Community works

THE ARTS: AS TORRENTIAL rain became a deluge of biblical proportions in the harbour town of Kinsale, it appeared that the opening…

THE ARTS:AS TORRENTIAL rain became a deluge of biblical proportions in the harbour town of Kinsale, it appeared that the opening of Kinsale Arts Week (KAW) was destined to be a washout, writes SARA KEATINGin Kinsale

Rumours of dissent were spreading through the village. Would Paul Brady really be performing on an outdoor stage in a storm? Would the electrics hold up in the rain? Would we even be able to hear the music above the wind?

A group of brave supporters sheltered in the old museum building at Charles Fort nonetheless for the opening address by Minister for Foreign Affairs Micheál Martin, clothes damp but spirits unflagging.

It seemed that their optimism was to be rewarded, because at about 7pm – as local support act Dog Tail Soup took to the stage – the grey sky parted as if it were the Red Sea, and a chink of sunlight illuminated the coastline. The rain stopped, as if controlled by some higher power – Paul Brady himself, perhaps – until the bravado musical finale, and as revellers poured out across the moat-bridge, the clouds began to shed their weather-load again.

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Now in its fifth year, Kinsale Arts Week has carved a niche for itself as a vital local arts festival embedded in the community.

The visual arts provide the largest element of its programming strand, and with so many artists living locally – inspired surely by the dramatic landscape of the region – contributions to the festival from the community make up an impressive amount of the programme’s material.

A comprehensive Artists’ Trail, for example, which brings arts-lovers to visit the studios of artists based in the region, is enough to fill two days. There is also plenty of local art on show to distract the casual passerby, as improvised exhibition spaces make the most of some of the disused spaces in the town – a butcher’s shop, a hairdressers: both victims of the recession.

Meanwhile, local businesses market themselves in more imaginative ways as shop windows become temporary homes for paintings and sculptures; the very streets of this labyrinthine, cobbled village are transformed into an outdoor walking gallery.

It is not just local artists who are supported by the programme, however, but a diverse and impressive range of some of Ireland’s greatest living artists.

An impressive installation by Brian O’Doherty, who buried his alter-ego Patrick Ireland at Imma last year, was specially commissioned by KAW to engage with the town’s great landmark, the 16th-century ruin at Charles Fort, which has been so well preserved by the OPW.

An angular red and white wooden structure, The Look Out was conceived as a “fort within a fort”, and O’Doherty was proud to talk of it as a favourite work from his 60-year-long career. It is on display until October.

Two prints by O'Doherty under his Ireland pseudonym are also exhibited in To Have and Have Not,a conceptual exhibition curated by Gemma Tipton, which brings together two works each by eight great living Irish artists: one of which was on sale (at a forbidding price), the other of which the artist would never sell. The exhibition is an investigation of how we place value on art.

The artists Alice Maher, Donald Teskey, Stephen McKenna, Martin Gale, Eithne Jordan, Nick Miller, Diana Copperwhite and O’Doherty provided a myriad of explanations for their attachment to specific pieces. As opposed to traditional curator’s notes, the texts beside the paintings were the artists’ own stories in their own words.

It made for a unique viewing experience. For McKenna, the artist is always aware that the quality of an artwork "is not infrequently confused with its price", and, along with the other artists, he explains why his Portrait of Lothar Schmidt-Muehlisch,a portrait of a very good friend, now deceased, was a keeper.

The artists pointed to sentimental memories, the importance of a gift bestowed, or, in Nick Miller's case, the primacy of inspiration. Of his Whitethorn, truck-view, Miller writes, it was "the first time the meaning of painting the landscape around me really came alive".

Janet Mullarney's site-specific exhibition To Make it Home, set within and speaking to an abandoned butcher's shop, made for another unique and altogether chilling experience. The Sunday morning sunshine – relief for daytrippers hoping to take advantage of the packed programme of free entertainment on KAW's official street day – provided a startling passage through a brilliant white courtyard into the dark, dank recesses of a decommissioned butchers.

A giant silver-cast human leg stood eerily in a meat locker. Objects lining a trestle table resembled tiny human hands. The disembodied feet of a video installation danced a pattern on the bare tiled floor. Despite the warmth of the metaphor evoked by Mullarney’s title, the effect was of a human abattoir.

Meanwhile, on the street outside, opposite Fintan Lynch's Salon, Tom Campbell's Clay Head Showproved similarly playful and disturbing. Campbell became a moving sculpture in the process, piercing eye-sockets and nostrils in the dense formless sphere of clay that covered his skull.

Alongside Dance Theatre of Ireland, whose Block Partyis travelling throughout festivals in Ireland this summer, Campbell's performance proved to be one of the highlights of the free entertainment on offer.

As dusk fell on the docks, the sound of live music was carried across the bay by another incipient rainstorm, which flooded the surrounding hills until midway through Monday afternoon.

Then, hearing of the arrival of rockabilly star Imelda May, the miracle of a scorching Irish summer evening was called down upon the coast once more. If the arts can survive this sort of weather, then it can surely survive the recession.

Kinsale Arts Week runs until Sunday; kinsalearts.com