BG2

In 2005, seventeen artists were awarded commissions through two commissioning strands of the second phase of Breaking Ground, BG2, the Ballymun Regeneration per cent for art scheme.

Collaborative Commissions

Jeannette Doyle, John Byrne, Mick O’Kelly, Michael McLoughlin & Gillian Kenny, Joyce Duffy, Desperate Optimists, Seamus Nolan, David Jacques, Cecily Brennan, and Linda Quinlan were commissioned to make work through the Collaborative Commissions strand.

There was no specific brief for this strand, but artists were asked to make work that questioned or commented on issues pertinent to daily life in a community such as Ballymun, in the context of the major changes that are taking place here, and in the wider context of Ballymun as part of the capital city.

The selection panel for these commissions was John Carson (chair), Alice Maher, Arts Council nominee, Sean Lynch, SSI nominee, Peter McVerry SJ, BRL/BG2 nominee, Dean Scurry and Janice Feighery, artists from Ballymun, Evelyn Hanlon, Head of Finance, BRL and Aisling Prior, Director, BG2. The panel met over two full days and assessed over eighty submissions from artists and twenty six expressions of interest from local groups.

Some artists worked with people who are members of local support or community groups, including women who are recovering from drug addiction, members of a traveller group, and of two youth groups. Other artists made their own connections locally and engaged and collaborated with people in various ways.

Jeannette Doyle worked on a portraiture project, with sixteen women from the Star project, a resource for women over-coming drug addiction. Gillian Kenny and Michael McLoughlin worked with residents of the St Margaret’s Travellers’ housing scheme, and other people in Ballymun. Desperate Optimists made a short film in Ballymun with a cast of 150 local residents.
David Jacques will devise a project with teenagers from the after-school ‘Aisling’ project and from the youth centre Geraldstown House. Joyce Duffy is interested in making new work that examines the role of the police and other custodians of power and control, and subject of civil rights in Ireland. Seamus Nolan is researching local environmental, waste management and recycling initiatives. John Byrne, Mick O’Kelly, Cecily Brennan and Linda Quinlan are earlier on in their considerations.

The Collaborative Commissions strand was devised in response to the growing number of socially engaged art practice/ art-in-the-community diploma courses, primary and post-grad degrees being offered through the art colleges both in Ireland and in the UK. However, not only does this commissioning strand offer an opportunity for artists and curators to try to implement, or challenge, the theory propagated, it also provides an actual forum through which the validity of art commissioning with per cent for art funds in areas of economic disadvantage can be analysed and critiqued.

It also takes the work achieved through Breaking Ground I an important step further. Through the education and training strand of BG1, a number of artists were commissioned to share their skills in order to facilitate local people’s creativity (such as commissions awarded to writer Lia Mills, sculptor Dave Kinane, photographer Perry Ogden, artist and print maker Mary Fitzgerald). These artists chose to suspend their own art practice proper during the course of the commission in order to work with others.

The Collaborative Commissions strand of BG2 set the challenge to artists to make work that is indivisible from their on-going art practice. It supports the development of that practice and facilitates an expansion of that practice. The commissioned artist is the author of the resulting artwork(s). The term collaboration is used loosely, with artists being asked to consider the nature and terms of ‘collaboration’ and how their work can engage with potential co-authors, collaborators, participants, co-makers, other artists, empathisers and supporters etc.

In preparation for this new body of commissions, an extensive series of informal consultative meetings was held between BG2 and community activists and workers interested in participating in the commissioning programmes. These consultation sessions were followed by visual presentations by BG2 and by community groups to interested artists. It was important to counter, from the outset, the unrealistic expectations that some people may have had over the capacity or appositeness of contemporary visual artists to fix things, to put right social or economic injustice.



Download Phase 2 call for entries here










To contact Breaking Ground:


Ray Yeates, Artistic Director


ray.yeates@axis-ballymun.ie


Tel (01) 883 2100