of pollinating insects.Photo: Kaethe Burt-O’Dea

A Green Prescription for North Central Dublin
The Lifeline is a community-led project based in North
Central Dublin (NCD), advocating the importance of
nature to our health and wellbeing. The final goal is
to establish a territory dedicated to environmental
regeneration that will connect the Botanic Gardens
with the Liffey, creating a ribbon of biodiversity and fertile
ground for social innovation, green enterprise and
nature-based solutions.
Background
In 2007, the Grangegorman Development Agency (GDA) held a series of
public consultations to inform the Masterplan for the new TU Dublin & HSE campus
on the derelict St. Brendan’s Hospital site. The hospital was originally designed as an
asylum for the vulnerable, set in a carefully considered landscape, promoting nature
as therapy. This history became more complex as care models for the mentally ill
evolved and the use of psychiatry and chemical based treatments took precedence.
The potential of this fascinating wild landscape, abundant with biodiversity, sparked
the imagination of Stoneybatter resident Kaethe Burt-O’Dea.
Kaethe used the consultations to document needs expressed by the
community for pocket parks, sensory gardens, local food production, a car free campus
with areas devoted to outdoor exercise and opportunities for life-long learning.
An opportunity to combine both public and private needs in the development of a sustainable
exemplar emerged. Unfortunately, the demands of the building programme
made it impossible to accommodate this grand vision within the confines of the site.
The Lifeline
It was the critical need to provide public transportation to the campus
that led us to rediscover the disused Great Midwestern Railway (GMWR). This wasteland
opened up exciting potential to the community. We could develop the public
amenity we dreamed of, one that would combine green infrastructure with an intermodal
transportation and a living laboratory where TU Dublin could study the benefits
of nature in the city, a Lifeline for NCD.
During 50 years of rewilding, the cutting had spontaneously developed
an extraordinary array of environmental services for the city. It had slowly evolved into
an ecological corridor hosting species rarely found in urban environments, filtering air,
composting waste, diverting run-off and purifying water.
The Lifeline will preserve and build on what
nature had developed.

NATURERX 156–157
In 2009, Kaethe presented the Lifeline to TU Dublin Sustainable Development
students which launched a programme of multidisciplinary research under the
Students Learning with Communities Programme (SLWC), led by Dr. Catherine Bates.
A two-year study of the natural assets was conducted along the GMWR cutting with
Ecologist Mary Tubridy to argue for the preservation of this stretch of rare urban biodiversity.
50 Architecture Students produced plans to incorporate the community’s
vision into the territory. The Lifeline was presented at several international conferences.
‘Introducing the Lifeline (Dublin, 2010), a public seminar held in collaboration
with TU Dublin, the GDA, the Environmental Protection Agency, Dublin City Council
and Transport for Ireland (TFI), attracted over 100 participants.
In 2013, the GMWR cutting was transferred to TFI for the Luas Cross City
to provide essential public transportation. Having conducted an in-depth analysis of
this unique inner-city landscape, we were acutely aware of what had been lost to the
NCD community.
Building the Community
Despite this set back, our commitment to establish a partnership with
nature in the city remained strong. In the same year the Lifeline won a Guinness Projects
Award, providing business training and funding to set up a limited company. We
also began beekeeping and became intrigued by their organisational strategies and
consensus decision making. We wondered if these processes could be used to guide
public participation in urban design and planning.
In 2015, we hosted an International Action Science Workshop at TU
Dublin to develop a new direction for the project. The two-day workshop partnered
beekeepers with artists, academics, professionals, social workers, and NCD residents
to examine the question: ‘Are Bees leading us toward responsible urban design and
health in our cities?’
Three important outcomes emerged from this workshop:
- A new site for the Lifeline – The former Royal Canal route from Broombridge
into Broadstone though Blessington Basin.
- Bí URBAN – A nature-based social enterprise and hub dedicated to
community led development of the Lifeline in Stoneybatter, NCD. The
studio accommodates a shop, workshop & exhibition space, resource
library, and product development lab. Since its opening in 2016 Bí
URBAN has become a fertile ground for social innovation, green
enterprise and nature-based solutions.
- NatureRX – With the support of GDA ‘…the lives we live’ Grangegorman
Public Art, we developed a programme which engages the public
in the Lifeline. NatureRX workshops invite the NCD community to use
creative processes to explore, map and document their personal connection
with nature in the city.
2020 Vision
One positive outcome of COVID-19 has been the reawakening of our relationship
with the natural world and its importance to community health and wellbeing.
The pandemic has asked us to revisit the utopian model of nature as cure which
originally shaped the St. Brendan’s Hospital site. The initial two kilometre movement
restrictions were comparable to the foraging radius of a honeybee from its colony.
Similar to the bees, urban residents developed expert knowledge of their local green
spaces and the sanctuary they offer.
We are all citizen scientists in a global action research project. Health is
the subject, the community our lab and human behaviour the instrument. Our relationship
with nature is intrinsic to the solution.

Bí Urban Bee Stewardship Workshop Series – Natural Beekeeping
with Tanguy de Toulgëot of Dunmore Country School. Photo: Kaethe Burt-O’Dea
Understanding and nurturing biodiversity
is as essential to the physical and mental health
of inner-city residents as it is to the future of
our pollinators.
Work-life balance and its impact on climate is a key element in the study.
How we learn, socialise, travel, shop, care for each other, everything we do is under
scrutiny including the function and meaning of employment itself. Connecting nature,
people and place is being prioritised by local authorities who are making rapid infrastructural
changes to facilitate walking and cycling, demonstrating that change is
possible, and at a faster pace than we previously believed. The outdoors has become
our classroom.
The Lifeline is a think tank where individuals and groups explore these
issues and trial solutions through local action. Bí Urban is its hub, run by a collective of
volunteers and collaborators. Skills are shared and all contributors have value, whatever
their background or discipline. Everyone has an essential role to play in how we
want to live in cities going forward.

NATURERX
158–159
Biography
Nestled in the heart of
Stoneybatter, Bí URBAN is a
unique creative studio, founded
by artist environmentalist and
healthcare design consultant
Kaethe Burt-O’Dea. Kaethe has
won numerous awards including a
TU Dublin Community Fellowship
and an RIBA Award.
TU Dublin is Ireland’s centre of excellence for community based learning.
The Grangegorman Project is linking education with healthcare on a single site, creating
the perfect environment for restructuring urban design and planning strategies.
Now that we have established our studio, community and network, we ask you to
partner with us as we map and activate the Lifeline, a living laboratory where we can
prototype, evaluate and construct a sustainable future.
The Bí Team
More recently her work was
recognised by Diageo when
she won the Arthur Guinness
Projects Award for the
LIFELINE, a ‘living laboratory’
exploring the collaborative
regeneration of the urban
environment with community
health and public engagement
as a central tenet. In 2016
she established Bí URBAN, a
studio for social creativity,
prominently positioned on the
main street of Stoneybatter
to act as a hub for the
development of this project.
Bí URBAN represents the next
stage of an ambitious strategy
to build the LIFELINE, an
outdoor classroom devoted to
the study of nature in the
inner city that will connect
the Botanic Gardens to Phoenix
Park, creating a ribbon of
biodiversity and fertile ground
for social innovation, green
enterprise and nature-based
solutions.
Many incredible people,
businesses and organisations
have generously contributed
time, expertise and financial
support to Lifeline. It is
impossible to thank everyone
indi vidually here. We would
like to use this special
opportunity to publicly
acknowledge the Grangegorman
Development Agency as a
catalyst for our vision, TU
Dublin Stu dents Learning
With Communities Programme
for facilitating an exciting
programme of multidisciplinary
research, and North Central
Dublin for embracing our
ambition.
Links
www.biurban.ie
biurbanstudios@gmail.com
Instagram:@bi_urban_desireland
NatureRX Natural Treasure Jewellery Workshop in progress. Participants
are introduced to the folklore and medicinal properties of local plant
species and immortalise them in precious metal. Photo: Kaethe Burt-O’Dea

A full house for the one-off cabaret event in St. Laurence’s Church,
10th April 2017. Photo: Lori Keeve
Judith Mok takes centre stage for an operatic solo.
Photo: Lori Keeve

160–161
1916: A
Revolutionary
Cabaret!
Judith Mok

Over the course of last year, 2016, the Easter Rising in
Ireland in 1916 was very much on everyone’s mind. As
a poet myself, I was fascinated by the idea of a Rising
led by poets. They weren’t very good poets, but they
were poets all the same. And so, I started wondering
what the contemporaries of MacDonagh, Pearse and
Plunkett were doing on that actual day in 1916 when
the Rising started. As we know, their Irish contemporaries,
like Tom Kettle and Francis Ledwidge were wearing
khaki uniforms and fighting in the trenches in Europe.
The more I looked into it, the more I realised that this
was true of many of their contemporaries, some of the
greatest poets of the 20 th century in any language, were
wearing the uniforms of the French, Austrian, Italian,
German and Russian armies.
Context
1916: A Revolutionary Cabaret!
took place in St. Laurence’s
Chapel on 10th April 2017.
Event Management; Sara
O’Loughlin. Artwork;
Moses Rowen.
Biographies
Judith Mok is the originator
of 1916: A Revolution Cabaret!
She was born in Bergen in the
Netherlands. After graduating
at the Royal Conservatory in
the Hague, Mok won French and
Dutch State Grants to study in
Vienna under Christa Ludwig and
her mother Eugenia. In Paris
she studied French repertoire
with Pierre Bernac and Noemie
Perugia. She worked for 11
years part time in Argentina
performing at the Teatro Colón
and extensively touring the
country. Judith was awarded
a knighthood by HRH Queen
Beatrix for her work in the
arts. With a versatile group
of solo musicians she has given
recitals with Sephardic Music.
Appearances in Paris, Dublin
and Istanbul Cultural Capital
together with santour virtuoso
Javid Afsari Rad have have been
recorded by German NDR, Turkish
and Irish television. Recently
she founded an ensemble’ Los
Queridos’ with Sephardic music
at its core, with Iranian
brothers Koshravesh in Dublin
and Paris. In the context of
her Irish residence Judith Mok
But then we realised that in 1916 there was a revolution going on in
poetry, in music in the visual arts and eventually on the streets too, reaching its climax
with the Russian revolution of 1917. It seemed a good idea to us to commemorate
this, because what was happening in places like Zurich, where on the very night of the
Rising you had Hugo Ball going on stage in the Cafe Voltaire and performing sound
poems, which would form the basis of Dada, a movement which would prefigure our
present Postmodernism. All over Europe these movements were exploding into being:
Futurism, Cubism, Surrealism, Dadaism.
These European movements are our heritage. They are as much part of
our inheritance as much as what happened in the GPO on Easter Monday. Especially
in these times, Europe is not just our past, it’s also our future. So the music being performed
in Grangegorman in April 2017 was very deliberately chosen to reflect Europe.
It will be performed in German, French and Russian, and not in English, although
translations of the songs were provided in the programme. The poems were read in
English translations, for the sake of immediacy.
It is to be hoped that in TU Dublin, it will be an emphasis on our cultural
heritage, on learning the languages of Europe, of claiming our heritage. In performing
this, we aim to present a cross section of that heritage in poetry and music, in the
form that arose in the cities of Europe at that time: the Cabaret. Not just a Cabaret,
but a Revolutionary Cabaret!
Michael O’Loughlin

