Second day in residence

February 28th
Miles 205
Carbon Footprint 58kg
Expenses 25 euro on food and various coffees; mini-DV tape.

Left home at 7.30 am; very windy. Video camera set up to film the journey for the first time. Crossed into Tipperary at Killaloe/Ballina, took the lakeside route through Portroe and onto Netwown, where I added a leprechaun to the image bank, then took a left for Dromineer just outside Nenagh.

Looked through the windows of Neddy's Cottage in Dromineer; potentially available as public space. Needs work. Dromineer very windswept and silent - like a ghost town.

Back to Nenagh; set myself up in the office, but discovered cannot access internet through my laptop.Will have to check out local library and wireless access at hotels. Interview with a couple of people about the context, using the following list of questions;

What makes North Tipperary unique or culturally distinct?
What is the most interesting thing about North Tipperary?
Who is the most interesting person I could talk to in North Tipp?
Is there something here that fascinates you?
What is the most overlooked aspect of North Tipp?
Is there a part of the history that has been largely overlooked?
What are the areas of friction or tension?
What is the best hope for the future of the place?

Spent a couple of hours in discussion with Martina about various things concerning rural arts development. Noreen at CAVA asked me to write and article for their newsletter. Might use that as an opportunity to make contact with local 'enthusiasts' and hobbyists. Also, want to track down informal, themed environments.Drove to Thurles in the daylight, beautiful road, such a different experience from doing it at night. On a whim took a turn for Templederry; a community that requested increased arts activity. Up into the mountains beyond Templederry, obviously not tourist country, nicer for that.

Second talk in the Visual Dialogues series; Mari-Aymone Djeribi and Dominic Stevens. Individual presentations about their practices as artist [former] and architect [latter], follwed by joint presentation Rural Lexicon which is kind of a new philosophy of living in and relating to the rural context. Very inspiring, as always. I found myself left with a question, as I was after last week's event - how do you de-centralise culture but keep new ideas, new work in circulation [without generating huge carbon footprints?]
www.mermaidturbulence.com

On the way home I had an absoloute brainwave, which I am not going to detail here! Need to keep it close to my chest while it develops.

Got home at midnight - not quite so tired as last week.

First day in residence

February 21st 2007
185 car miles
Carbon Footprint = 52kg

Calculate your own carbon footprint at http://www.carbonfootprint.com/

6.30 am

Driving east into the sunrise. Crossed into Tipperary at Killaloe/Ballina, over Lough Derg. Reached Nenagh by 8 am. Looked for Ordnance Survey maps of North Tipp; none available [sold out]. Drove every route out of Nenagh and back in again, to get my bearings. 2 articles in Tipperary Voice re; residency, radio interview on Tipp FM the previous evening. Checked out coffee shops [nothing open before 9], second hand shops to see what people discard [not much wool there] and camera shops [nothing open before 10] and various gift/newsagent shops for Leprechaun items.Small shop for rent called New Amsterda(m) . Must check out the cost.

11 am; North Tipp Civic Offices - meeting with Martina Finn, acting Arts Officer. Discussion about aims and objectives of residency, followed by negotations around contract; these took up the whole day.
We agreed the following aims, objectives and indicators;

Aims
1. To research and develop my work practice in response to the context of North Tipp.
2. To work in a transparent and accountable way.
3. To generate a sustainable element or activity through the residency, something that can be built on post-project.
4. To generate discussion about the future of art in rural contexts, with particular reference to North Tipperary.
5. Create ongoing opportunities for the community to encounter and develop an understanding of the work practices of a contemporary visual artist.

Objectives
Develop a body of work comprising images, texts, photographs, drawings, found imagery, objects etc.
Maintain a public record of the process through a web journal on the Shifting Ground website
Connect with research being generated by Jay Koh/CityArts through the Research/Thesaurus/Process project [Shifting Ground is a research partner in that project].
Make connections with local artists with a view to sharing ideas and experience.
Open discussions with local rural organizations on cultural development as an aspect of rural development.

