RMH
ellievsbear
No title available
Aqua Utopia｜海の底で記憶を紡ぐ
almost home
oozey mess
🪼
One Nice Bug Per Day
#extradirty
wallacepolsom
Misplaced Lens Cap
Xuebing Du
No title available
No title available
taylor price
todays bird
h
$LAYYYTER
No title available
Product Placement
seen from Malaysia
seen from United Kingdom
seen from Kenya
seen from Italy
seen from Japan
seen from Germany
seen from India
seen from United States
seen from United Kingdom
seen from Japan
seen from United States
seen from United States
seen from Italy
seen from Netherlands
seen from Canada
seen from United States
seen from United States
seen from Indonesia
seen from Singapore
seen from Malaysia
@mrulster
The major walls in Belfast known as the “peace lines” that are supposed to separate Catholic majority and Protestant majority neighborhoods
There are about 100 'peace walls' in Belfast still, a quarter century after the Belfast/Good Friday Agreement.
𝐂𝐨𝐭𝐭𝐨𝐧 𝐏𝐫𝐢𝐦𝐚𝐫𝐲 𝐒𝐜𝐡𝐨𝐨𝐥 Cotton Primary School was a co-educational primary school located on the outskirts of Bangor, Northern Ireland. The school aimed to provide a supportive and inclusive environment for children aged four to eleven and followed the Northern Ireland Curriculum. Opening in 1969, this school replaced an older building that was on the opposite side of the road. While it was only a two-teacher school, at one stage it served up to 40 students from Bangor, Groomsport, Conlig and Donaghadee. Full report here: https://urbexhub.com/cotton-primary-school/
St. Stephen’s Green, Dublin, 1964. From the Budapest Municipal Photography Company archive.
Harry Gruyaert, County Kerry, Ireland, 1988
Discovering the amazing images by Robert John Welch (1859-1936) of the visual history of shipbuilding in Northern Ireland (via Capturing Northern Ireland's dynamic shipbuilding history | Art UK)
The Good Relations Team at Ards & North Down Borough Council and Neep Pictures produced a thought-provoking animated video on sectarianism. (The enmity between pepperoni and pineapple on pizza lovers.)
Worth watching and rewatching.
According to tradition, Santa Claus comes from which of the following places:
• North Carolina
• Northern Ireland
• North Pole
(As seen on RTE Sunday morning programme)
3D render based on a 1855 vintage Ireland map.
"Before you judge someone, walk a mile in their shoes first. After that, who cares? They are a mile away, and you still have their shoes."
—Billy Connolly, The Guardian
"Good advice is a bit like a bowl of sprouts at a dinner party. You don't always fancy taking some for yourself, but you're happy to pass it on to others."
—Mark Rice-Oxley, The Guardian
"If you're drowning in the middle of the ocean, a floating piece of driftwood is a pretty big deal."
—JoshWorth.com
"Neurologically speaking, we really only deal with matter of a certain size and energy of a few select wavelengths. For everything else, we have to make up mental models and see if they match up to the tiny shreds of hard evidence that actually feel real."
—JoshWorth.com
"An album is a form of presenting photos, while a photo book means story telling by means of the photos."
—Kacper Kowalski
I believe for the most part you can trust respected medical authorities. I believe I’m one of them, so I think you can trust me. But I would stick with respected medical authorities who have a track record of telling the truth, who have a track record of giving information and policy and recommendations based on scientific evidence and good data.
Anthony FAUCI
Music Unite: The Unexpected Journey
Muslim community and Loyalist flute band creating harmony through music
Loyalist flute bands and the Muslim community are two groups that may appear not to sit well together. There is however at least one thing that they both have in common -- due to negative stereotyping they both receive a great deal of hostility.
Since the beginning of this year, the Shankill Road Defenders Flute Band (SRD) has been working with Beyond Skin, an organisation that aims to unite different cultures and traditions through music and the arts. On 11 May the SRD played alongside artists from a variety of cultures, including Muslims in “Night to Unite”.
John Higgins, the SRD conductor, noted that the majority of the members of the band unhesitatingly wished to take part, seeing the occasion as a great opportunity to change negative perceptions of Loyalist flute bands. In many ways, the event symbolised the progress Northern Ireland has made in welcoming diversity. On Culture Night Belfast, 18 September, Beyond Skin and the Centre for Democracy and Peacemaking will be working again with the SRD to present Music Unite -- a performance by the SRD and international musicians.