1916: A REVOLUTIONARY CABARET! 162–163
developed Molly says No! a one
woman show, with classical
music songs and written by
poet/screenwriter Michael
O’Loughlin based on the novel
Ulysses by James Joyce.
Dominica Williams is a mezzosoprano
from Dublin. She has
sung as a chorus member and
a minor role soloist with
RTÉ Concert Orchestra, Opera
Theatre Company, Wide Open
Opera & Northern Ireland
Opera. She has performed four
new works for mezzo-soprano,
flute, viola and harpsichord
with members of Kirkos Ensemble
in an installation evening of
contemporary music organised
by the Irish Composers’
Collective. She was invited to
take part in a masterclass with
world-renowned baritone Simon
Keenlyside as part of the New
Music Dublin Festival in the
National Concert Hall. Dominica
is a Northern Ireland Opera
Young Artist for the 2016/2017
season, and she continues her
vocal studies under Judith Mok
in Dublin.
Born in Aberdeen, Elaine Clark
studied with David Takeno
at the Guildhall School of
Music and Drama in London,
where she won several awards
and prizes. She continued her
studies with Viktor Liberman
at the Utrecht Conservatory in
the Netherlands. Since 1996,
when she was appointed Co-
Leader of the National Symphony
Orchestra of Ireland, Elaine
has considered Dublin her home.
Elaine is very much in demand
as a chamber musician, being a
member of the Ficino Ensemble
and Clarion Horn Trio. She has
also travelled extensively with
the contemporary music ensemble
Concorde and performed numerous
world premieres.
Born in Helsinki in 1992. Selftaught
in most subjects, Maire
Saaritsa relocated to Ireland
in 2015 to study the theatre of
the clown, movement and mime.
She has since met with many
people with whom she is now
beginning to collaborate with
much mirth and gusto – on her
part, in any case.
Selected notes from the programme
The Twilight Of Freedom – Osip Mandelstam (1891–
1938). Before the war Mandelstam and other poets
like Anna Ahmatova and Marina Tsetaeva used to meet
and recite their poems in the Stray Dog cafe in
St. Petersburg. Like many Russian poets, he gave
the Revolution a cautious welcome, while having the
deep forebodings expressed in this poem. Mandelstam
eventually died in a prison camp in Siberia in 1938.
Youkali – Kurt Weill (1900–1950). By 1916 the
tango had arrived in Paris from the brothels of
Buenos Aires. Years later the German composer Kurt
Weill was exiled to Paris by the Nazi regime and
wrote this tango, full of longing for an imaginary
paradise.
Ludions, La Diva de l’Empire, Je Te Veux – These
songs were composed by the eccentric composer Erik
Satie (1866–1925) whose works are seen as precursors
to Surrealism and Minimalism. The texts are by the
absurdist poet Leon-Paul Fargue.
Karawane – Hugo Ball (1886–1927) was a German poet,
who co-founded the Cabaret Voltaire in 1916 in
Zurich, and was one of the leading figures in the
art movement Dada. Karawane, he said, is a nonsense
poem whose meaninglessness is its meaning.
The Jealousy Duet from The Threepenny Opera Kurt
Weill/Bertolt Brecht. Brecht and Weill’s adaptation of
John Gay’s 18 th century ballad opera, was set in the
Germany still recovering.
Grodek – Georg Trakl (1887–1914) was one of the
major German poets of the twentieth century. He
served on the Galician front as a medical orderly,
and committed suicide in 1914.
Les Chemins de l’Amour, a popular song in the French
tradition by Francis Poulenc (1899–1963).
El Choclo – A.G. Villoldo, a popular tango in Paris
during the war years.
El Paño Moruno / Jota – Manuel de Falla (1976–1946)
spent the years before the war in Paris, where he
was influenced by Stravinsky, but after returning
to Madrid in 1914, he would rediscover Spanish folk
music, as in these two songs.
Kate Ellis is a cellist and
Artistic Director of Crash
Ensemble, Ireland’s leading
new music group, and a member
of Francesco Turrisi's Taquin
experiments, Yurodny, Ergodos
Musicians and the electrofolk
group Fovea Hex. Kate
has toured and broadcast in

Australia, the USA, Europe
and China, performing at
Carnegie Hall, the Kennedy
Centre, Shanghai EXPO, Istanbul
Akbank Jazz Festival, Canberra
International Music Festival,
Bang on a Can Marathon (NYC)
and the Edinburgh International
Festival. Kate has collaborated
with, commissioned and recorded
works by composers including
Steve Reich, David Lang, Nico
Muhly and Donnacha Dennehy and
has performed with a diverse
range of musicians including
Bobby McFerrin, Iarla O
Lionaird, Martin Hayes, Gavin
Friday and Karan Casey.
Nick Roth is a saxophonist,
composer, producer and
educator. Engaging in
conversation with mathematical
biologists, astrophysicists,
ecologists and hydrologists,
whilst simultaneously subsumed
by an insatiable appetite for
literature, his compositions
interrogate the inherence of
meaning in formal structure
and the symbiotic resonance of
words as sound and text. Roth
is artistic director of the
Yurodny Ensemble, a founding
member of the Water Project,
and a partner at Diatribe
Records, Ireland’s leading
independent record label
for new music. His work is
represented by the Contemporary
Music Centre (CMC) and the
Association of Irish Composers
(AIC).
There Is… – Guillaume Apollinaire (1880–1918) is
considered one of the major poets of the first part
of the century and influenced Dada and Surrealism.
An artillery officer in the First World War, he died
in 1918, a victim of the Spanish flu pandemic which
killed more than 30 million people that year.
From a Soldier’s Tale – Igor Stravinsky (1882–
1971) was a Russian-born composer who was living in
Switzerland during the First World War, and his work
was often based on Russian folk themes. ‘A Soldier’s
Tale’ is based on an old Russian tale and Tilim Bom
and Counting Song are children’s songs.
Night. Street. Streetlight. Pharmacy – Alexander Blok
(1880–1921) was the leading Russian symbolist poet.
From Jewish Folk Poetry (Op.79) – During WWI there
was a huge revival of interest in Yiddish culture
in Poland and Russia, typified by the work of the
ethnographer and later Soviet deputy S. Anski.
Dmitri Shostakovich (1906–1970) was a child in 1916,
but denounced by Stalin’s arts minister Zhdanov in
the late 1940s, he turned to these Jewish folk songs
for inspiration.
Accordionist Dermot Dunne
completed his studies at the
Conservatory in Kiev, Ukraine.
He returned to Ireland where
he pursues an active career as
both a performer and a teacher
at the TU Dublin Conservatoire
of Music and Drama. He has
often performed as a guest
soloist with the Irish Chamber
Orchestra and in 2010 toured
with them extensively in
Ireland, China and Singapore.
He has premiered works written
by leading Irish composers
such as Deirdre Gribbin, Ian
Wilson and Jane O'Leary. He has
performed with Crash Ensemble
at the Edinburgh Festival, the
Royal Opera House Covent Garden
London, Carnegie Hall, New
York and the Kennedy Centre in
Washington DC. In recent years
he has performed frequently
with Katherine Hunka on violin
and Malachy Robinson on Double
bass in a group called The
Far Flung Trio which has been
hugely successful at venues
throughout Ireland.

