Creating a cultural memory

ArtLog is an attempt to preserve for posterity the creative ferment that is the Tyrone Guthrie Centre, director Pat Donlon tells Arminta Wallace

The Tyrone Guthrie Centre is an unlikely place in which to come face to face with the future. Outside the windows of the graceful country house, Annaghmakerrig Lake nestles among drumlins and beech trees, a classic Co Monaghan landscape which probably hasn't changed much since the last glaciers retreated from these parts. But if the director of the state-owned residential artists' centre, Pat Donlon, has anything to do with it, the future starts right here, right now.

She's about to introduce an innovative and ambitious digital archive which will not only record data about artists who spend time at Annaghmakerrig but will try to capture something of the notoriously elusive process of artistic creativity itself.

ArtLog will be up and running in the spring. Every artist who checks in at the centre will be asked to supply basic biographical information for the central database. After that, participation in the digital archive will be optional - artists who elect to participate will also be able to choose whether to record their thoughts, ideas and methodology in a blog-style journal, an audio recording or a video diary. An attractive old water tower in the grounds of the main house is being refurbished as a hub for the project, but, if they prefer, artists will be able to access ArtLog from the privacy of their own bedrooms.

The technology involved is complex, and has been developed in conjunction with the Digital Media Centre at Dublin Institute of Technology - but the idea, says Donlon, is to keep the interface as simple as possible in order to encourage everyone to have a go.

"This is the age of the finished product," she says. "We see paintings appear in galleries as if they just leapt on to the canvas fully formed; books appear, but the author's draft versions of the manuscripts simply disappear. It's becoming more and more difficult to capture the process of creativity. Nobody writes letters any more. They write e-mails, but nobody archives their e-mails. What will be left for scholars who come along in 20, 23, 40 years time, wanting to inquire into the thought processes of a particular writer or visual artist? Nothing."

Nothing, pretty much, is what remains of the 4,000-plus artists who have stayed at the Tyrone Guthrie Centre since it opened in 1981. True, the walls are crammed with paintings donated by grateful residents, and signed copies of books dot the library shelves - but, by and large, all that's left of the artists who've passed through are their signatures in the visitors' book. Which is, according to Donlon, a crying shame.

"For 25 years, Annaghmakerrig straddled the culture on this island as a non- sectarian, non-political haven where people from both North and South could come and work together," she says.

MOST OF THE poets of the northern movement have stayed at some stage - but then so has just about everybody who is anybody on the Irish cultural scene, from Seamus Heaney and Frank McGuinness to Tom MacIntyre and John Jordan. The absence of any formal attempt to track, or even register, all this creativity strikes Donlon as a kind of wilful amnesia.

"You know how upset we get when somebody close to us loses their memory, gets Alzheimer's? The pain and grief around that is enormous," she says. "Well, we're talking about our cultural memory here. If Irish art is a mosaic of little pieces, we have to keep all those pieces. And the tiny pieces are as important as the big ones because they hold the whole thing together."

Annaghmakerrig is, she argues, particularly well-placed to host an archive such as ArtLog. "Where else do you have artists from different backgrounds working side by side for a period of time? It's extraordinary how intently people work here. Everyone is in a state of heightened productivity. There's an idea among people who've never been to the Tyrone Guthrie Centre that artists spend their time swimming in the lake and having parties. But parties only happen after the day's work is done - and the day's work is often long and intense.

"There are no distractions here, no excuses. You see it in people's eyes at the dinner table. They're shattered from this total focus on whatever it is they're trying to do. But then they start chatting to each other and, because they're in this state of heightened activity, they're receptive to ideas and they generate ideas. It's like a synergy happens. It's not that they feed off each other, but they fire each other."

The synergy often happens in unexpected ways. In a studio at the back of the main house - one of a series of workspaces situated in what was once a row of stables - a visual artist is packing up her paintings and getting ready to leave after a three-week stay. To judge by the number of completed works, she has had a productive time, but what really got her going, she says, was the interaction with fellow-artists.

