Context Background:
The third phase of South Dublin County Council's In Context, 2006 –2009, built on the underpinning principles and learnings gained from the previous two phases of commissioning and was further informed by the Department of Arts, Sport and Tourism’s General National Guidelines for delivery of Per Cent for Art Schemes, published in 2004. This project was commissioned under In Context 3, of which the principle component was to create time for the artists to engage with the context.
Previous to In Context 3 Dermot Bolger had worked with numerous South Dublin writers during his time as Writer in Residence, both through workshops and in editing ‘County Lines’, a book of reminiscences, insights and poetry from South County Dublin writers. Having tried to encourage people to write about their experiences of life, he continued during his residency in In Context 3 to imaginatively interact as a creative writer with the personal experiences and history within the county through the medium of fiction, drama and poetry. The outcomes of his residency come under two main titles; Walking the Road and County Lives.
Description:
Walking the Road was launched in the summer of 2007, it was an experimental theatre piece which used the life of the Irish poet Francis Ledwidge (who died in 1917) to tell, by extension, the life stories of numerous young Irishmen from South Dublin villages like Rathfarnham, Tallaght, Lucan, Clondalkin and Saggart who died in the Great War and whose stories were often written out of the narrative of Irish history.
Walking the Road is one poet’s re-imagining of another poet’s life. Hovering in the half-light of memories, it vividly and imaginatively tries to follow Ledwidge on one final journey after his death as he finds himself once again walking the road that he once walked as a shop boy from Rathfarnham in South County Dublin to his native Slane in County Meath on the night on which he wrote his first poem. Now, enduring the same walk again after his death, alongside him walk the ghosts of those who touched his life and the ghosts of other young Irishmen – from villages in South Dublin County that he passed by, from Dermot Bolger’s own village of Finglas and from all the foreign lands from which young men died amid the mud of Flanders. Unseen, they walk alongside him, but where are they walking to and will any of them ever reach home?
To mark the 90th anniversary of the 3rd Battle of Ypres in 1917, Walking the Road by Dermot Bolger was produced by axis, Ballymun, in association with the In Flanders Fields museum in Ieper, Belgium. It receive its world premiere in Axis Arts Centre, Ballymun on June 5th 2007 before transferring to the Ieper Town Theatre in Flanders and then returning to tour to various other venues around Ireland including the Civic Theatre, Tallaght; Manchester and the US. The text was published by New Island in association with South Dublin County Council. www.newisland.ie
County Lives is a sequence of poems by Dermot Bolger, primarily in the voices of commuters undertaking everyday journeys across South Dublin County. These poems were displayed in twelve locations across the county between Sept 2007 and Sept 2008. Between the January 1st and March 30th 2008, people who live or work in South Dublin County were invited to submit to the author, via this website, up to three original poems that reflect some aspect of their lives within the county.
The Clondalkin Suite is part of the extended County Lives series, a sequence of poems exploring daily life across the generations, inspired by encounters with the community and landscapes of this South Dublin County suburb. The Clondalkin Suite poems appeared as posters and murals in a variety of indoor and outdoor locations across North Clondalkin. A map of the locations is published as an insert in the Clondalkin Gazette (issue out May 25th 2008) and is available to download from the In Context 3 website. To celebrate the publication of the map, a video projection of poetry from the series lit up the paved area outside the Clondalkin Civic Offices over the June Bank Holiday Weekend.
In September 2008, the full text of County Lives was published as an anthology Night and Day, consisting of Dermot Bolger’s original sequence interlinked with a representative cross section of submitted poems by other authors. The poems are accompanied in the book by a series of photographs taken by In Context 3 artists, Anne Cleary and Denis Connolly, that show the cityscape and landscapes of South Dublin County. Dermot also published External Affairs, which is a companion volume to the anthology Night & Day. External Affairs publishes in its entirely and without being interwoven with work by other voices, Bolger’s original County Lives poems.
Artist Biography:
Born in Dublin in 1959, Dermot Bolger has worked as a factory hand, library assistant and publisher. His nine novels include The Woman’s Daughter, The Journey Home, and most recently The Family on Paradise Pier.
Dermot's debut play, The Lament for Arthur Cleary, received The Samuel Beckett Award, his last play From These Green Heights, received the Irish Times/ESB Prize for Best New Irish Play of 2004, and one of his latest plays, Walking the Road which was part of the In Context 3 programme' opened in May 2007.
Bolger is the author of eight volumes of poetry, including External Affairs (2008) and has edited many anthologies, including The Picador Book of Contemporary Irish Fiction and, most recently, County Lines: A Portrait of South Dublin County Through its Writers. Most recently he devised and edited the poetry anthology Night & Day: Twenty Four Hours in the Life of Dublin (2008)
He wrote the best-selling collaborative novels, Finbar’s Hotel and Ladies Night at Finbar’s Hotel and he has been The Writer Fellow in Trinity College, Dublin, Playwright in Association with the Abbey Theatre, Writer in Residence with South Dublin County Council, a resident artist in South Dublin County Council’s In Context 3 Per Cent for Art Commission Scheme and Artist in Residence as part of the Place & Identity Scheme, which is the Dun Laoghaire Rathdown Per Cent for Art Programme.
Bolger is a regular reviewer and free lance contributor to various Irish newspapers, including The Irish Times, The Sunday Business Post, The Irish Independent, The Irish Daily Mail and The Sunday Independent and also writes occasional features for foreign newspapers and magazines.
His radio plays for BBC Radio 4 include Hunger Again, The Kerlogue, The Night Manager and The Fortunestown Kid and, for RTE Radio, Moving in and the radio version of his own novel, The Woman’s Daughter, which was broadcast in seven countries and won the Worldplay Award for best script.
Commissioner Type:
Local Authority
Commissioner:
South Dublin County Council SDCC
Programme:
In Context 3
PerCent for Art:
yes
Funding:
Dept. of Environment Heritage and Local Government
Budget Range:
70,000 - 150,000
Associated Professionals:
Project Manager: Rachel McAree, Sarah Searson