1916: A REVOLUTIONARY CABARET! 164–165
The songs were performed in German, French and Russian to accompaniment on cello,
viola, saxophone and accordion. Photo: Lori Keeve
Alexander Blok’s Night. Street. Streetlight. Pharmacy
performed by Maire Saaritsa. Photo: Lori Keeve

Courageous Women, a film that reimagines moments from the lives of influential women figures in Irish history
around the Vote for Women. On location in the former Richmond Penitentiary in Grangegorman, 2019. Photo: Smashing Times

166–167
City of Dublin
Winter Solstice
Festival
A Creative
Celebration of
the Centenary
Vote for Women
Breaking Down
the Walls
Smashing
Times

City of Dublin Winter
Solstice Festival
Context
The Winter Solstice Festival
first arrived in Grangegorman
in 2016 by Smashing Times and
Slí An Chroí through ‘…the lives
we live’ Grangegorman Public
Art programme. Since then,
it’s become an annual event on
the campus through an ongoing
partnership with TU Dublin.
Biography
The Smashing Times International
Centre for the Arts and
Equality, incorporating Smashing
Times Theatre and Film Company
and Smashing Times Youth Arts
Ensemble, is dedicated to the
promotion, study and practice
of the arts and equality. The
Centre operates as a world class
arts space and digital hub for
artists, activists, communities
and the general public across
Ireland and internationally.
It provides a resource service
and a training and networking
agency in relation to using
high quality creative processes
and collaborative arts practice
to promote human rights and
equality for all. The Centre
produces an annual and multiannual
interdisciplinary arts
programme with a focus on
economic development, tourism,
community infrastructure and
education. All artistic mediums
are supported with a focus on
the performing and collaborative
arts including theatre, film,
visual arts, dance and music.
Professionals associated for
these respective projects
include Mary Moynihan, writer,
theatre and film maker and
curator of the digital art
exhibition; Niamh Clowry,
associate curator and
researcher; EM Creative, Digital
Artist and Graphic Designer;
Freda Manweiler, Producer, Mark
Quin, Film Director and Editor,
High Wire Ltd, Roisin McAtamney,
Actor, Facilitator; Megan
O’Malley, actor; Ann Sheehy,
actor; Tamar Keane, Facilitator;
The Winter Solstice Festival has been held on the TU
Dublin Grangegorman Campus since 2016. The festival
marks 21 December, the shortest day of the year,
which is celebrated worldwide across a range of cultures.
This family festival is a colourful gathering of
local communities with national and international visitors
celebrating the Winter Solstice, bringing together
céilí dancing, traditional storytelling, poetry and craft
making with the processional parade culminating in a
powerful and coming collective fire ceremony in Dublin’s
Smithfield Square.
The celebration is an inclusive gathering of people of all ethnicities and
cultures through costuming, drumming, parading, flag carrying and being a participant
in the Winter Solstice Fire Ceremony. Mary Moynihan adapted a script to fit a
‘carnival-like’ atmosphere of dance, storytelling, song and music, which was directed
by her and Dr. Eric Weitz. Performers and entertainers included Carla Ryan, actor
and singer; Geraldine McAlinden, actor; Peter Kelly, musician; Hilary Bow, performer;
Vijaya Bateson, stilt walker; Joe McKinney, Shamanic Drummer; the Brian Ború Céilí
Band; Michael McCabe, artist and facilitator; and performers from TU Dublin Conservatoire
of Music and Drama. A craft workshop for young people was facilitated by Kim
Jenkinson, visual artist. Actors and musicians mingle with the audience which is made
up of families and grandparents with children ranging from babies to teens. The arc
of the characters, from being very isolated, hopeless and suspicious at the beginning,
to becoming hopeful and aware of the need for connection to each other, to our wider
communities, histories and nature.
Since 2016 pubic engagement at the Dublin Winter Solstice Festival has
been 1,600 with 30,000 reached via social media, totalling 121,600 in the past four
years. In 2019 Smashing Times presented the City of Dublin Winter Solstice Celebration
Festival as part of a European-wide transnational project ‘Legends of the Great
Birth’. Smashing Times is one of seven partners involved in this initiative which is
supported by Creative Europe and implemented in the framework of the European
year of Cultural Heritage 2018. This Creative Europe transnational project explores,
through the use of performance, a common European mythological heritage, specifically
in relation to the Myth of Creation, a myth present in a range of mythologies.
The seven project partners are Aeroplio Theatre, Greece, Smashing Times, Ireland,
Action Synergy, Greece, Fusion of Arts, Romania, AIDA Fondazione, Italy, Stella Polaris,
Norway and Stowarzyszenie Teatr Krzyk, Poland.

SMASHING TIMES: WINTER SOLSTICE FESTIVAL 168–169
The traditional lighting of the fire to welcome the solstice and the return of the
light on the shortest day of the year. Photo: Lori Keeve
Dr. Eric Weitz, Emeritus
Assistant Professor, School of
Creative Arts, Trinity College
Dublin. The historian advising
on the project was Sinead
McCoole.
Links
www.smashingtimes.ie
http://smashingtimes.ie/
theatreandfilmcompany/cityof-dublin-winter-solsticecelebration-festival
The traditional lighting of the fire to welcome the solstice
and the return of the light on the shortest day of the year.
Photo: Lori Keeve

A Creative Celebration
of the Centenary Vote
for Women
Context
‘The Women’s Voices’ exhibition
comprised banners which
highlighted ten stories from
the past – Margaret Skinnider
(1893–1971), Helena Moloney
(1884–1967), Máire Nic
Shiubhlaigh (1883–1958), Grace
Evelyn Gifford (1888–1955),
Dr. Katheen Lynn (1874–1955),
Constance Markievicz (1886–
1927), Eva Gore Booth (1870–
1926), Hanna Sheehy Skeffington
(1877–1946), Margaret (Gretta)
Cousins and Dr. Eleanora Fleury
(1867–1960). As well as Irish
activists for women’s rights
and Quakers Anna Haslam (1929–
1922) and Thomas Haslam, the
English suffragettes Emily
Wilding Davison (1872–1913) and
Emmeline Pankhurst (1858–1928).
Specific to Grangegorman, Dr.
Fleury, who became a successful
psychiatrist, was the first
female member of the Medico
Psychological Association
(MPA), now the Royal College
of Psychiatrists. Fleury
served as assistant medical
officer in the Richmond Asylum
(later called the Grangegorman
District Mental Hospital) and
before becoming deputy resident
medical superintendent (RMS)
at the satellite asylum and
Portrane, Co. Dublin. She was
a suffragette and was active
in the fight for Irish freedom.
She was arrested during the
Irish Civil War and imprisoned
in Kilmainham where she served
as medical officer to the
Republican prisoners using
whatever sparse resources were
available to her.
Creative Drama Workshops were
held in Dublin 7 with St. Paul’s
Secondary School, Stanhope
Street Secondary School, and
Henrietta Street Adult Community
Education Service, based on the
question ‘What does the vote
mean to you?’ and ‘What can
we do today to promote women’s
rights and equality for all?.’
On 8 March 2019 students from
TU Dublin’s Conservatoire of
Music and Drama performed a
Creative Celebration of Women’s
Stories 1916–1923 at St.
Reflection – The Art of Forgetting and Remembering
As an artist, I am inspired by historical memory and
the range of narratives that can exist within history. I
find myself consistently drawn to hidden histories of
powerful women who stood up against oppression and
refused to accept the roles assigned to them in terms
of gender and sociopolitical constructs of containment
and denial. I am particularly interested in how we can
use art to enable voices from the past to speak to us
today. ‘Women’s Voices, Then and Now’ is a creative
celebration of Women’s stories in Ireland from 1916
to 1923. Smashing Times used creative processes of
theatre, film and online digital resources to celebrate
the vote for women and to reflect on the experiences
of women today in relation to gender equality, human
fights and diversity. The project identified stories of
change experienced by pioneering women who fought
for freedom and for the vote in Ireland in 1918, including
women living in the Grangegorman area of Dublin.
The aesthetic of the work is to capture a moment or essence of each
character/person as if a light has suddenly penetrated a darkened space to reveal in
the shadows a glimpse of the ordinary/extraordinary presence of a real human being.
In the same way that the dust lingers in the air, invisible one moment and then suddenly
present, as if it were diamond dust caught and now glittering in the sunlight
of a dark and empty cell. The woman’s presence fills the space. As we worked on the
film, exhibition and workshops with communities bringing to life the stories of these
women who risked their lives to campaign for a woman’s right to vote and for freedom
from oppression, we were able to reflect on our own lives and the values inherent in
our own and other’s narratives today.
The research, online exhibition and film explore stories that reside in
liminal spaces. According to French philosopher Michel Foucault (1916–1984) social
institutions often produce dominant ‘paradigms of knowledge’ which in turn play a
role in establishing hierarchical power structures and relations. These power structures
create a dominant narrative hiding multiple voices particularly of women. The
arts can be the shamanic process through which the stories speak to us today, as we
continue to ask who is still unrepresented, who is still missing, and why?
During filming, we worked in the windowless cells of the basement of the

