Rachel Andrews, Writer in Residence - Arttrail'08

Rachel Andrews

Writer in Residence Arttrail

Response to Arttrail 2008

7.04.09

The most quiescent place in Cork right now lies on a stretch of land framed by
water to its left and roadway on its right. The water, lapping up against the
quays, forms the uppermost part of Cork Harbour, the last deep water berthing
point before the river begins its wandering journey in and through the city. When
I was a child the passenger ferries used to dock along these quays; I remember
them white and high and exciting. To say that nothing of such excitement happens
here any more would be incorrect, smaller sail boats still take pause at the
quaysides, cruise ships come and go, and early last summer fishermen, protesting
their dwindling livelihoods, set up a blockade in the city harbour, for two days
their stopped, silent boats a spread of colour against the jaded yellow-greys of
the industrial surrounds.

But for the most part, aside from those who take the sailboat tours, or the odd
lonely drinker, the people of Cork have little cause currently to frequent the
City Quays. Although the docklands continues to chug out its remaining days as a
working port, most of the important trading traffic has moved downriver, and the
left-behind mills and warehouses stand empty and unused. Sombre and strangely
elegant, gone quiet and into a time of their memories, these buildings exist now
in a temporary world, somewhere between a half-forgotten past and a still
uncertain future.

Some time ago, I walked the roads that encircle this hesitant space. On a
mission, I suppose, of rediscovery, I started down at Albert Quay, straddling two
different worlds. Look one way, and there is the traffic pushing past. Look the
other, and there is the water, unmoved as ever. Docklands is a place where the
old and new do not yet interact, although the beginnings of such an entanglement
suggest themselves in the recent arrival to the area of Murray O’Laoire
Architects, whose offices appear soon after the turn onto Victoria Road and whose
windows look out onto the sculptural forms opposite. In the evenings, these
professionals join with students and dock workers for drinks in the popular Idle
Hour pub and it is at those nuanced, after sunlight times when there first
appears a chance of this strange semi-land becoming a hustling, living place.

But during the day, before pub opening hours, the location mostly has about it a
detachment - a disconnect really - that belies both its ten minute walk from the
city centre and any comings and goings of activity from the residential terraces
on neighbouring Albert Road. Frozen in a time twenty years gone, this is a place
apart now, with little to do with anything except for itself.

I turned left, onto Centre Park Road, all long and straight, flanked by the
gaspings of an industrial heartland. Tyre centres, oil companies, car sales
factories. The constant tap tap of manufacturing, a sound I’m unsure of, a sound
unfamiliar. Signs, warning care and caution: No Smoking, No Entry, Caustic Soda,
Premises Patrolled. The grey squat chemical containers, the grey high chimneys,
the grey warehouses, overhead the grey rolling sky.

Grey is no longer the right fit for Docklands. The colours it lives in now, in
multiple drawings and planning documents, are light, airy, weightless. They are
the colours of an effortless, cosmopolitan society that meets around coffee
tables and strolls on the promenade. They are the colours of parks, and
streetscapes and universities and culture. They are the colours of official
fantasies, part of a template of redevelopment intent on overhauling the area and
hurtling Cork forward so that it, too, becomes one of those much-envied,
post-industrial, ardently 21st century cities where citizens are invited to live
and work and visitors come to play.

Right now, these fantasies appear largely confined to the landscape of
discussion. Although the Cork City Development Plan, on which the strategic
vision for Docklands is based, was launched five years ago, the interminable
nature of the Irish planning process, with its merry-go round series of
applications and objections, and its political tugs-of-war, combined with the
onset of recession, has left most observers ruefully pessimistic about the
immediate, or mid-term possibility of regeneration in the area. In cyberspace, on
blogs and in discussion forums, the mood is particularly gloomy. “I think it is
safe to say: Cork Docklands RIP,” wrote one contributor to an architectural
website not so long ago. There are no keepers of the docklands. The
disillusionment is complete.

***
On a cold, bright afternoon in September, against a backdrop of floating seagulls
and a spread of hard landscape rolling out into hills and houses, a white Ford
Transit van spins on an axis outside a place colloquially known as the Blue
Warehouse, a Japanese balladeer crooning out from a recording alongside. The
audience is small, entranced, and there is something almost fundamental about
this strange, short performance, the birth child of nomadic Japanese artist
Hironari Kubota, who periodically disassembles cars in order to understand them
and their place in society today.

Kubota’s choice of the Ford van is obvious, a memorial to an industry that once
beat at the heart of Cork, an excavation of a city essential. But in transforming
cold, dead material into something harbouring vivid spirit, Kubota has also found
a way to transform space. As the van turns and turns again, the artist’s creation
impacts outwards, onto the mounds of heaped tyres to the side, onto the tall,
disused silos standing imposing and helpless, onto the expanse of yard beneath.
Instead of acting as background to Kubota’s theatrical display, these objects
begin to form part of it, becoming, with each spin, a fused mixture of shape and
colour that adds depth and texture to the performance. In this manner, function
and definition give way to image and idea, allowing, through a simple change of
context, for interrogation, examination, for renewal.

