Is it a bird? Is it a plane? Or is it a “sculptural installation?” The words on several lips at Galway’s Spanish Arch yesterday as an enormous inflatable red ball colonised the medieval architectural landscape.
RedBall Project, as it is called by North American artist Kurt Perschke, began its artistic life in St Louis, Missouri, and has visited 18 cities before arriving in Galway for the annual arts festival.
Made of heavy duty fabric, it inflates in just under an hour and elicits all sorts of reactions.
"RedBall represents the immediate creative impulse embedded in all of us – the simple act of seeing afresh,"its creator says.
"I take it to three cities a year, so before this it was in Rennes in France, and it will go to Montreal, Canada, in September," says Perschke.
He visited Galway a year ago to research sites. RedBall is usually commissioned by festivals as a form of public or street art.
“Sometimes we are illegal – as in Spain’s Barcelona – so it spans the gamut,” says Perschke. “We were expecting to be detained and we were just down the road from the military police...but then they kinda liked it,” laughs Perschke.
Narrow streets
In Rennes it squeezed itself between 16th-century half-timber buildings in narrow medieval streets and occupied the entrance to leading French newspaper
Ouest-France
. Someone in Spanish Arch suggested it might be usefully employed “locking those TDs into Leinster House”.
It can be caught, not quite literally, from 11am to 6pm daily in Galway at Druid Lane, Quay Street, today; Church Lane tomorrow; the seaside shelter on Salthill’s Promenade on Sunday; in a location “as yet to be confirmed” on Monday; by the river Corrib on Tuesday; and outside the Town Hall Theatre next Wednesday.
Perschke is inviting members of the public to label or “hashtag” all their photos and posts on his project as #RedBallProject across all social media.
The Galway International Arts Festival and Galway Fringe continue for another week.
www.giaf.ie
www.galwayfringe.ie