SMASHING TIMES: CENTENARY VOTE FOR WOMEN
170–171
Laurence’s Church to celebrate
International Women’s Day. The
evening featured a performance
of Constance and her Friends
by Mary Moynihan, performed by
Megan O’Malley, directed by Dr.
Eric Weitz, and the launch of
the online exhibition ‘Women’s
Voices: Then and Now’ and the
film Courageous Women, launched
by Senator Alice Mary Higgins.
Actor Raymond Keane read Eavan
Boland’s poem ‘Our Future
will become the past of other
Women’. The evening was chaired
by Orla O’Connor, Director of
the National Women’s Council
of Ireland with contributions
by Samantha Ncube, ‘No Hate
Speech’ Youth Ambassador and
Robert Downes, Actor, Director
and Facilitator and LGBTQI
campaigner.
Courageous Women, a film by Mary
Moynihan produced by Smashing
Times and Highwire, continues
this process of remembering.
It is co-directed by Moynihan
and Mary Quinn, edited by
Mike Manweiler Quinn, with
actors Megan O’Malley, Róisín
McAtamney and Ann Sheehy.
The film reimagines moments
from the lives of Constance
Markievicz (1868–1927), an
Irish politician, revolutionary
nationalist, suffragettes and
socialist;’ Helena Moloney
(1884–1967), a member of
Inghinidhe na hÉireann and the
Irish Citizen Army who were
stationed at City Hall Garrison
during the Easter Rising
of 1916, Margaret Skinnider
(1893–1971), a revolutionary
feminist and maths teacher who
came to Dublin from Scotland
at the age of 23 to take part
in the Easter Rising and Hanna
Sheehy Skeffington (1877–1946),
a radical activist, feminist,
pacifist and human rights
campaigner and one of Ireland’s
foremost suffragettes.
Clock Tower in TU Dublin, Grangegorman. Originally opened in 1916 as the Richmond
Penitentiary, it is possible that these cells once held captive women and children, and
perhaps those who were shipped off to Australia as part of the cruel transportation
system in place for them. The cast and crew felt a strong sense of history and a presence
in the space and we regularly took time to stop to acknowledge the presence of
the past and to remember the inhuman way in which people were treated. The silence
in the space spoke volumes.
As an artist I was profoundly affected by the historical essence of the
Grangegorman campus and spaces such as the Clock Tower. To take time to remember
and reflect on a society where women and children were held in chains perhaps
for no other reason than actions carried out to escape from the grinding poverty that
existed back then, to remember the nameless men, women and children from the past
who suffered at the hands of a patriarchial, colonial authoritarian world where human
rights and equality had no value.
Walking through Grangegorman there is a liminality at play, a transition
between two worlds of the old and the new, the past and the future and the truth and
denial. A possibility for justice between what is hidden or denied and what is remembered
and respected. Grangegorman has on the one hand a sense of excitement,
possibility and hope, for a new university that will work with, respect and support
thousands of students young and old, into a new future. There is hope because now
the space is seeped in values of respect and dignity, of support and kindness, of learning
and possibility. What lingers underneath or alongside this real world of potential is
an invisible narrative of pain, sorrow and injustice, and also possibly acts of unknown
kindness in a cruel world of voiceless, hidden histories that have left their presence
in an energy that still lingers.
What I have discovered myself is that there is no escaping the past, it
lingers around us like ghosts from another world, like the mist that disappears only to
reappear when we least expect it. Our duty is to find a way to acknowledge what still
needs to be spoken or listened to or simply witnessed. I wonder who are the watchers,
the ghosts from the past watching us walk through their space as we stand here today
in a country where we have democracy and freedom? For me, theatre as an artform
is about making what is invisible visible and we have a duty of care to remember the
past and to be waiting for when the doors to the liminal world will reopen and share
their secrets with us, or perhaps we must push those doors open to bring what was
once invisible or denied, back onto the stage.
Mary Moynihan
Along with ‘…the lives we live’,
project supporters included the
Department of Culture, Heritage
and the Gaeltacht, Cllr. Janice
Boylan, Dublin 7 residents;
Fiona Maxwell, Lindsey Melia,
Aoife Moran, Siphiwe Moyo,
and Valerie Roe, Secondary
School Teacher with St. Paul’s
Secondary School, Dublin 7.
Link
www.smashingtimes.ie
http://smashingtimes.ie/
centrefortheartsandhumanrights/
smashing-times-a-creativecelebration-of-the-centenaryvote-for-women

Breaking Down
the Walls
This project was supported by
St. Patrick’s Cathedral, and
the Edmund Rice Trust.
Key personnel engaged in this
project were Mary Moynihan,
writer, theatre and film-maker;
Freda Manweiler, Producer;
Catherine McFadden, Psychiatric
Counsellor, and EM Creative.
Images are courtesty of
Smashing Times.
The Aspire Ireland organisation
envisions a world where people
with Asperger Syndrome have
the same opportunities to
work, socialise and participate
as everyone else. Asperger
Syndrome is a condition on
the Autism Spectrum. Asperger
Syndrome impacts on the way
that individuals view the
world, interact with and
communicate with others.
St. Paul’s CBS has been in
existence since 1869. It is
also known as ‘The School
Around the Corner or ‘The
Brunner’.
This digital book is an innovative, interdisciplinary
creative arts project celebrating the new Grangegorman
development and individual and community
integration. Breaking Down the Walls was initiated by
Smashing Times Theatre and Film Company in partnership
with Aspire – Asperger Syndrome Association
of Ireland, St Paul’s CBS Secondary School, HACE –
Henrietta Adult and Community Education Service, TU
Dublin Conservatoire and along with ‘…the lives we live’
Grangegorman Public Art, is supported by St. Patrick’s
Cathedral and the Edmund Rice Trust.
Breaking Down the Walls began in 2016. Using the metaphor of the formidable
stone wall that surrounds Grangegorman, Smashing Times worked with three
local groups to explore the walls that surround us that lead to significant challenges
both personally and socially. Using a creative workshop process, artists and participants
explored how to ‘break down walls that keep us from the unknown, ourselves
and each other’ – Viola Spolin, (1906–1994). Together they researched the history and
social and cultural heritage of Grangegorman and the former St. Brendan’s Psychiatric
Hospital and conducted site visits to Grangegorman to explore the physical wall and
the transformation of the space into a new urban quarter for Dublin city. As part of the
project, groups were introduced to the work of spoken word poets Kate Tempest and
Benjamin Zephaniah. Spoken word poetry is an art that focuses on the aesthetics of
word play and intonation and voice reflection. Spoken word poetry includes any kind
of poetry read aloud, including hip-hop, jazz poetry, poetry slams, traditional poetry
readings and prose monologues.
The project resulted in the design of a new theatre workshop model, and
the creation of a freely accessible Breaking Down the Walls digital handbook.
Links
The project resulted in
the design of a new theatre
workshop model, and the
creation of a freely
accessible Breaking Down
the Walls digital handbook.
http://www.smashingtimes.
ie/theatreandfilmcompany/
wp-content/uploads/2018/04/
Breaking-Down-the-Walls-
Digital-Book.pdf

SMASHING TIMES: BREAKING DOWN THE WALLS 172–173
Young people need more training like this
on gender equality. I would really like to use theatre
to promote human rights.
Barry O’Bolin, St. Paul’s CBS
Theatre workshops included drama games and exercises along with
discussions on human rights with reference to gender equality,
inclusion, mental health and access to the arts
Cross-community creative workshop on themes of individual and
community integration, TU Dublin Grangegorman, December 2016

Goldenbridge Day Nursery, St. Vincent Street West, Inchicore, Dublin 8. Student: Sarah O'Donavan. Photo by Jo Holmwood, 2018.
The children in early childhood care settings were given the opportunity to wallow, to share beautiful moments, to explore, feel and enquire.

174–175
To be.
To wallow.
To wonder.
Maree
Hensey

Biographies
Maree Hensey is a visual
artist. Her practice
encompasses drawing, sculpture
and installation. Material
is an integral component in
her practice. Maree uses
materials that are rich in
associations and investigates
ways to transform them, often
projecting new identities and
layers of meaning onto the
work in doing so. Over the
past number of years Maree has
completed several public art
commissions, site-specific
Installations and communitybased
participatory art
projects. Her interest is in
responding to context, where
all of the cues for a works
development evolve from the
social and physical aspects
of a particular place. This
responsive and process-led
approach stimulates ideas and
generates content through
dialogue and creative exchange
with people who her work will
affect. Maree continually
expands the premise from which
she works and re-assesses her
processes and methods.
Kids’ Own Publishing
Partnership was formed in
1997 and since then has
firmly established itself as
a leading organisation within
the cultural sector, supporting
children’s engagement
with professional artists
through high-quality arts
and publishing experiences.
Kids’ Own works in defence
of children’s right to
culture, supporting children’s
inclusion and recognition
as active cultural citizens
within their communities and
society as a whole. Kids’
Own works through a model of
social change, blending strong
social justice goals with
artistic excellence. Through
publishing and the arts, Kids’
Own advocates for a society
where children are valued and
listened to, and where their
voices, opinions, experiences
and creative expression are
given visibility, credence
and status. An integral part
of Kids’ Own’s work is the
I am a visual artist. My artistic practice has spanned
painting, drawing, sculpture, film, printmaking, installation,
and public art. Ritual, repetitive action, alchemy and
substrate are integral components in my practice. I use
materials that are rich in associations and investigate
ways to transform them, often projecting new identities
and layers of meaning onto the work in doing so.
In 2017, I began an action-based collaboration with Kid’s Own Publishing
Partnership and TU Dublin’s Early Childhood Education Programme. I wanted to
explore how children engage all their senses in the development of individual language
and expression. As an artist, my approach was to present a sensory, paired
back environment for the participants to explore, feel and investigate using natural
open-ended materials such as sand, feathers and water.
In preparation for the placements, I led a collective of second year Bachelor
of Arts (Hons) Early Childhood Education students through a process-based
experience. These experiences were documented, and through discussion, each student
then began to develop methodologies that could be used with young people.
Our aim was to create a socially safe and emotionally supportive environment, which
would offer children immersive opportunities to actively explore, question, enquire,
come up with ideas and make their own decisions. Each student prepared a shared
ethos and approach for working with young children in readiness for their placement
work in the communities.
Both as an artist and in a supervisory capacity, I followed students in their
placements and the collective regrouped for a closing shared discussion to review
experiences. The participatory nature of this provided students with raw and real
evidence of how engaging with the arts gives energy to children’s natural capacity for
creativity, communicating, thinking and exploring. A blog documenting the processes
can be found in the Links section overleaf.
This online presence gives an insight into the sensitivity towards the
aesthetic and the ethos of nurturing individuality and self-expression. The students
engagement and motivation became the key criteria to the documentation. Kids Own
put together short process videos that capture the perspectives of the partners and
participants in all phases of the project. The videos and sound recording footage are
very insightful and offer a valuable testimony to the project. They highlight how the
students could plan and implement aspects of the work into each of their care settings.
This is an essential part of project’s legacy.

