Paul Seawright's exhibition The Map, which has opened at the Douglas Hyde Gallery, consists of a series of photographs taken last year at "one of Europe's largest public housing developments" - Tallaght. Those familiar with Seawright's work will know what to expect. He presents us with a vision of a disorientating, borderline environment, with edge-of-town spaces, which are both intimidating and strangely beautiful, and which are hard to categorise. Calm and deserted, they are caught in the eerie, other-worldly glow of artificial light by night, or coldly delineated in the hard, crisp light of day.
Seawright, who was born in Belfast and is based in South Wales, visited Tallaght over a period of several months last year. His is a distinctive take on the area. It departs from the conventions of social documentary, eschewing the familiar structures of pictorial narrative and aesthetics in favour of a more oblique, partial view. They reflect the uneasy boundaries where culture meets nature, where the neat lines of the planners' graphics translate into the reality of mud and concrete.
Interviewed by Declan Long as part of the documentation of the project, Seawright noted that some councillors expected photographs of burnt-out cars - expected the archetypal images of urban deprivation. He wasn't interested.
He was not, as he says, making a sociological document. In a telling phrase he explains "I'd say my work is more about the psychology of space."
The Map, though, is more than just another exhibition. Rather than merely depicting Tallaght, it is fair to say that the work originated in Tallaght and was directly addressed to the community, in the form of 20,000 copies of a publication reproducing the photographs in colour, and distributed to households in the area. It is, in fact, just one in an enormously ambitious series of 10 projects under the umbrella title In Context, devised and undertaken by South Dublin County Council.
Some of the constituent projects of In Context, including The Map and Chiaroscuro, a CD of a new work for string quartet by composer Stephen Gardner, premiered last November, are in a sense already complete. Others are still very much in progress. These include a residency by Eoin Nelson in Stewarts Hospital, in Palmerstown, where he is working with clients and visitors, Katherine Lamb's ambitious stained glass work A Lucan Portrait, to be situated in the entrance lobby to Lucan Library, and Lia Mills's writing project Loose Horses, which will incorporate six commissioned short stories, and will be distributed on the Web.
A significant innovation, Emily Jane Kirwan, South Dublin County Council's Arts Officer, points out, was the decision to pool the per cent for art funding, rather than treat every scheme as an entity. This provided an overall budget of £340,000. After the initial call went out in 1999, about 200 individuals responded, the vast majority of them visual artists. From this submission, 35 artists were given a nominal fee and invited to submit proposals, from which the 10 projects were eventually drawn.
"From the beginning," Kirwan explains, "we engaged directly with the artists and let them lead the briefs." This allowed an unprecedented degree of flexibility in terms of budgets, media and locations.
It also led to an exceptional level of interaction on the ground. Belfast-born composer Gardner, for example, drew on his own responses to the environment. The four movements of Chiaroscuro (recorded by the Hibernia String Trio and Michael d'Arcy), can be thought of as a portrait of place. One of Seawright's images adorns the CD cover and, like Seawright, Gardner vividly conjures up a sense of an edgy, exposed space. He relates the four movements to ideas of energy, uncertainty, melancholia and . . . I'm not sure what the last one is about." Premiered at the South Dublin County Council HQ, the work is available on CD, free to residents, from the County Library in Tallaght Town Centre. Several hundred people have so far availed of the offer.
In Lucan, Katherine Lamb enlisted and received the help of the Irish Air Corps to take aerial photographs as part of her composite stained glass portrait of the area, which incorporates a large number of portraits of local individuals, and is being made in collaboration with 20 students of Lucan Community College and Lucan Youth Reach. The Mermaid Project, an ambitious collaboration involving composer Roger Doyle, poet Nuala Ni Dhomhnaill and dancer and choreographer Cindy Cummins, has drawn involvement from local residents of Nigerian, Armenian, Russian and Chinese origin for a work based on themes of displacement, using the image of the mermaid as a metaphor.
THE remaining projects are also well-advanced. The artists involved are Michael Minnis, who, through the example of Killinardan community centre, is dealing with the way people take charge of their environment, Michael McLoughlin, who is examining the notion of the Ideal Home with members of the travelling community, and Alan Phelan, who is working on a set of short films drawing on aspects of the local history of Rathfarnham and Terenure (with actress Jennifer O'Dea). Taken overall, In Context can reasonably claim to be redrawing the map of public art.
Paul Seawright's exhibition The Map is at the Douglas Hyde Gallery until March 17th. Christine Redmond discusses her work at a seminar in the gallery on Wednesday, February 14th.
