Kells in Co Kilkenny is the setting for a visual arts event the entire community has embraced. Its project manager, Valerie Mullally, talks to Aidan Dunne
Sculpture at Kells is as grassroots an arts initiative as one could imagine. That's Kells, Co Kilkenny, by the way, where, annually since 1998 (bar one cancellation because of the foot-and-mouth outbreak), the community has thrown itself with remarkable zeal into organising and staging a major outdoor sculptural exhibition to coincide with the Kilkenny Arts Festival.
Representative selections of major works by such art world luminaries as Barry Flanagan, Elizabeth Frink, Lynn Chadwick and Peter Randall Page have found their way to the picturesque setting of the ruins of Kells Priory on the banks of the King's River.
The event's project manager is Valerie Mullally, a role she has fulfilled from the beginning despite, as she says, having absolutely no art-world background or experience. What she does have is an admirably pragmatic attitude, an air of not suffering fools gladly, and intricate local knowledge, which means that no matter what logistical support is required she immediately knows who will have the talent, the skill or machinery required. As she puts it, with a wry smile: "I've raised three boys. There's nothing I can't do at a moment's notice." In fact, since 1998 she has amassed a wealth of experience in the specialised business of exhibition organisation.
It's fair to say that it all began by chance. The sculptor Ann Mulrooney, just out of college, had a body of work she was interested in showing. She asked the Kilkenny Arts Festival if they might have a suitable venue but got no response. Gabriel McGuinness, an art collector based in Kilkenny, was in the habit of walking out around the priory in Kells and knew that it is a setting both beautiful and relatively little known. He suggested that she and a few friends stage their own exhibition there. They looked for a local willing to show Mulrooney around, which is where Mullally came in.
The convergence of these three individuals was fortuitous. The first exhibition featured work by Mulrooney and friends she invited, including Helen Comerford. It worked out so well they thought they might do it again. Mulrooney's curatorial flair is rooted in her generous responsiveness to the work of other sculptors. McGuinness had art-world connections and a persuasive manner. The next show featured four substantial Frink bronzes, making it probably the best display of Frink's work to date in Ireland. Next year again, McGuinness persuaded Barry Flanagan to take on the role of distinguished guest. Kells managed to host a show of his work direct from exhibition in New York.
It was around then that Mullally realised the event had somehow moved into a different league. Flanagan and a sizeable deputation from the London foundry that cast his work turned up on site. "My job", Mullally recalls, "was to keep Barry distracted when our crew was positioning his huge sculpture of a drumming hare. We find it's best to keep the artists away when you're manhandling their work. They can get a bit uneasy. So I was in Shirley's pub with Barry and the guys from the foundry. The Arts Council had stipulated that the artist's fee for each exhibitor was £28.30. I handed over £28.30 to Barry and explained that it was his fee. He looked at me for a minute, then he said: 'You are a very interesting person.' We immediately drank the money between us. Then, just as I thought I'd done a great job in keeping him distracted, he looked at his watch and said: 'I think we've given them long enough, will we go see how they're getting on?' He knew all along."
McGuinness's contribution has been invaluable, she points out.
"Really, with no money and nothing to offer, we could never have gotten the artists we did without him," she says. "His personal contacts made it possible. And really the artists have been terrific. They have understood what we are trying to do, they accept the fact that we have not been able to pay them properly, that we have no expert technicians or all the other stuff - whatever it is - that they are used to. But you know, now, if we had the money, I wouldn't spend it on technicians, or parades, or firework displays.
"What we do is a sculpture show, that's where the money should go, and if we had more I'd put it into producing a good colour catalogue."
There are tensions involved in looking for public funding. Funding bodies such as the Arts Council inevitably have their own agendas. "The show we want to put on may not be what they want in Dublin. But I know we can do a show and 90 per cent of the people who come to it will get something from it. Make it too difficult, too art-world orientated, and you lose them at the beginning. One of the first things Ann had to point out to me was that the pieces were not statues, as we were calling them, they were sculptures. This year, as it happens, most of the work is not like that, it's more things you have to think about. I still like bronze, stone - big stuff."
The heart of Sculpture at Kells seems to be in Shirley's Bar in Kells. "That's where it all happens," Mullally agrees. "Even initially, the Arts Council looked for minutes of our meetings. I wasn't sure if we had meetings, never mind minutes. We were just talking in Shirley's."
She is not exaggerating. The process is exceptionally organic and unforced. People come and go as needed, and they seem to know when they are needed. The Tidy Towns committee swings into action a fortnight before the show, for example. Of course, there is a consistent core. Apart from Mullally, McGuinness and Mulrooney (now based in London) there are Pauline O'Connell, Matt White and Vincent Dempsey, for example. How many on the committee? "That depends," Mullally hedges, cautiously. One feels she is innately suspicious of committees, meetings and bureaucracy.
"For me personally, meeting so many people has been interesting. Of course," she adds, "you get a doozy every year. That's to be expected."
For their part, artists have fallen under the spell of Kells. When they turn up for site meetings they usually end up joining the poker session at Shirley's - "though they don't usually have much money, so they're not great for poker".
One of the town's virtues is its lack of mobile phone reception, enhancing its sense of being a bit apart. "I remember Brian Connolly showed one year and stayed overnight with us. In the morning we shook hands and he set off with his bag. He called into Shirley's, just to say goodbye. He was still there at five that evening when we looked in. And at eleven. He came back home and stayed over. I think it took him about five days to leave."
People in Kells are surprisingly responsive to even difficult work, she feels. And her own attitudes have changed over the years. "Some pieces you look at and appreciate as ideas, even though you think, on a technical level, you could have done them yourself. Others you can appreciate technically even though you may not warm to the end result. I think you become more tolerant, less dismissive. That's true of people in Kells generally, though for some people, making fun of things is part of the appeal. There's nothing wrong with that."
The event's fortunes changed last year when, in partnership with the Welsh village of Pontrhydfendigaid, it won a substantial grant from Interreg, an EU-backed funding organisation that supports projects linking Wales and the Irish South East. The grant, worth close to €200,000 over a two-year period, is to fund two co-operative exhibitions. The first, Strata, curated by Mulrooney and Welsh artist Tim Davies, and featuring work by 12 artists, has just ended a run at Pontrhydfendigaid and opens at Kells on August 14th during the Kilkenny Arts Festival.
Mullally is keen that artists provide a way into their work, particularly in a community context, and most, she has found, are ready and able to talk about what they do. As she sees it: "For most people, art is an extra in life. Like sport. They don't play, but they can follow the rules, and involvement expands and enriches their lives. But in the art world, it's as if the language is in code. We're trying to break into that in a small way."
Strata, this year's Sculpture at Kells exhibition, is at Kells Priory, Co Kilkenny, Aug 14-28