TO BE. TO WALLOW. TO WONDER. 176–177
strategic development of the
sector of arts practice with
children, supporting and
mentoring professional artists
who work in this field and
whose practice is deeply rooted
in respect for reciprocal
processes of enquiry and making
between artists and children.
The following is a quote from
Leslie Cassells:
‘Although perhaps sometimes
hidden, the child-centred
approach is at the heart of all
the work we carry out in the
Arts in Education Module, as
well as all reading material
our students are asked to carry
out. The work from this project
is refreshing and embodies
this way of working. My hope
is that bringing this work into
placements in such a focused
way will cause ripples and
reverberations long after
the work.’
Leslie Cassells, School of
Languages, Law and Social
Sciences TU Dublin is the
longest established provider
of Early Childhood Education
in Ireland. The BA in Early
Childhood Care and Education
was introduced in September
1999. In September 2005, First
Year intake on a new 3-year
BA (Hons.) took place. There
is a work placement for 30
days in Year 1 and 60 days in
both Years 2 and 3. Practice
in the Early Years, Child
Health and Nutrition, Art in
Early Education, Drama in
Education, Sociology and Social
Policy, Skills Development,
Child Development in Context,
Mental Health during the Early
Years, Language, Literacy and
Numeracy, Aistear and Early
Years Curricula, Outdoor
Learning, Pedagogy and
Curriculum, Digital Childhoods,
Working with Families and
Communities, Child protection,
Business and Management Skills,
and Sociology of Education and
Inequality.
Links
www.tobetowallowtowonder.
wordpress.com
www.vimeo.com/256061757
Early years residency with
artist Maree Hensey and
TU Dublin Early Childhood
Education
www.vimeo.com/282830334
To be. To wallow. To wonder.
Phase Two
www.mareehensey.com
www.kidsown.ie
TU Dublin BA (Hons) Early Childhood Education Art Department,
Mountjoy Square S, Mountjoy, Dublin 1. Photo: Maree Hensey, 2018
The process involved introducing the
students to ways of abstract mark making using
a range of exploratory techniques, processes and
experimental materials, large and small scale. They
gained a confidence in experimental and expressive
mark-making. Each mark made was considered,
thoughtful and meaningful. They listened to their own
rhythms and made work that was sensitive, thought
provoking and individual.

TU Dublin BA (Hons) Early Childhood Education Art Department,
Mountjoy Square S, Mountjoy, Dublin 1. Photo: Maree Hensey, 2018
My intention by introducing materials such
as sand, feathers and leaves was to enrich the
students’ understanding of the potential that the
‘seeming chaos’ would have to offer the children in
their placement settings for adventure, discovery,
expression, fun and development.

TO BE. TO WALLOW. TO WONDER. 178–179
Goldenbridge Day Nursery, St Vincent Street West, Inchicore, Dublin 8
Student: Sarah O’Donavan. Photo: Jo Holmwood, 2018
St. Vincents Day Nursery, Ballyfermot/Palmerstown
Primary Care and Mental Health Campus, Ballyfermot
Rd, Ballyfermot. Student: Lynne Murray.
Photo: Maree Hensey, 2018
We sat on the floor with the children, we
were experiencing what they were experiencing.
The children were involved in the planning of the
session and were very excited about that.
The children in early childhood care settings
were given the opportunity to wallow, to share
beautiful moments, to explore, feel and enquire.

180–181
The Glass
Garden
Brian
Cregan
Photographing architectural models at Grangegorman
Development Agency 2017. Photo: Alisha Doody

Late in 2016, Brian approached us with his proposal to
site the first The Glass Garden residency the following
summer at our Photography facilities on the Grangegorman
campus. His project would focus on working
with children from the immediate locale, using photography
to foster and develop forms of self-representation
around themes of identity, belonging and the environment.
We were immediately convinced of the value of
the proposal and the potential of the residency. For us,
having only arrived in the neighbourhood in 2015, it was
an opportunity to work with local community groups,
providing access to our facilities, which generally lie
dormant across the summer. Equally, it was a chance
to work with Brian, a graduate of our BA Photography
programme and an artist with a solid reputation in
collaborative practices, in order to realise the serious
ambition of his project.
Context
The Glass Garden by artistin-residence
Brian Cregan
involved working with a
group of children from the
Grangegorman area during 2017-
2018. The artist established
a partnership between the
newly relocated TU Dublin
Photography Department and
local communities, Aosóg
Child and Family Project, and
Step-by-Step Child and Family
Project. The children forming
the participant group were
between ages 8 and 12 and were
all attending schools in the
Smithfield and Stoneybatter
areas.
The residency focused on
identity, environment and a
sense of place through the
medium of photography, video
and visual art. Inspired by
‘The Grangegorman Masterplan’
for development of the area,
a range of creative activities
were used to engage the
children on their journey of
discovery to ‘reach out’ and
explore their local community
in transition, through art
making, learning new skills and
gaining experiences in the city
and beyond.
Brian’s residency, consisting of an intense set of practice-led workshops
and related field-trips developed for the children at Aosóg (2017 & 2018) and Stepby-Step
(2017), might be seen in relation to a longer tradition of what is termed the
‘Photographic Empowerment’ movement in the US.
This movement, which draws on the pedagogical methods developed
by Brazilian educator, Paulo Freire, may sometimes pivot around practices known as
‘Photo Novella’ or ‘Photovoice.’ Using the workshop model, visual literacy and self-representation
through photography are taught as a means to explore identity formation
with the agency of the participants to visually represent themselves to the fore. The
power of the image, as well as the question of power relations embedded in photographs,
are also demystified. While the children in The Glass Garden residencies were
young, they nonetheless found out about photographic seeing and techniques; they
moved between the subject-positions of the photographer and the photographed,
all in a supportive learning environment. They were thus exposed to the potential
of the visual image to communicate their own ideas: ideas about themselves, about
what they see and how they see it. Photography does more than merely represent
the world. It acts in and on the world, connecting people, forming relationships and
ultimately, forging new communities.
There is a value to enumerating the kinds of photographic activities that
the children took part in during The Glass Garden residency, which you get a strong
sense of in this publication. They worked with digital and analogue photographic
processes; they tried out a range of cameras, from point-and-shoot to high-end,
professional; they made their own cameras from cardboard boxes; they exposed
direct-positive cyanotype prints with natural objects outdoors; they watched and
waited in the darkroom as the images they had made materialised from latent image
to positive print. In fact they encountered the whole span of the history of photography
from its origins to the present in their workshops, even if it might not have been
so evident to them. They also constructed and set up photographs, used accessories
in the photographic studio, styled their own mini-performances, and worked with

THE GLASS GARDEN 182–183
Some of these activities
included gallery visits,
artist talks, historical
tours, photography workshops
and photobook making. Two
exhibitions, one as part of
Culture Night, were held on the
TU Dublin Grangegorman campus,
where the children shared
some of their experiences and
artworks with family, friends
and other members of their
community.
Biographies
Brian Cregan is a lensbased
artist who explores the
potential of photography to
represent our relationship with
landscape, natural history and
the built environment. Working
independently on commissions
and assignments, he has
successfully collaborated on
numerous projects with other
artists, curators, educators,
designers and architects. He
exhibits his work nationally
and internationally. His work
as an educator is integrated
into his practice and often
forms the inspiration for new
work. He has been designing and
facilitating photography/visual
arts workshops since graduating
from the TU Dublin Photography
BA Programme in 2012, where he
received first class honours and
the DIT Photography medal for
best student. He is a Creative
Associate working on the
Creative Schools programme on
behalf of the Arts Council and
is a member of the pioneering
Arts in Education Teacher
Artist Partnership initiative.
Ann Curran lectures in
photography and is Programme
Chair of the BA in Photography.
She has a BA in History from
Trinity College Dublin and a
Masters in Fine Art from Visual
Studies Workshop, Rochester, New
York. Her research is concerned
with what Hal Foster defines
as an archival impulse, that
which seeks ‘to make historical
information, often lost or
displaced, physically present.’
She has exhibited in Ireland
and the US and was formerly the
Assistant Coordinator for the
Media Center at Visual Studies
Workshop, Rochester New York.
She was the Coordinator of the
Central New York Programmers
Group based at Cornell
University and was active in
bringing both documentary and
experimental film/video makers
to the upstate New York media
centre and college circuit.
Pinhole photography outside Photography Department at TU Dublin,
Grangegorman 2017. Photo: Brian Cregan
everyone to edit what was presented in their exhibition. Reviewing the archive of
photographs, across both The Glass Garden residencies, one notices the deep attentiveness
of the children, their gestures and their curiosity, the respect they show for
the team of people working with them, the fun they had in actively exploring their
surroundings whether in the Botanic Gardens or at The Hugh Lane Gallery.
It was wonderful to meet Geraldine Nugent and see the commitment of
all those working at Aosóg and Step-By-Step. The workshops were also so effective
and enjoyable for the children by virtue of the time, support and input of our own
photography technician, Kate O’Brien. BA Photography graduates, Alisha Doody and
Claire Behan, worked closely with Brian to document all the activities across the span
of the two residencies, creating a tremendous record of what was achieved. All forms
of documentation, including this publication, acknowledge what was an important and
unique project led by Brian, which undoubtedly had impact. Through active learning,
the children used photography to scrutinise their environment, record it, reconstruct
it and reproduce it. At their exhibitions after each residency, the excitement and the
pride of the children shyly showing what they had made was clear. Thinking about
the social function of photography, one sees how a project such as this one creates
relationships and communities, and how communities may be also be built around
photographs.
Ann Curran