As part of Community Relations and Cultural Awareness Week, a touring presentation called the Unexpected Journey has been developed between the SRD and a Kurdish (Muslim) musician.
Both have experienced animosity in relation to their cultures and this event will showcase and explore the insight the SRD has gained from working with musicians from various cultural backgrounds, including a discussion about the empathy shared between the SRD and the Kurdish musician. The presentation will also show how, through working together, they have gained a positive insight into each other’s culture.
The SRD first formed in 1957 and it is a melody flute band. The SRD have been All Ireland Champions and even marched on the fields of The Somme in France for the opening of the Somme Orange Memorial Obelisk.
By Adam Henry Magee.
Roe Valley Arts & Cultural Centre, Limavady; Friday 2 October 2015, 7.30pm
Originally published by CultureHUB, October 2015.
Silent Testimony: Exhibition by Colin Davidson
Somewhere between 1969 and 1994 is where the faces of the sorrowful but powerful stories of Colin Davidson’s recent project, Silent Testimony, are set. Mr Davidson shows us the people of Northern Ireland and holds a light up to the dark time of the Troubles. Colin shared some of his views and feelings with CultureHUB.
Upon entering the gallery we are met with the unfaltering gaze of Virtue Dixon and the harrowing story of her daughter Ruth celebrating her birthday in the Droppin’ Well Public House with friends. It was thee that in her final moments, the room collapsed around her in a time bomb attack. Witnesses claim to have heard the DJ playing ‘Happy Birthday’ to her at the exact moment the masonry had started to fall.
Horror, sadness and empathy take charge as you wander to each individual portrait. Graphic images stain the mind as you consider each story; a record sleeve belonging to that of young Terrance, strewn in the road beside a coach bombing on the motorway, the clock that now stands still in Paul Reily’s house since the moment he heard the news of his daughter Joanne’s death, the permanent and life debilitating injuries of Margaret Yeaman and Emma Anthony, the discovery of a body so tarnished by the earth after being found in a bog, that it was only by the gold cross hung around the neck that Walter Simon could confirm that it was his son Eugene who had been missing for 3 years.
You worked in partnership with cross-community victims’ support group WAVE throughout the project. I imagine that it would be very hard at times to meet these people and to learn of their stories. “I think it has actually changed me as a person even more than as an artist. The stories were harrowing to hear. I hope I have succeeded in channeling this emotion into the work. This is an exhibition, not rooted in the past. In fact it is very much about our ‘now’ in this place. This is the legacy of all conflict.”
“I started talking to people who had suffered loss through the Troubles here in 2010. It was important to me that this idea was not seen as patronising or unhelpful. WAVE have been a key ally in the whole quest. I started talking to them seriously about the project in 2013. The paintings took around 12 months to complete.”
How did these portraits compare to other projects? “Put simply -- the previous themes I chose to work within were born out of the need to be making a painting. The subject served this need. I looked for themes which would allow me to explore paint. Silent Testimony turned that aim, that need, on its head. The idea, the concept, came first. The paint served the idea for the first time in my practice.”
Bombings, torture, executions and such human suffering is with us here in the hushed stillness of the gallery. These faces in their silence testify with their eyes, and ghost-like shells smudged and altered by the pain of life. Using broad and rigid brush strokes, Colin brings us their day to day existence that we shan’t forget. Vacantly they look off into the distance to some other dimension, to perhaps a happier time with the ones that are gone.
It’s only when you stop and look down the length of the gallery that 18 pairs of eyes stare back, the convergence of their stare both bearing witness and giving us a sense of their loss. It can be assumed that Davidson joins them together in their sorrow, which helps to subtract that feeling of individual suffering from looking at the portraits as a singular thing. These images draw you into their world, their individual heartache, their Silent Testimony.
By Jasmine Daniels.
This exhibition runs from 5 June to 17 January 2016 in the Ulster Museum.
Originally published by CultureHUB, October 2015.
