Droichead Arts Centre is back open again and will be celebrating Culture Night 2020 this Friday, 18 September with another strand of its creative initiative called CONNECTION.
The CONNECTION project has three elements featuring twenty seven visual artists – a live evolving gallery exhibition created by local artists which will run in Droichead Arts Centre in Stockwell Street until 3 October, bespoke posters created by the eleven Borrowed Ground visual artists and an outdoor exhibition in and around Drogheda on Culture Night.
On Culture Night 2020 Droichead Arts Centre working with artist/curator Brian Hegarty, in association with Drogheda Business Improvement Development (BIDS), and Create Louth brings the gallery outside into the heart of Drogheda town where 9 visual artists will create 9 responsive works in 9 buildings.
Artists opening up their process of creation in non-art spaces in the heart of our community creates a dialogue between art and audience and the 'new' world we live in. It responds not only to inner processes of the artist, but also manifests reactions to happenings in the outside world. A Culture Night Tour will be hosted by curator Brian Hegarty at 8:00pm. Guests are limited to 10. Meeting place is the building formerly known as O’Reillys.
Droichead Arts Centre Director Collette Farrell commented “We are delighted to participate in Culture Night 2020, and in bring arts and culture outside for the first time onto the streets of Drogheda, with support from BIDS, and Create Louth. And we are also looking forward to re-opening our venue, slowly and cautiously with a capacity of 41 people. We will have an Autumn arts programme that is live but also on radio, in print, online and we need the people of Drogheda’s support. We look forward to welcoming our patrons to Droichead over the coming months.” For more details on booking and your visit, check out www.droichead.com.
CONNECTION CULTURE NIGHT ARTISTS
Fran Cassidy (Former O’Reillys Building, Narrow West Street)
Fran Cassidy is a photographer and poet from Dublin. He is an observer whose practice captures the essence of everyday life from candid moments to the unexpected. There is a warmth to his photography that is always empathetic to his subjects, who are often on the margins of society.
Claire Fitch (Westcourt Hotel, West Street)
Claire is a composer, sound artist, and writer of electronic literature. Her first job was in 1995, with the RTÉ National Symphony Orchestra, playing cello. In 2002 she began producing audio content for games and film in Ireland, and in 2009 started improvising with performance poets in Dublin. In 2012 she left RTÉ and started teaching digital audio content skills to lots of students in various colleges around Ireland. She is a lecturer at Dundalk Institute of Technology.
Gee Vaucher (Former Choice Building, West Street)
Gee Vaucher is a visual artist born in 1945 in Dagenham, East London. Her work with Anarcho-punk band Crass was seminal to the 'protest art' of the 1980s. Vaucher has always seen her work as a tool for social change. Vaucher can be seen to have expressed her strong anarcho-pacifist and feminist views in her paintings and collage. Vaucher also uses surrealist styles and methods.
John Moloney (Boyle Sports, West Street)
John Moloney is a Drogheda-based artist. He treats his practice as a mediation, as a process of relationship to sensual and non-sensual material in the now, and in that sense, it is a connection. He uses a wide variety of materials in his work, from traditional to modern every day, and that work can be permanent or ephemeral, an intervention or time limited, an activity or an object. Play plays an important part in his practice. Through that play, he tries to be open to the possibilities that are in the environment, that space that is inside and outside of himself.
Mark Templeton (Kevin McAllisters Electrical, West Street)
Mark Templeton is a Canadian sound artist and photographer. Since 2007 his sound recordings have been released by Anticipate, Senufo Editions, Staalplaat, Sweat Lodge Guru, Under the Spire Recordings, Silentes and his own audio-visual label, Graphical Recordings, which he established in 2015. In the spring of 2018, he released his first photobook, Distorted Tourist, which included a series of five one-sided flexi disc records. Templeton has performed live and exhibited his work at Pingyao International Photography Festival, Unsound Festival, Mutek Festival, Send+Receive Festival, Suoni Per Il Popolo Festival, WNDX festival and other festivals, art galleries and alternative spaces in Europe, the UK and North America.
Helen McDonnell (Little Duke Theatre, Duke Street)
Helen Mc Donnell has been working as a professional tattoo artist for over 20 years. This is reflected in her art work. The carving of the shoe casts acknowledges the lost art of Scrimshaw and the traditions of folk art. We have no way of knowing where these beautifully crafted utilitarian items have come from, and what their journey has been. It is thought the name comes from the old English word Læste, which means “to follow.
Namara Lindsay (Westcourt Hotel, West Street)
Namara Lindsay lives in Dublin. She holds a Master of Fine Art with distinction from The University of Ulster, Belfast.
Sarah La Puerta (Stockwell Artisan Café, Stockwell Street)
Sarah La Puerta, née Sarah Gautier, is a musician, writer and artist currently living in a church on top of Hill in Troy, NY until further notice. She was born in 1986 in New Orleans, Louisiana and raised in Strange Paradise, Texas. She recently released Always Check the Mail, an anthologette of postcards and collage as part of the DRAG ACID publication series. (Published in Drogheda by thirtythree-45)
Orla Fitzpatrick (Drogheda Library, Stockwell Street)
Orla Fitzpatrick is a writer, historian and librarian from Dublin, Ireland. She has written widely on photographic, costume and design history. She is the Head Librarian at the National Museum of Ireland and has a doctorate from Ulster University on the topic of modernity, modernism and the Irish photobook. She is a regular contributor to Source photographic review and gorse literary journal. Recent conference presentations include a paper on the Belfast blitz of 1941 given at the Photography and Britishness conference held at Yale Center for British Art, 2016. She writes about vernacular Irish photography at jacolette.com and teaches History of Photography and visual culture at the National College of Art and Design, Dublin. She is a board member of the Belfast Photo Festival.
For further information, check out Droichead.com or call the Droichead Box Office at 041 9833946
For interviews with Collette Farrell, Director of Droichead Arts Centre, please contact Nicola Watkins PR