As demolition begins today on the tower blocks in Ballymun, artist Liz Comerford has made one last visit to record her impressions in these empty shells, writes Anne Dempsey
'There is something about looking at other people's spaces," says artist Liz Comerford. "It's exciting. You feel you shouldn't really be there. For me it's the nearest thing to stealing sweets from my grandmother as a child. Also, you're not in control of what you see, usually you've very little time, so you're rushing round never knowing what you will find."
We are trundling creakily upward in a dark, malodorous lift in Thomas McDonagh Tower, Ballymun, Dublin. Over the months the tower is slowly emptying as families move into houses and duplexes nearby.
Ballymun Regeneration Limited (BLR) is creating a new town with quality homes, proper infrastructure and a good social mix, and Liz Comerford is employed by Breaking Ground, BLR's Per Cent for Art Commissioning Programme, to visit each block after the homes are vacated and before they are soft-stripped - removed of remaining furniture and fittings - and respond artistically to what she sees.
She has already had an exhibition of paintings at the Axis, Ballymun's arts centre, and has produced a boxed notebook of drawings for the BRL archive. Her project is one of many within the arts commissioning programme, the most ambitious to date by a local authority, and directly linked to the regeneration process.
Some 2,860 people have lived in Ballymun's 15 tower blocks, 19 eight-storey spine blocks, and 10 four-storey walk-ups; 500 families have moved into their own homes, with 1,400 new houses under construction in BRL's phase one and two.
So what sense of lived lives is captured from what's been left? We arrive at the 13th floor and step out on to a landing where walls bristle with graffiti memories and exhortations: "Anne & Richard 1982-2004"; "Leanne loves . . ."; "f*** the law, grow your draw"; "Terri, Sheila, Shauna, Mark".
The small flat we step into seems dignified in contrast. Hall and bedroom are papered in a soft violet, walls decorated with transfers - silver star, sun and moon. The view from the balcony is wonderful. Blue hills haze in the distance, below is a Monopoly board of streets, traffic and construction, with oases of new homes built around green crescent spaces. The McDonagh grass is marked by blackened blobs, each the legacy of a burnt-out car. Across the skyline are other tower and spine blocks, some now empty, others with balconies still hung with plants and washing.
"I've become fond of all the machinery down there, it looks like toys, manageable, then when you go back down again it's huge," comments Comerford.
She begins taking photographs. "The juxtaposition of the flats means that light comes in from one direction, so there can be a luminous effect on light and shade," she says. She snaps a soother on the draining board, two dried out dishcloths, one pink, one blue. There are pillowcases in the hot-press, an elastic stocking, Christmas paper and a tape of Niamh Kavanagh's In Your Eyes.
More tapes and spice jars of mint and cumin are under the kitchen sink, far fewer possessions here than are usually discarded, apparently. It's easy to feel voyeuristic.
"In other flats there is a largesse. This is quieter, so much is gone, the spareness of its space has a different message, there is no option but to go in a different direction, you're sneaking past yourself. There is an onus to find, so you're hunting for the little personal things like the soother," says Comerford.
"Some families leave the paper they've been given to pack up the stuff. Left in heaps it has a sculptured quality to it, and as I go round it has become a real motif, giving a recurring theme, which is nice." More public spaces, more graffiti, with someone called Deco ubiquitously present. "Pearse Tower is full of Bob," observes Comerford.
In gaining access she works in collaboration with Dublin City Councillor and relocation officer Conall McGlynn, whose main job is to help people move.
"Most people want to go but they can be sad to go," he says. "One man left over 2,000 books behind. We came to help another family move, and they stood up from the breakfast table, leaving sausages in the pan, cups and saucers on the table, all their furniture in the rooms and just walked out the door. They had everything new round in their new house and made a completely fresh start.
"One colleague says going into some flats is like being part of the Holocaust, as if everyone had to flee with what they stood up in."
We see homes like this later in the day. One still has curtains, carpets, sitting-room suite, bedclothes on the beds as if someone stepped on to the floor, make-up and talc on the dressing table, towels and tea towels in cupboards, kitchen drawers full of crockery, cutlery, glassware, unopened tins of soup and fruit in the presses, a child's pencil box with pens and pencils on a table beside an unopened bottle of sparkling white wine, as if bought for a celebration which didn't happen.
Some families still live in McDonagh. At one stage, on the stairwell, a voice asks, "who's there?" and four little heads pop round a corner. "We thought you were druggies," they say, relieved, and four small girls in school uniform clatter down the stairs in front of us.
In another flat, a child's bedroom gives directly on to an oppressive, jutting wall from an adjoining wing. "That wall opposite says to me 'I'm in gaol'," says Comerford. "In many flats you'll find parents have tried to cheer up this room with bright colours, painted rainbows, but nothing hides the force of that wall."
Later she explains the artistic process in translating her tower visitations into enduring images.
"The photos are the source materials, I draw almost everything from them and by the time I've finished I know the photographs by heart. I can be flummoxed about how to begin, but the drawings start the dialogue, they replicate the experiences I have here, and begin a suggested, unspecified storyline. The things go in, I wonder what they mean. I don't know about the lives of the people, and while the details suggest certain things, I stay in the not knowing.
"So an image might pop up when I'm working at home, doing the dishes, hoovering, whatever; later, another turns up and they start melding together. You work the only way you can and you have to believe the right image will come."
Her Axis exhibition featured paintings from Pearse tower and an earlier exploration in McDonagh. One painting shows two people dancing outside a tower block. An interior painting has a woman walking on her hands, with discarded shoes on the ground beside a doll's house. A dark study shows bikes on a staircase with a woman as if in flight; another has a crouching figure looking back into the lift. All figures are unclothed, giving a quality of abstraction, and many works hint at zaniness and anarchy.
"They examine an interaction between the people and the space and it was only later that I realised that they conveyed some of my role as the onlooker in an unfamiliar space," she says.
"I think it's important not to hide from the difficult part of Ballymun nor to convey a total Pollyannaish image. What came through for me was the resilience of the people, and with it the hope that they are moving now into a place in their lives where they may not have to dredge up that quality of resilience quite so often."
As we leave, I look down at the writing on a stair step below me. "Deco was here", it says.