media release – media release –media release – media Release
Drawing the Water
By
Pauline O’Connell
a premiere
in collaboration with curator.ie
8pm, 23th June, 2012.
Community Hall, Milltown, Co. Kerry
Commissioned by Kerry County Council for Milltown under the Per Cent for Art Scheme with funding from the Department of the Environment, Community and Local Government, filmed and produced in Kerry, O’Connell’s new HDV takes inspiration from a social water scheme circa 1860 locally known as The Spout. It was filmed by Ciarán Walsh in September, on location in Milltown and in a studio in Ballyheigue. Post production was managed by Ciarán Walsh at EYEBALL publishing in Ballyheigue.
This year long project focused it’ attention on the imagined, historic, and living memory in relation to aspects of community gathering, time and memory in relation to The Spout.
Working in collaboration with the local primary and secondary schools, using a discursive framework with members of the community O’Connell researched the Victorian model of benevolence as an instrumental part of it’s creation.
The function of this inconspicuous public water source became more than it’s obvious function. It operated as a multi scaled device whereby the individual not only drew the physical water it was the receptacle for sharing information located in the local / global nexus (a time when emigration was strong).
Photo by Siobhan Dempsey, Latitude Imaging. Props by Leo Finucane, Moyvane.
The film imagery adopts a sedate pace to heighten it’ aesthetic powers and act as a defence transcending the drudgery experienced in order to focus attention to a rebirth of conscience. Today we are faced with similar problems regarding the purity, safety and privatisation of our public water schemes.
The standpoint of the worker and their positionality opens a dialectic relationship between the particularity and universality of the subject of indigenous and regional ways of life. A question mark hovers as to what will become of global inhabitants as this new urban world superimposed on the rural is created – have we transcended the drudgery of having to draw pure water from wells and springs 151 years later?
O’Connell’s fascination with local knowledge’ since her own “blow-back” to her native Kilkenny 8 years ago examines local cultures, politics of place and place construction alongside modes of social relating.
In this way O’Connel has culminated the project screening concurrent with a free and open Ceilidh event that evening in the Community Hall in Milltown so as to gather the ideal of community.
Pauline O’Connell
Pauline O’Connell was born in 1971 in Kilkenny. She studied Fine Art at Dun Laoghaire College of Art Design & Technology and presently is undertaking her MA in Socially Practice & The Creative Environment at Limerick School of Art & Design. She has been involved in numerous public art projects in Waterford, Sligo, Kilkenny and Vienna, teaching at primary and third level, curating Master-classes for the Fire Station Artists Studios, Dublin and critical reviewing for Circa Magazine. She exhibited ”Delicate Tissue” in New York which related to the folklore regarding crossroads as a site of unmarked children’ graves. At L’ecole des Beaux Arts in Paris her silver and rubber heart series was the cause of much contemplation and appraisal. For the past 19 years O’Connell has adopted a socially engaged art practice that informs her research through dialogue with individuals and community, in, for example Langa a South African township and in a north Thai rural village near Kanchanaburi. These ideas have relevance to a place or memory of place resulting with art events, publications, temporary and permanent artworks.
Further information;
Vincent O’ Shea, Public Art Coordinator Kerry County Council
E. infoirl@indigo.ie T. 087 2384599
Pauline O’Connell, Artist
E. paulinefire@gmail.com T 056 7759994, M. 086 3893156
