Installation comprising video, photographs and text, a collaborative project with Maoliosa Boyle. The project began when we came across a local media piece on an elderly piano teacher in Limavady, Northern Ireland, who refused to sell a section of her garden to make way for a big redevelopment of the area.
Piano Teachers and Shopping Centres, (wall text) a collaborative installation with Maoliosa Boyle exhibited in Temple Bar, Jan 2002.
After working in the cattle market for a couple of hours we went off down the town in Limavady to get some lunch. We found a café at the end of one of those internal arcades popular in the 1970s. We ordered some chips and tea and sat down, studiously avoiding eye contact with the random salt pattern too close to the congealed dollop of ketchup. Observed in the harsh afternoon light of the post-lunch rush, both of us could remember more comforting greasy spoons than this. Jesus perhaps a squeaky clean controlled environment full of “edenic rhetoric” that a new shopping centre could potentially offer was just what Limavady needed? Rather than the alienation of this faded lack lustreplace which had none of the romance conjured up by Walter Benjamin’s Arcades Project … Had this arcade ever been a magical, dream laden hall of mirrors for anyone?
Piano Teacher’s and Shopping Centres
After working in the cattle market for a couple of hours we went off down the town in Limavady to get some lunch. We found a café at the end of one of those internal arcades popular in the 1970s. We ordered some chips and tea and sat down, studiously avoiding eye contact with the random salt pattern too close to the congealed dollop of ketchup. Observed in the harsh afternoon light of the post-lunch rush, both of us could remember more comforting greasy spoons than this. Jesus perhaps a squeaky clean controlled environment full of “edenic rhetoric” that a new shopping centre could potentially offer was just what Limavady needed? Rather than the alienation of this faded lack lustreplace which had none of the romance conjured up by Walter Benjamin’s Arcades Project … Had this arcade ever been a magical, dream laden hall of mirrors for anyone?