Without frontiers: A kiss of life
Eileen Weir of the Greater North Belfast Women’s Network made a telling observation when I met her at the Shankill Women’s Centre. She said, “The sectarian divide only exists for men.” In her 20 years of experience organising cross-community women’s groups in Tiger’s Bay, the New Lodge, Rathcoole, and at the Barron Hall in Newtonabbey, she’s discovered that working-class women are enable to cross sectarian frontiers and engage with each other in a way that’s inconceivable for their male peers for whom tribal allegiance weighs heavier. Next year, Eileen says, will be a particularly important time for community relations in Belfast, with the two centenary commemorations of the Somme and Easter 1916, which have the potential to drive wedges of suspicion and recrimination between communities.
Eileen thinks 2016 will be a real opportunity for the communities to reach a deeper understanding of each other’s cultures and traditions. She’s helping to collate a book where the women of New Lodge and Tiger’s Bay share their stories of positive collaboration and friendship in the face of fear and intimidation, entitled, Women’s Voices from behind the Barricades. Eileen, like all other social networks in Belfast, is getting her funding where she can at the moment. Community relations are taking place in a cashflow hiatus, just when community building has reached another critical juncture.
Chris O’Halloran, who took over the directorship of Forthspring Intercommunity Group in January, also presents me with a recent publication, Talking about the Troubles: an anthology of vivid anecdotes and vignettes collated by community co-ordinator Johnston Price and his team under the aegises of Forthspring’s “5 Decades Project”, which is determined to be a cross-community trove of testimony. Organised chronologically, it leads the reader through the decades of the Troubles to the Good Friday Agreement. Its coda of “we’re a bit happier”, while according well with the modest, bittersweet tone of the book, perhaps is still too optimistic.
Chris expressed his view that since the Good Friday Agreement, “community relations have been mainly stagnant,” but the fact that there was no major rioting at the Workman Avenue peace wall, next door to Forthspring on the Springfield Road, was seen as a minor mercy, given the large scale disturbances not far away in Woodvale. Chris may be realistic about the sectarian background, but he is not pessimistic. Forthspring runs three youth projects with half a million pounds worth of help from the Lottery Fund. There’s one inter-community youth group and one each for the Protestant and Catholic community, for kids who don’t feel ready to meet kids from ‘the other side’.
Truly transformative community relationships that can interfuse and remake each other require curiosity, courage and creativity. That’s why Chris is so full of praise for his artist in residence Fiona Lovely’s use of art, to help both kids and adults reimagine their environments beyond stereotypes and the toxic gestalt of the past. In particular, she likes to get people to make weird fashion, like the national dress of some brighter planet where people have never feared what others’ think, and flaunt themselves, wearing their hearts on their sleeves and sporting their memories in all their raggle-taggle splendour, patchworked into garments that are really mind goggling.
Deirdre Mackel, the arts manager at the Springfield Development Trust, is also keen to use art to explore memory and identity. She recently showed her own delicately crafted dresses, light as gossamer, snagged on barbed wire, fraught with childhood anxieties, at the Gerard Dillon Gallery at Cultúrlann. Deirdre expects artists to push boundaries in their own experience and take risks. This means that she’s extremely active in the community, facilitating art projects such as Labyrinth where kids from Whiterock, the Westrock Residents Association, and the Matt Talbot and Newhill Youth Clubs produced an alternative tourist guide to the Upper Springfield, chock-a-block with the secret knowledge of local kids and their worm’s eye view of their world.
Artists Charlotte Bosanquet, Deborah Malcomson and writer Brenda Murphy delivered the project. Bosanquet produced a book that is a witty reimagining of the communities, so should you want to wander the Shepherd’s Path, shake a leg in the Windy Gap or play with the Giant’s Foot, then Labyrinth is essential reading. Another project, Haiku, installed poems on billboards in prominent locations in West Belfast as well as in the markets, Lower Ormeau and Millfield.
In her most recent artistic collaboration, Deirdre facilitated a guerilla gardening project, where young and older people reclaimed an interface, anti-social hotspot and installed a pop-up garden, where ideas, passions and hopes come together for a moment, then are dismantled again. Deirde is enabling “creative conversations about heart-felt things”. She is “really optimistic about the power of art to create social change, both as a platform to address pressing social issues and to enhance how we see the world as an audience”.
Eileen, Chris, Fiona and Deirder work where the sectarian interface looms largest, but in the way they are transforming these spaces through art, community action and creative conversations, they are giving a kiss of life to the future. So while community relations may seem stuck in an impasse, bubbles of infections wit, joy and laughter are seething thick and fast through the old pot.
By Graham Higgin.
Originally published by CultureHUB, October 2015.