Anthony Haughey is an artist
and a lecturer in TU Dublin,
where he supervises practicebased
PhDs in The Centre for
Socially Engaged Practice-Based
Research and teaches on the
Photography programme. His art
practice works from the premise
of a principal situatedness
of art in place and community
and its connectedness
through dialogic exchange.
His solo and collaborative
works have been exhibited,
collected, and published
widely internationally; The
National Gallery of Ireland
recently acquired his work for
their permanent collection.
He is currently working on a
socially engaged public artwork
with the Global Migration
Collective commissioned under
the Infrastructure programme
and Fingal County Council.
Recent and forthcoming
exhibitions include, ‘Go Down
Moses’, Museum of Contemporary
Photography, Chicago, ‘The
Artistic in Documentary, DZ
Bank Art Collection, Frankfurt
and ‘Citizen Nowhere / Citizen
Somewhere: The Imagined Nation’,
which opened in the Crawford
Gallery in late October 2020.
Geraldine Nugent has been
working with children and their
families since graduating from
UCD in 1983. She has worked
and managed residential units
for teenagers 1983–1988, before
she became a Youth Worker for
disadvantaged youth in 1988.
After working in other areas
of childcare she became the
first Project Leader with
Aosóg Child and Family Project
in 1997, and has been there
for 15 of the 20 years the
Project has been running in the
Stoneybatter area. Since 1983
she has continued in education,
parenting training, Early
Childhood education, Youth
Leadership and Management,
Personnel Management to name a
few. Over the years as Project
Leader, she has supported
children in the arts through
drama, music, crafts and art,
and has worked closely with the
Education Department in Collins
Barracks, the CYAG for several
community arts events (games
of 1916, Halloween) and Aontas
events 2001–2006.
Participants working on studio portraits with Kate O’Brien from the photography department,
TU Dublin Grangegorman 2017. Photo: Brian Cregan
Paul Ring began his career with
Sallynoggin SCP working with
both primary and post primary
children. Paul was in this
position for 4 years. Following
this, Paul coordinated and ran

THE GLASS GARDEN 184–185
a youth centre in Bray for
1 year before coordinating
Bray New Directions Project
– a youth diversion project
– for 8 years. Paul currently
coordinates the Step-by-Step
Child and Family Project,
working with children
between the ages of 5–12 and
their families. Paul has an
Honours Degree in Humanities,
(psychology/sociology) and
Postgraduate Diplomas in
Counselling and Youth jJustice.
Links
www.briancreganphotography.com

Joe Stokes, Cattle Market, 2020. Copyright Louis Haugh

186–187
One Hour
Archive
Louis
Haugh
Pattern Book 1
I met with Louis Haugh outside Lilliput
Stores on Arbour Hill. He was running a public art
project called One Hour Archive with a local community
group, gathering material for an audio tour
of Stoneybatter led by local residents. He wanted
me to write a text. We sat on the bench across from
the coffee shop, with the potted plants alongside. It
was a sunny day in late summer.

We talked about several other things before we talked about this text.
Louis and I are friends for many years. We first met when we were both working in
Lilliput Stores, making coffees and selling gourmet sandwiches. I’d been living in the
neighbourhood for several years at that stage, in one of the ‘artisans’ that used to be
unattainable. It was only when I started working in Lilliput, with Louis, that I got to
know the people around me. I got to know the person who potted the plants on this
bench, the same person who for several years ran the street party on Sitric Road,
where I lived before I lived where I live now, close by. I know the various people who
for various reasons complained over the years about this street party and this bench
and the other measures taken to spruce the area up. I know these people slightly, the
way you know neighbours; you become familiar with the regularity of the patterns by
which they live, rather than the specifics of their personalities. Louis and I sat and
talked about this text, interrupted every few minutes by people passing by who we
knew or half-knew, many of them from the time we worked in Lilliput, many of whose
names I’ve forgotten or was never told.
I find, if I’m walking in the city, I see other people walking. If I cycle, I see
cyclists. If I drive, drivers. I see the world partially, in different registers at different
times. I see my own reflection, or the reflection of the technologies I use. I see, sitting
on the bench in Stoneybatter, other more-or-less young adults, fashioning lives out
to tie with a knot, bind together,
fasten by tying
Context
One Hour Archive by visual
artist Louis Haugh is an audio,
text, photography and GPS
based work, presented as a one
hour audio-guided walking tour
of Stoneybatter, led by the
voices of the members of The
Tuesday Club. It was officially
launched on 29 May 2019 and
continues to be available
for public access via
www.pocketsights.com/tours/
tour/Dublin-One-HourArchive.
Associated professionals
include An Síol, Community
Development Agency in
Stoneybatter, Mairéad Tully,
community care worker Owen
Binchy, Director of An Síol,
and Dr. Nathan O’Donnell,
writer. One Hour Archive
received additional support
from Fingal County Council.
It has been included in
the Bealtaine Festival, the
Stoneybatter Festival and
Culture Night and features on
publicart.ie.
One Hour Archive began
when, in 2017, Louis joined
The Tuesday Club, a local
knitting and crafts group
based in Stoneybatter, with
the intention of getting to
know the older community
living in his neighbourhood.
The Tuesday Club was founded
of whatever resources they have, buying houses if they can, working if
they can, or not working, having children, or not, whatever. This is the natural greedy
self-serving way in which I make the world reflect back to me how I’m living or choosing
not to. I don’t necessarily see, or see as quickly, or as sympathetically, the older
people who live in the houses around me, who pass us on the bench, who’ve lived here
all their lives maybe, or maybe not, but who in any case probably aren’t dropping in to
Lilliput for their groceries. We are not living the same life.
Louis talked to me, on the bench, about the project. He’d been working
with a group called the Tuesday Club, a community initiative (originally a knitting
club) that had been running for years. It was set up originally by Alice Fitzharris.
Tired of seeing other people her age, people older than her, people past retirement,
sitting at home doing nothing, she began to plan weekly meetings focused on crafts:
knitting, crocheting, reading, book-swapping. These sessions became conversational
social events to which the same people returned every week, or every week they
could, contributing a couple of euro toward a cup of tea and a cake, and a chat. They
became a kind of connective tissue, a set of interactions with people, a community,
a club. I know what that feels like, of course, because we all know what community
feels like, whether or not we are privy to it. We tend to think of communities as geographical
entities, existing in space, but in fact I think it’s their durational quality that
really matters: the perpetuation of interconnections over time. It matters, how we are
surrounded, by people, by buildings, by design. These things affect us psychologically.
They affect our health. I thought about all this too, in a partial sort of a way, while we
were sitting on the bench, talking. I thought of how many times I have sat on that
very bench, myself, and interacted with people passing. I tried to think how a piece of
writing might reflect this. I imagined a writer, sitting on a bench; just sitting, like I was
doing, but for months and months, engaged in a sort of slowed-down observation,
charting the things that happen, or do not happen, around them.
What does it mean, to write about the place where we live? At its most
basic I guess it means something about living and it means something about place. It
has something to do, also, with duration: with stillness and patience and the gradual
weaving of things over time. This might be, as I see it, or as I saw it, sitting with Louis

ONE HOUR ARCHIVE 188–189
Marie, knitting, 2018. Copyright of Louis Haugh
in approximately 2005 by
Stoneybatter resident and
local legend Alice Fitzharris.
Growing tired of her older
neighbours being forgotten
about, Alice started arranging
afternoon tea, cakes, knitting
circles and social gatherings
every Tuesday. This evolved
into a bustling social group
that organises outings, events,
charity raffles and overnight
trips throughout the year as
well as maintaining a weekly
gathering at Aughrim Court. It
was evident when Louis joined
the group that the rich social
history of Stoneybatter was at
risk of being forgotten from
one generation to another.
Over the course of several
months Louis began recording
conversations and interactions
with the members of the group
to gradually build a one-hour
audio-guided walking tour of
Stoneybatter, which became the
One Hour Archive.
Stoneybatter is a small
village in Dublin 7 that
boasts a rich and diverse
social history dating back
many generations. Within
living memory Stoneybatter
has seen huge and continuous
development, once the centre
of a famous cattle mart, now
it is a thriving hub for cafes
and restaurants. One Hour
Archive guides its audience
throughout the streets of
Stoneybatter and shines a light
on the near-forgotten gems
in history. Through anecdotal
across from Lilliput Stores on a day in late-summer, the straightforward study of what
happens when you just sit down in one place – a bench maybe – and observe, following
the play of propulsive forces around you, the bonding and fusing, the knitting and
then unspooling of people’s lives.
This word seems apt, ‘knit’, with its Anglo-Saxon abruptness: two heavy
consonants pressed up against one another, contracting and squeezing the vowel in
between. Derived from the old English, cnyttan, ‘knit’ relates to a similar word in old
Norse, knytja: ‘to tie with a knot, bind together, fasten by tying’; you can almost hear,
in the word itself, its meaning, the repeated knotting, by needle or knitting machine;
the creation of continuous loops, pulled one through the next. It is also the word used
to describe how bones heal after a fracture; they knit. Communities knit together,
become tighter, closer; people knit together after a crisis. The process of looping and
binding: a ready metaphor for a fundamental human impulse, to lean on each other, to
intermingle, to interdepend. Louis and I finished our coffees and vacated the bench,
and walked down Arbour Hill together. I can’t remember what we talked about then,
only that we were talking, and laughing, and then we stopped, and we said goodbye,
believing that if it mattered – whatever it was we’d been discussing, some vestigial
unimportant thing – we could return to it another time.
Nathan O’Donnell
1 This text is a shorteded version of the original text.

What does it mean, to write about the place
where we live?
storytelling, reminiscing
and group conversations, the
social history of Stoneybatter
is remembered and celebrated.
Audience members are invited
to download the Pocket Sights
® app for iOS or Android
from www. pocketsights.com
or through the App Store or
Play Store.
Biography
Louis Haugh is an artist,
educator and photographer
based in Dublin. His practice
encompasses photography, video,
audio, text and often involves
event-based outcomes. His work
is both socially-engaged and
collaboratively made and seeks
to represent people and places
through different modes of
visual engagement. His practice
is deeply influenced by his
work as a museum photographer
and darkroom printer. Drawing
on many years of work printing
and documenting still and live
art for galleries, museums and
artists in Ireland, he has a
built a complex visual language
based on collaboration and
peer-to-peer engagement.
Dr Nathan O’Donnell is a
Research Fellow at IMMA in
connection with the IMMA
Collection: Freud Project.
He was the holder of a twoyear
Irish Research Council
Enterprise Postdoctoral
Fellowship at the museum,
2018-19, during which time he
co-organised several events and
symposia dedicated to Freud's
work, as well as working as
a curatorial researcher for
exhibitions in connection with
the Freud Project.
Alice and Mary, bus to Carlingford, 2018. Copyright of Louis Haugh
Links
www.louislouis.ie
www.pocketsights.com/
tours/tour/Dublin-One-Hour-
Archive-3117

ONE HOUR ARCHIVE 190–191

Dorothy Smith, For Now, 2020, 56 × 76 cm, pencil on paper

192–193
Grangegorman
Drawings
Dorothy
Smith
Drawing 1
Drawing is a rich metaphorical word.
We draw water
draw tickets
draw curtains
draw guns
draw breath
draw things behind us
draw things to us
draw conclusions
draw attention to ourselves
We can withdraw from a person or place
We can become withdrawn
We can withdraw to a drawing room
We are drawn to certain people and places
We are drawn to activities and objects
As people we are drawn together
People have been hung, drawn and quartered
We draw pictures.
What is happening when we draw?
To draw implies movement, a shift from one place or way of being
to another, a transition from one state or function to another.