A poet got into the habit of calling round to her studio every afternoon for coffee and an impromptu reading - she points to a painting inspired directly by these poems - while a chance encounter with the traditional singer, Liam Ó Maonlaí, gave her the idea for the whole series of paintings in the first place. It is, in fact, a not uncommon experience for artists to begin with one idea and find it emerging as something completely different. And that, says Donlon, is exactly what ArtLog aims to record; it aims to be a portrait of a changing mind.

The Tyrone Guthrie Centre has itself, as she points out, changed quite considerably over the years.

"When the house opened first, it was for writers - there was just one studio," she says. "Now we have six studios, and are in the process of converting one space into three more by dividing a very long barn area. We also have a performance space which was opened last year and is used by theatre groups, dancers, choreographers, people who need to make a lot of noise. Also last year, Phil Coulter gave us a piano, so now we can have two composers in residence at any given time."

The house is also active in an international series of artist exchange programmes. It's this diversity which, Donlon insists, gives Annamaghkerrig its creative edge.

Over the past four months the centre has been closed to visitors while it got the kind of rewiring and electrical makeover necessary to bring an old house into line with modern health and safety legislation. When it reopens on February 4th, it will, Donlon hopes, boast an extra soundproof space. She also has plans, at a future date, to install a ceramic studio and kiln facilities to entice potters and ceramic artists into the Monaghan mix.

DONLON HAS BEEN a regular visitor to the house since she first came as a young librarian to catalogue its eclectic collection of books. Her years as director of the National Library in Dublin have also, clearly, influenced her ambitions for ArtLog.

But she's keenly aware that, as director of the Tyrone Guthrie Centre, her responsibilities aren't just to the future but to the house's tradition of gentle hospitality and - more importantly - to each successive set of visiting artists.

"It was very exciting to be offered the job here - and very terrifying," she says. "When you love a place as much as I love this one, you realise it's a very precious and slightly delicate thing. It wouldn't take that much to destroy what's here. I would like to leave a legacy, but the most important thing is to protect, preserve and deepen the experience for people who come here. We can't really change it - and I don't want to change it."

Watching Donlon laughing and chatting as she grabs a bowl of soup in the kitchen, surrounded by artists, it's obvious that she feels completely at home in her role as director, and that she can play the role of genial host to perfection. Except, she confesses, that it's not a role.

"I've only been here for a year, but I feel as if I've never lived any place else," she says. "I was astonished the first time I ever came to Monaghan. I thought: 'Why has nobody ever told me about this? It's a stunning landscape, and the people are so friendly and funny.'

"And I'm learning a lot of new words. My family laugh when I talk about 'going up to Dublin'. They say: 'Oh, for goodness sake, Mum, it's down.' "

The easy, relaxed atmosphere at Annaghmakerrig is helped along by the five-star food provided by local cook Lavinia McAdoo, by the beautiful gardens, by the comfortable, thoughtfully furnished bedrooms, and of course by the serene presence of the lake itself. But aren't some artists inevitably going to be concerned about the implications of the new digital presence that will be ArtLog?

"Oh, yes," says Donlon cheerfully. "Some people have welcomed it with open arms, and some have been very suspicious." But, she adds, what ArtLog is not is just as important as what ArtLog is.

"I think there's a feeling that it's yet another modern management device to keep tabs on people, another level of bureaucracy - and that is the last thing it's meant to be. It's for posterity, not for account-keeping now. It's not a device that's going to be used either for or against the artist. It's a personal archive that is private to the house until such time - and these are issues that still have to be ironed out - as it's made available to genuine researchers.

"It's trying to replace the sort of stuff people used to scribble in notebooks, letters diaries, trying to fill that gap in an authentically digital way. Now some artists never scribbled during their lifetimes, and some artists will never want to participate in ArtLog, and we have to be totally sanguine about that. It will undoubtedly evolve as the years go by, and we have to be sanguine about that too. And it may fail gloriously."

She pauses, a spoonful of soup poised in mid-air. "But I think it's worth the effort."