Indicators
Media coverage of residency and related aspects
Attendance at public events/discussions generated through the residency
Public feedback via e-mail and discussions
Development of work through the residency
‘Outcome’ of the residency whatever form that takes
Post-residency developments

Martina mentioned that various departments in the council have different kinds of maps of the county; I would really like to get copies of all of the different types of maps.evening; drove to the Source Arts Centre in Thurles to give the first talk in the Visual Dialogues series. Very windy road, raining, dark. Difficult to negotiate all those lights and bollards along the road - I find it visually very confusing.No-one came to the talk! This raises interesting issues around the existing culture of artist interaction etc.

2 1/4 hours drive home - very, very tired.

Why would a visual artist have any interest in rural knowledge?

February 15th 2006

This question was put to me today by Denis O' Sullivan on the Arts Programme of Tipp FM. My answer was something to the effect that a number of visual artists, including myself, are no longer comfortable with the idea of producing more and more images - the world is already full of them. I call myself a visual artist but increasingly I see myself as a cultural worker; definitions of culture are much broader and more interesting to me than definitions of art.
Extracts from THE IDEA OF CULTURE by Terry Eagleton published by Blackwell Publishing;
‘Culture’ is considered to be one of the two or three most complex words in the English language, and the term which is sometimes considered to be its opposite – nature – is commonly awarded the accolade of being the most interesting of all. . . .culture, etymologically speaking is a concept derived from nature. One of its original meanings is husbandry or the tending of natural growth. The word ‘coulter’ which is a cognate of culture, means the blade of a ploughshare. We derive our words for the finest of human activities from labour and agriculture, crops and cultivation. Francis Bacon writes of the ‘cultivation and manurance of minds’ ins a suggestive hesitancy between dung and mental distinction. ‘Culture’ here means an activity and it was a long time before the word came to denote an entity.
The Latin root of the word culture is colere, which can mean anything from cultivating and inhabiting to worshipping and protecting.
If culture means the active tending of natural growth then it suggests a dialectic between the artificial and the natural, what we do to the world and what the world does to us.
Nature produces culture which changes nature.
Read more of Terry Eagleton's book The Idea of Culture
"MuHKA presents a series of dialogues on the term culture as a keyword around which individuals and societies produce, contest and share meaning, bringing together several leading figures working in this field. In his book Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society, Raymond Williams gives a precise and useful account of the words that are instrumental in shaping our understanding of culture and society. Words, which although familiar, he believed, would benefit from further clarification; not in order to impose a finite meaning on them, but instead to describe their development, adaptation and translation between times and places and their relationship to other words. In his definition of ‘culture’ Williams describes this word as one of the two or three most complicated words and elsewhere as the original difficult word. It can simultaneously refer to: [1] intellectual, spiritual and aesthetic development [2] the way of life of a people, time or place and [3] artistic works or the output of aesthetic practices. According to Williams its complexity stems from the fact that the word culture plays an equally important role in a number of different areas of exper ience [art being one, society being another] between which it occupies an awkward place. By way of elucidation Williams traces the etymology of ‘culture’ back to its roots in plant or animal husbandry [to cultivate or to tend]; how it came to refer to the development of manners and the intellectual faculties, how it was extended to include more generalised social processes and how through its links to civilisation, class and civil values it acquired a contested status. The formulation and maintenance of cultural elites and the culture wars that saw previously excluded groups gate-crashing the citadel. Today the term ‘culture’ is deployed for a combination of progressive, bureaucratic and reactionary causes. As a remedy for social exclusion, for the empowerment of sub and counter cultural groups, as an instrument of government policy, and in the xenophobic ring-fencing of cultural values and norms on ethnic, religious and linguistic grounds. Williams believed that the awkward position that the word ‘culture’ occupies somewhere in-between social and artistic categories, rather than being a problem, instead produces a range and overlap of meaning that is the source of its significance. Indicating a complex argument about relations between general human development and a particular way of life, and between both and the works and practices of art and intelligence.This lecture series at MuHKA will take the slippage that finds ‘culture’ sitting in-between, artistic, social and theoretical discourse as its point of departure and consider the following questions: [1] Rather than divide culture into neat partitions such as art, politics and lifestyle can we approach it as a continuous field with many intersecting points? [2] How can we best challenge cultural norms which are exclusive and prescriptive and aim for a culture that is convivial and cosmopolitan? [3] Rather than accepting culture as commodity or policy objective, is it possible instead to imagine a culture that is always undisciplined, flexible and in motion?
lecture-series organised by Grant Watson [curator MuHKA]"