The water moves from the well or river to the bucket
and becomes a liquid to drink or wash with. The curtains
extend across the window and block the light,
provide privacy. Air moves from outside our body to
inside and becomes part of us. We remove ourselves
from others physically or emotionally. Our focus, attention
and physical being shift when we are attracted to
new places, people, objects, activities.
The act of drawing embodies movement; a pencil moving across a page,
a stimulus transformed into marks, information and ideas being sifted, sorted, processed.
The source material from which we draw can be visual, conceptual, emotional,
it can be a clear idea, or a ‘niggling’ thought. Drawing transforms this source into
another state, in a specific place, giving it form and function. Some ideas will never be
realised or generated if not worked out through drawing. Drawing is searching. It is a
way of thinking. It makes ideas visible.
Drawing is an intrinsic part of human existence. Drawing goes back
through time and form, from a luminous example such as the Lasceaux cave drawings
of 20,000 years ago, to iPad sketches of the present day. Everyone, with few exceptions,
has drawn at some stage in their lives. We start drawing at an early age often
before the age of one. Drawing is non-discipline specific; architects, cartographers,
engineers, and all designers draw to capture, develop and visualise ideas, to communicate.
Drawing has a role in medicine, maths, the sciences, and communications.
Drawing is not the preserve of the artist.
Drawing is both a verb and a noun. To draw is a process. A drawing is
a product. All drawing takes place somewhere on this continuum from process to
product. In early childhood, children are involved in the process of drawing with little
concern for the look of their drawing. Teenagers become concerned with the look,
wanting to get it ‘right’. Where anyone’s work lies on this continuum is dependent
on the person, the discipline and the context in which the work is happening. Some
people will work exclusively on one end or the other of this continuum, others will, in
exploring an idea or over the course of a project move back and forth along its full
length.
No two people draw alike. No two people see
in the same way.
Drawing is a quiet word. It has an intrinsic psychological component. It
operates in a private sphere and requires concentration, attention and an openness
to chance. It is a unique way of interacting with the world and with oneself. It is an
embodied activity that necessitates the moving, distilling, arranging and sorting of
information from potentially many sources into new ideas and knowledge.

GRANGEGORMAN DRAWINGS 194–195
Context
The change of use of the
Grangegorman site from an
enclosed and secretive presence
in the neighbourhood into
an outward looking public
educational facility has been
hugely welcomed. Construction
sites are ubiquitous in our
city yet remain places of
mystery, the myriad skills they
contain perhaps overlooked
by the majority of us, the
public. Through ‘…the lives we
live’ Grangegorman Public Art
programme, Dorothy Smith had
an opportunity to gain access
to this world. From 2018 to
2020, she made a number of
visits to the East Quad, on its
journey to becoming the School
of Creative Arts, witnessing
the complex spectacle of its
construction. The objects
and processes that she has
drawn will be hidden in the
finished building, integral
to its presence, enabling it
to function. Infrastructure
of this kind speaks of
possibility, of the future.
It carries with it an air of
optimism.
Dorothy Smith, Moment, 2020, 102 × 64 cm, pencil on paper
Dorothy would like to thank
Derek Dockrell of the HSE, Lori
Keeve of GDA, Sean Stagg and
Brian Wilson of Sisk for their
support and time.
Dorothy's work considers the
infrastructure and material
fabric of public space; the
spaces and structures we
habitually traverse and use,
how they impact the quality and
reach of our lives and on the
effectiveness of our cities and
neighbourhoods. Her concerns
include the life cycle of the
city, its design, construction,
demolition, decay, its fragile
and transitory nature; the
invisible forces that cause it
to be and continually shape it.
She is interested in extending
the possibilities of drawing,
how it can explore and interact
with contemporary issues and
places.
Dorothy's drawings are a means
for her to investigate and
engage with our constantly
changing and evolving city.
Formally, she employs
an intricate methodology
which deliberatively places
restrictions and process
between the intention and
the making of the marks. This
necessitates a reconsideration
of the act of looking and a
distillation of the visual
1 This talk was given at ‘Drawing Together’, a public seminar which took place in St. Laurence’s Church,
Grangegorman, 12 October 2019. Curated by Conor Sreenan GDA, ‘Drawing Together’ was held in association with
the Irish Architecture Foundation Open House Dublin.
‘Drawing Together’ launched a series of City Drawings by plattenbaustudio. The drawings, commissioned by GDA,
marked the 10 th anniversary of breaking ground at Grangegorman, following the Masterplan for the site drawn by
architect James Mary O’Connor.
The event gathered architects Valerie Mulvin, James Mary O’Connor, Jennifer O’Donnell, Jonathan Janssens,
moderated by artist Dorothy Smith, to discuss the role and value of drawing in city-making.

Dorothy Smith, Slippage, 2020, 56 × 76 cm, pencil on paper
information used to create
the drawing. This process has
resulted in drawings that
have their own refined formal
language while also referencing
print making techniques and
architectural and technical
drawing.
Biography
Dorothy Smith is a visual
artist whose practice is
concerned with the built
environments in which people
live and work and in particular
the construction and lived
experience of public space. Her
practice involves studio-based
work, curation and publicly
engaged projects.
She is a founding member of the
group Phizzfest Reimagining
Phibsborough which has been
actively engaged in campaigning
for a people centered approach
to design and planning in her
local community.
Links
www.dorothysmith.ie

Dorothy Smith, Underneath, 2020, 56 × 76 cm, pencil on paper
GRANGEGORMAN DRAWINGS 196–197

Drawn
Together
Conor Sreenan
Director of Strategy and
Design, Grangegorman
Development Agency
2019 marked ten years since breaking ground at Grangegorman. That
moment was preceded by longstanding efforts culminating in the Government decision
of 2002 to redevelop the Grangegorman site, and the indefatigable efforts of
many in the years after.
Coinciding with this milestone, the GDA set about commissioning a new
drawing. A large-scale drawing, it was to gather on one sheet all previous progress
with all current plans. It was to be a drawing of record and a working drawing, to
capture the character and texture of the site and neighbourhood in its current and
potential future states. The GDA invited three young architectural practices to participate
in a tender process to be selected to make the drawing. Noreile Breen, NÓS
workshop and plattenbaustudio all submitted proposals demonstrating a range of
critical approaches to the matter of drawing.
plattenbaustudio, an architecture and drawing studio based in Berlin
and founded by Irish architects Jennifer O’Donnell and Jonathan Janssens, were
appointed for the task. In the end, they have made four drawings. Each one is set to
the cardinal directions of north, south, east and west. The collection of four comprise
a single set of ‘City Drawings’, reaching out far beyond the walls that had bounded
the Grangegorman site for so long. They are axonometric projections; two-dimensional
representations of three-dimensional places. Despite their almost cartoonish
appearance, they are constructed with incredible accuracy, patience and judgement.
The drawings are inscribed with the Masterplan vision of James Mary
O’Connor, John Mitchell and their teams – along with the built and lived experience of
the emerging changes on site over recent years. They are a design tool, to ensure that
collective decisions today are consistent with the aims and objectives established by
the Masterplan. They are also a register of an evolving context as the GDA progresses
the various programmes of building works through an increasingly uncertain future.
They are not construction documents; rather navigational charts which make a safe
place to test ideas.
The drawings include buildings and places already built, those under
construction and those for which there are very well developed plans underway. They
also include trees, grass, paths, pavements, walls, lampposts and the spaces between
buildings – Public Goods.
This ‘space between’ includes sites for public art. The axe-supporting
tree from Alice Maher’s The Axe (and the Waving Girl) is drawn from survey, as is the
cascading ground of Clodagh Emoe’s Crocosmia ×, and more recently THE GOLDEN
BANDSTAND – Sculpture by Garrett Phelan.

DRAWN TOGETHER 198–199
plattenbaustudio, City Drawing North (Extract).
For full version to go https://ggda.ie/urban-quarter/city-drawings
These drawings are a work in progress, and always will be.
They are publically accessible records, freely available from the GDA
website. The GDA offers them to the City, in the hope that they are useful to those
interested in the art of practice, and that which draws us together.
They represent an act of public negotiation; between the past and present,
the actual and the possible, and between the public and art.

