Future Happiness (continued)

While the practices and function of St Ita’s have changed, traces of the original vision where clients are cared for and empowered to have a degree of autonomy in their recovery journeys is still very much present. In parallel to this, the NFMHS recently demonstrated their contemporary approach to patient-lead / patient-focused care through their support of an ambitious pilot project by OPP with CMH clients at Usher’s Island where high quality arts engagement was placed at the centre of the recovery journey, not as art therapy but as a meaningful route to independence, to express without judgement and engage in necessary moments of collective joy that comes from making art together.

I invited OPP’s first generation of resident artists—Glenn Loughran, Emma Finucane and Jonathan Cummins, as well as OPP’s director, artist John Conway, to the new context of Portrane in 2020 for Resort Residency to reflect on their experiences and observations as arts practitioners in the NFMHS and explore possibilities to continue their practice in its new home. For Resort Residency / Revelations 2021, we are delighted to present a diverse array of new work encountered as a promenade style circuit around Portrane and Donabate. The show, titled Future Happiness, features new work by each of the artists. Jonathan Cummin’s series of works, Compliance / Insight, were developed with service users during his residency in Usher’s Island, Emma Finucane’s work explores the local community’s historical affiliation with mental healthcare and the sea through site specific communal action in a work titled FLOAT, Glenn Loughran reflects on the local area and its history

Introduction 2015

Following the cutting of the barley at the Chinkwell Field in Portrane, the straw was used to build a straw bale round tower by Gareth Kennedy in the weeks leading up to the Bleeding Pig Festival, a ‘folk folly’ of sorts this temporary 12m tower joined the towers of the Portrane skyline and was activated by a series events including special performances by the Fingal Mummers and the Tower Singing Circle, to mark the harvest and the close of the holiday season. The tower was created on site at the Chinkwell Field with Master Craftsman Eoin Donnelly who provided the role of mentor to the local volunteers and invited participants engaged in the build, this produced the meitheal (collective work) of a pre-industrial age that would have taken place in fields at this time of year.

In addition to this impressive spectacle, Paul Carville of Irish Straw Crafts facilitated a series of workshops with a selection of participants from the Tower Singing Circle to create Mummer and Strawboy masks and costumes for use at the launch of Bleeding Pig Festival. The inauguration of the tower and the launch of the Resort Revelations programme and the festival was conducted by Councillor David O’Connor, Mayor of Fingal.

Introduction 2016

In acknowledgement of the importance of time to the incubation of the site specific idea, the residency was offered in two parts, an initial visit and a return research development and production phase. In 2016 the artists continued their enquiry into the very depths of this context; drawing on history, fiction, geology, communication and community. Linking the presence of St. Ita’s Hospital to stories embedded in rock, sea and atmosphere through radio and sound, illuminating communication portals from Lambay Island, a volcanic past and the mobile home park itself. Fingal County Council proudly supported these ambitious explorations into history and landscape with some of Ireland’s most fascinating contemporary artists. We were also grateful for the reception and welcome the project received in the area.

In keeping with the experience of process in practice we invited Suzanne Walsh to produce a creative text which responded to her own experience of the area as an art writer. Suzanne drew on some of 2016’s themes through conversations with the artists who have inhabited this place both past and present. We also commissioned photographer Brian Cregan who, alongside Rossi McAuley of Distinctive Repetition created a bespoke, site responsive design piece, where the layers of this landscape were presented through graphic and traditional photographic form with stills shot by Brian using medium format.

All kinds of futures

The relationship between artist and place deepens in meaning at this unique corner of north county Dublin, much has happened since the beginnings of the Resort Residency idea in 2014. Our collaborators Lynders Mobile Home and Fingal Arts Office were awarded the prestigious Allianz Business to Arts Award in the Best Small Buisness partnership category, Alan James Burns was the successful recipient of the Arts Council Touring Award for the project he created for Resort Revelations 2016 – Entirely hollow aside from the dark which was presented as part of a national tour.

The stories of extended collaborations locally through creativity reveal themselves every year as the excitement and interest in the artists presence and exploration of this area grows.

While at this location, artists have always been conscious to acknowledge its site specific author Samuel Beckett; the essay Fingal, from More Pricks than Kicks,1934, gives a layer to this landscape which has become an important guidebook to begin a journey here, as is Gerry Lynder’s knowledge of the caves, stories of the RMS Tayleur wreckage, the ever present Lambay island, the intensity of the starry skies uncluttered by the the usual orange city lights. It is little wonder that artists, while on residency are compelled to look above, beneath and beyond to imagine the present, past and what John Steinbeck recounted as ‘all kinds of futures’ in his book ‘Travels with Charley’ in which he described an ethnographic account of a 1967 America.

Steinbeck was referring to a navy soldier who’s sub station offered this potential, Vanessa Daws’ project Other Space – Underwater Explorations of the RMS Tayleur is imbibed with this spirit of un-documented discovery, aided by the expertise of marine archaeologist, Eoghan Kieran and inspired by the stories of local man and former diver Laddie de Jong, Vanessa sought to bring what is hidden to the surface, where the lines are blurred between what Andre Breton described when describing the wonders of the deep in Mad Love also 1937 as ‘the wild eye’ and the facts as uncovered through underwater geo photography, with Other Space lying somewhere in between. Steinbeck also observes the new phenomena of mobile home as a space that simultaneously offers autonomy but also an uneasy permanence, but ultimately questions perhaps that need we all have to claim space. The ‘unease’ was captured in Deirdre O’Mahony’s exploration of food production and its future in the north county when space is in short supply and like the travelling ethnographer, Catherine Barragry visualised through music, sound and text this feeling of landing in unfamiliar territory and the attempt to find your place within it.

Production of Sight (continued)

Theorist Carlotta Castellani¹ has aligned the site-specific artist residency with what Foucault describes as a heterotopia – that every place is also non-place, a place dependent on a range of relationships and particularly dependent on the artist’s personal connection to it.

Resort Residency, through the unwavering support of Gerry Lynders and Fingal Arts Office, has become a space where visiting artists are welcomed as guests. The model aims to create a space where artists are supported enough to feel at ease within their environment so that the intricacies of their way of seeing reveal a truthful and integral representation of Portrane and surrounding Donabate.

On and on and on and on and on goes the title of the sculpture at the site by Difference Engine (Mark Cullen and Gillian Lawler). The form of the sculpture was decided on the throw of a 50-cent coin, creating an aperiodic binary tiling formation that allows the visitor to engage in the feeling of disorientation while remaining immersed in a place, a feeling which I am sure resonates with any artist participating on residency – what Marnie Badham describes as “places that are not their own”.² 

Land Grabs by Wendy Judge looks at rock formations surrounding the area and invites us to suspend our perceptions of them; after all, The Bleeding Pig is a rock which is acknowledged as an animal form. 

Jessica Foley has written a new work, Holes, which weaves her own experience on residency with anecdotes and fiction to reveal topographical and geological observations of the site. 

Bennie Reilly’s Souvenirs of Portrane speaks to the history of Newbridge House and its relationship to the coast, showing that the found object so revered by Fanny Cobbe is still a treasure across the ages, when in the eye of the beholder. 

The barely noticeable architectural features at the park have been beautifully illuminated by Marie Farrington in her work See Level, where the everyday vernacular becomes monumental through plaster mixed with seawater, as material is mixed with site.