Cork’s annual ArtTrail festival, of which Kubota was part, took hold of the Blue
Warehouse over a month-long period last autumn, succeeding Corcadorca theatre
company, which had staged its summer production in this, the former Southern
Fruit Warehouse, just a few months previously. The site, an extensive two acres
pushing down onto the waterfront, is the property of developer Howard Holdings,
which has cannily situated itself in prime dockland locations – it purchased the
11 acre Ford Vehicle Distribution Centre on Centre Park Road in 2006 – in order,
one imagines, to maximise its profits when redevelopment finally kicks off. The
collaboration between culture and big business is thus temporary, periodic. But
this moment, this pause for thought, has opened up a space, during which the
building has been recontextualised, reconsidered. In doing so, it has pulled ajar
a door, and perhaps something – an idea, an intention, an emotion - has moved
through it.

On the way into the festival centre, the first thing is the caravan. A little to
the side of the warehouse entrance, a grey space, a sad sanctuary. Much of the
story of the artwork, From Where to Here, is on the inside - the neglected
toothbrush, the lonely plants, the ache at the heart of the soulful singer on the
radio. The missing, nomadic resident. Teresa Gillespie, installation creator, has
something to say about the protective walls needed by all, the human urge to
forge even a melancholic domesticity out of a chaotic, rambling existence. This
is space turned into place, shabby and small, but a somewhere.

From the inside confines, the outside becomes an undefined blend of sound and
colour: the slim line of a branch, dressed in red and purple, arriving at the
window, a blackbird’s head cocked, a flash of yellow and black. The fragile
entity rattles and shakes – is it the passing trucks, or could it be something
more sinister? Like Kubota’s van, this artwork is changing its surrounding space,
but here it is the inside place, self-contained, disassociated, that disturbs the
outside, turning it blurred, hidden, insecure.

It turns out there may be some keepers of the Docklands. While planners and other
officials debate and wait, the artists have become the transient protectors of
the area. They are the explorers, organising expeditions into this unfamiliar
territory, recasting unwelcoming locations as theatrical spaces, rehearsal units,
or small, intimate galleries. It is not for nothing that the National Sculpture
Factory, located on the periphery of Docklands, and an evident intersection point
between this outlying space and the city centre, recently put together its own
excursion into the location, inviting audiences to view the place through the
prism of three large-scale art projects: the four red balloons, balancing,
weightless, atop the dense, heavy structures of old, the sea-container, suspended
between the land and the water, and the horse-drawn tour of the old locale, with
its shaman-like driver, communing with the spirit of docklands past.

Now, next, the black of the room. The silence. Then the light. Colour breaking
out into white. Off. On. Then off again.

In a distant corner, tucked in, the three screens. We stand, far back, in the
dark. The time is the night before leaving. The fragments of sounds and images
are those of the imagination, captured from the fantasies of a future place, the
place of destination.

The artists, Anthony Kelly and David Stalling, have, like Kubonara, considered
the city’s past. This waterfront was once a place of parting and arrival. Now
emotion and memory have distilled into dreams. In this work, The Act of Leaving,
the waves of sound and dancing lights are catching at the ephemeral. They, rather
than that to which they are alluding, are a thing of beauty.

In an artwork centred on light and sound, the considerations are also about space
and time. The time we spend in the blackness. The darkness surrounding. A space
in bulk, narrowed down to a single focus through a triptych illuminated.

These artists, these visionaries have found another way of seeing. The warehouse
space is not so much transformed - although the darkness, in its density, appears
almost incarnate - as reconceived. The environment has been observed, the
imaginings and projections encouraged, the undertaking sincere.

***

In the 2008 programme, the ArtTrail organisers wrote that their festival would
succeed if it opened up ‘new possibilities, new conversations, new ideas and new
collaborations’. On my quiet afternoon walking, the festival sign, simple black
and white on a wire fence, and at other locations throughout the city, suggested,
at the very least, a new possibility for the structures it was defining. The
central location of the Blue Warehouse, held in check behind that wire fence, was
no longer the remains of a cold storage container, it had instead become a kind
of blank, onto which different meanings and intentions had been projected.

If the hiatus in development at Cork Docklands has had a benefit, it is that the
artists have been given the time to reflect, in the absence of political pressure
or interference, on a landscape in transition. The long-term impact of this
reflection is still difficult to quantify. Perhaps the artist connection is a
fleeting one, merely a moment in time. Or perhaps it has paved a way for a
certain approach, a certain attitude, which may have its place in encouraging
thoughtfulness over expediency when the throttle of construction work finally
starts up in the area.

If nothing else, and at the very least, a conversation appears to have been
started with a surrounding layered deep in things to say. The artists have asked
questions of Docklands and it has responded. The process of listening to those
answers has now begun.