Index
Aesthetics Group, The 106–109
Aspire Ireland 172
Aosóg 182
Barry, Orla 105
Beattie, David 83
Beattie, John 139
Benson, Ciarán 12–14
Bí Urban 154–159
Bradóg Regional Youth
Service 12
Brocklebank, Caitríona 80
Brokentalkers 121–125
Búrca, Ella de 140
Burke, Karl 141
Burke, Mary 80
Burt-O’Dea, Kaethe 155–159
Byrne, Oisín 70–75
Carr, Alexandra 53–57
Casey, Ger 22–23
Cassels, Leslie 177
Caviston, Paul 105
Clark, Elaine 163
Create 124
Cregan, Brian 181–185
Corcoran, Kieran 90–92
Counihan, Alan 79
Curran, Ann 183
Davidson, Janine 84–89
D7 Educate Together 111–115,
135–141
Dockrell, Derek 26–28
Doyle, Jeanette 107
Doyle, Roger 105
Dunne, Dermot 164
Ellis, Kate 163
Emoe, Clodagh 110–115
FitzPatrick, David 36–38
Fitzpatrick, Gemma 80
Gannon, Fiona 136–141
Gerrard, Joy 70–75
Gillen, Aidan 104
Gorey, Helena 81
Graham, John 71–75
Groener, Anita 95–98
Guinan, Paul 143–147
Guy, Jennie 136–141
Haugh, Louis 136, 186–191
Haughey, Anthony 184
Haughton, Jenny 10–11
Henri, Christina 127–129
Henrietta Adult Community
Education 86–89, 172–173
Hensey, Maree 175–179
Hichem 95, 97
Holohan, Marie 80
Kennedy, Christina 76–79
Khan, Hina 95, 97
Kids’ Own Publishing
Partnership 176–177
Maher, Alice 76
Martin, Fergus 64–69, 83
Masterson, Bernie 131–135
Merriman, Julie 82
McAdam, Trish 100–105
McCoy, Aisling 143–147
McDonnell, Justine 30–35
McIvor, Charlotte 121–124
McManus, Luke 116–118
Millar, Leah 91
Mitchell, John 24–25

INDEX 200–201
Mok, Judith 160–163
Moynihan, Mary 168–171
Murphy, Ailbhe 124
Murray, Hilary 149–153
Muthi, Sara 32–33
Nala 95, 97
National Museum of Ireland,
Collins Barracks 84–89
Nugent, Geraldine 184
O’Carroll, Cathy 107
O’Connor, James Mary 25
O’Donnell, Nathan 187–189
O’Hara, Mick 107
O’Keeffe, Clare Anne, 148–153
O’Loughlin, Michael 162
Phelan, Alan 30–45
Phelan, Garrett 47–51
Phoenix Care Centre 71–75
Phibsboro Active Retirement
Association 89
Pre-Texts 16–21
Primary Care Centre 78–83
Prior, Aisling 71–75
Rialto Youth Project 121–125
Ring, Paul 184–185
Roth, Nick 164
Safi, Nasir El 95–97
Saaritsa, Maire 163
Scanlon, Emmett 142–147
Sex, Naomi 137, 140–141
Sherwin, Marc 102, 105
Síol, An 188
Smashing Times 166–173
Smith, Dorothy 82, 192–197
Smith, Kevin 93
Sommer, Doris 17–21
Sreenan, Conor 198–199
St. Gabriel’s National
School 89
St. Paul’s CBS (Brunner)
77, 115, 137–141, 17–171, 172–173
Step-by-Step 182
Staniford, Katie 92
Vaughan, Connell 107
Warren, George 76–77
Walker and Walker 58–63
Whelan, Fiona 125
Williams, Dominica 163

Acknowledgements
‘…the lives we live’ – extract
from ‘Dreams of a Summer Night’,
New Collected Poems (2011),
by kind permission of the
author, Derek Mahon, and The
Gallery Press.
Artists, writers and communities
for generous engagement
throughout.
The Public Art Working Group
Current – Ciarán Benson (Chair)
Jenny Haughton (Public Art
Coordinator), Robert Ballagh,
Kieran Corcoran, Anita Groener,
Derek Dockrell, Christina
Kennedy, John Mitchell, Jacquie
Moore, Ruairí Ó’Cuív, Nora
Rahill, Terry Prendergast. Past
– Ronan Doyle, Vanessa Fielding,
Eleanor Masterson, Caroline
Peppard, David Thomson.
Grangegorman Development Agency
Past and present – Board,
Chairs, Chief Executives, Senior
Management and the entire GDA
Team. In particular, Nora Rahill,
Ronan Doyle and Lori Keeve.
Health Service Executive
HSE Senior Management, Staff,
Architects, Estates, Operations
and Care Teams, including
the staff in the Primary Care
Centre, Phoenix Care Centre, and
the team responsible for the HSE
Residential Care Neighbourhood.
TU Dublin
The President, Campus Planning,
Senior Management, Staff,
Schools, and students. In
particular Dr Noel O’Connor,
Dr Paul Horan, and TU Dublin
Estates for the continued care
of the artworks. With regard to
the Public Art Now Conference:
Kieran Corcoran, Grainne
Coughlan and the School of
Creative Arts.
Communities
The Bradóg Regional Youth
Service, Grangegorman Area Based
Childhood Project, City of
Dublin Education and Training
Board Education Service to
Prisons, Complex Youth Theatre,
Common Ground Arts Organisation,
Dublin Adult Learning Centre,
Dublin Writer’s Centre,
Glencree Centre for Peace &
Reconciliation, Henrietta Street
Alternative School, Independent
Artists and Storytellers, MOST
Garda Youth Diversion Project,
National College of Art and
Design, North West Inner City
Network Gateway Project, Pathway
Centre, Primary and Secondary
Schools in the Grangegorman
Area, St. Michael’s Family
Resource Centre, Wheatfield
Prison Education Unit, An Síol,
National Museum of Ireland
Collins Barracks, The Honorable
Society of King’s Inns.
Architects
Heneghan Peng Architects,
Shih-Fu Peng, Glenn O’Brien,
and Simona Yonkova; joint
design team Valerie Mulvin,
Mulvin McCullough Architects
and TODD Architects; Feilden
Clegg Bradley Studios and
Simon Carter.
Additional Funders and Support-In-Kind
Dublin City Council Arts Grants;
The Ireland Funds; Office of
Public Works; Irish Museum of
Modern Art.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS 202–203
Selection Panels
Campus – Ciarán Benson, Anita
Groener, Katerina Gregos, Des
McMahon, Clíodhna Shaffrey. TU
Dublin Central Quad – Brian Fay,
Simon Carter, Ciáran Benson,
Derek Dockrell, Christina
Kennedy, Gerard Byrne, Luke
McManus. HSE Residential Care
Neighbourhood – Derek Dockrell,
Valerie Mulvin, Ciarán Benson,
Christina Kennedy, Gerard Byrne,
Luke McManus, Brian Fay. TU
Dublin West Quad – Shih-Fu Peng,
Ciarán Benson, Derek Dockrell,
Christina Kennedy, Brian Fay,
Gerard Byrne, Luke McManus.
Selection Panels for 17
Community-based Arts Projects
Panel 1 – Ruairí O’Cuív, David
Jacques, Michael Kilbride,
Martin McKeith, Sarah Pierce.
Panel 2 – Caroline Cowley,
Michael O’Loughlin, Emeka
Okakpu, Denis Roche, Clíona
Doris. Panel 3 – Gaynor Seville,
Dorothy Smith, Pádraig Naughton,
Niamh O’Connor Orla McDonagh.
Panel 4 – Michael O’Loughlin,
Patrick Sutton, Clíodhna
Shaffrey, Kathleen McCann,
Michael Dempsey. Panel 5 – Anna
MacLeod, Gráinne Foy, Brian
Nolan, Terry Prendergast,
Nora Rahill.
HSE Primary Care Centre
Brian Fay, Helen O’Donoghue,
Regina Byrnes, Derek Dockrell,
Dominic Thorpe.
Pre-Texts Panel
Vanessa Fielding, Gráinne
Foy, Siobhán Geoghegan,
Jenny Haughton, Kathleen
McCann, Julie Stafford.
HSE Phoenix Care Centre
Michelle Browne, David Clarke,
Derek Dockrell, Ronan Doyle,
Mary Grehan, Eleanor Masterson,
Sarah Searson, Ruairí Ó’Cuív.
Grangegorman Arts Strategy (2012) authors
Sarah Searson and Claire
Nidecker.

Grangegorman Today, October 2020. Photo: Barrow Coakley Photography

CROCOSMIA × CLODAGH EMOE 2–3

A Note to the Reader Jenny Haughton ‘…the lives we live’ Grangegor
Bradóg Regional Youth Service Making It: Cities Under C
for This Old Town Ger Casey Grangegorman Development Agency A
O’Connor Caring at Grangegorman Past Present and Future Dere
Rule of Silence Justine McDonnell Sara Muthi In the 21st
University in the City and in the Wider World? Prof. David FitzPa
of an Archive Alan Phelan THE GOLDEN BANDSTAND – Sculpture
Clegg Bradley Studios Central Quad Endless Play Walke
The Blue of the Sky, The Green of the Grass, The Red of a Rose Fe
Architects Residential Care Neighbourhood Phoenix C
Byrne Long Live the Weeds and the Wilderness Yet John Graha
Christina Kennedy Alice Maher George Warren Off
Primary Care Centre David Beattie Caitríona Brockleba
Fitzpatrick Helena Gorey Martin & Hobbs Julie Merr
National Museum of Ireland St. Gabriel’s Nation
Phibsboro Active Retirement Association TU Dublin S
El Safi Hina Khan Hichem Nala Anita Groener Sp
The Aesthetics Group Jeanette Doyle Cathy O’Carroll Mi
Grangegorman Luke McManus What Does He Need? Brokental
Charlotte McIvor Wear a Bonnet – Living Art Installation Chris
Prison Service The Masterplan and I’ll Be In Your Camp: Will You
Karl Burke Naomi Sex D7 Educate Together St. Paul’
Aisling McCoy Paul Guinan Grown Home Clare Anne O
Bí Urban 1916: A Revolutionary Cabaret! Judith Mok Kate El
Dermot Dunne Elaine Clark Michael O’Loughlin Bre
Celebration of the Centenary Vote for Women Mary Moynihan Sm
Chroí To Be. To Wallow. To Wonder. Maree Hensey Kid’s Own P
Education The Glass Garden Brian Cregan Aosóg Step-B
Archive Louis Haugh Nathan O’Donnell An Síol Gra
Sreenan plattenbaustudio