TIPPERARY

Heritage plays a strong role in Tipperary’s Creative Ireland programme this year, writes Olga Cronin

THOSE involved in steering the Creative Ireland projects in Tipperary over the next few years all agree on one thing: the events held last year to mark the 1916 centenary proved there is a genuine interest among people across the county to get involved in community-led projects.

Tipperary County Council’s Heritage Oficer Róisín O’Grady says: “There’s a huge appetite out there, from communities, to be involved, to participate and to collaborate on different projects, intermingling though heritage and arts. We saw, with the 1916 centenary events, that people came out in force.

“They put on productions, they did drama, they had music, concerts, dance, all that kind of thing, as well as the traditional events. I think there is definitely a move towards a lot of active communities and I think they’re very keen to participate in programmes and something like Creative Ireland gives them a free rein because the concept of creativity is very broad.

“So they can explore different avenues of culture such as music, art, drama, but they can also use heritage as their inspiration, like a lot of artists would do.”

Curator/Manager of Tipperary County Museum in Clonmel – which is one of only 13 local authority museums in Ireland and has approximately 30,000 artefacts within its collection – Marie McMahon says: “There is a shift in people wanting to know more about their heritage and where they stand in society. The 1916 centenary events were a huge success in that people came out and wanted to discuss their ancestors, where they came from and who they were.”

Tipperary County Librarian Damien Dullaghan says: “I think the 1916 centenary tapped into the community spirit of Ireland. I think that it showed that there was an appetite for community-based events and for communities to come together. The sheer volume of people who took part in the events last year shows this.”

Looking at the past, while keeping an eye on the present, appears to be a theme among some of the events marked for the Creative Ireland programme in Tipperary this year, showing, perhaps, the more things change, the more they stay the same.

From July 3 to April 27, 2018, the Tipperary County Museum, in Clonmel, will run an exhibition called A Message

In Time which will involve the museum collaborating with An Post, Clonmel Junction Festival, graffiti and graphic artist James Earley; knitted textiles designer Katie Hanlan; visual and textile artists Kari Cahill and Hazel McCague, of visual arts organisation Lay of the Land; digital animation students from Limerick Institute of Technology (LIT); and architecture students from Waterford Institute of Technology (WIT).

Marie explains: “This exhibition will be looking at our postcard collection and at how we’ve evolved, how the art of writing has evolved, all the way from Ogham writing to Snapchat and Twitter, and everything in between.”

“Within a postcard, there was a limit to what you could fit in. Nowhere did it state that you could only fit in a certain number of characters – like Twitter allows 140 characters – but Twitter acts on the same kind of principle, it’s just the notes are not handwritten and not posted. It’s done electronically and it’s just the application is slightly different, and it’s for a different generation.”

“We’re linking with LIT for the digital animations and creative multi-media where we’ll have visitor interactions with postcards. They’re going to create different types of narratives based on what we have in the collection, based on the post office and the notion of writing letters and messages.

“And with WIT, in Waterford, we’re looking at doing an architectural town survey for one or two towns in Tipperary.”

Memorabilia and old handcarts and tricycle postal carts from the General Post Office in Dublin will be brought down to the county museum while the museum will also take a look at the work of William Despard Hemphill, a Clonmel stereoscopic photographer from the 19th century.

“He created stereoscopic images and he had this looking glass that basically created a 3D image and it’s the same shape as the Google Cardboard virtual reality headsets that you put your phone into,” says Marie. “You’re talking about 150 years later but they basically work off the same principle, it’s just the application is slightly different.”

In addition, graffiti artist James Earley – whose family ran Earley Studios, a firm specialising in stained-glass artworks in Dublin for more than 100 years from 1864 to 1975 – will reveal a permanent large-scale art piece on the wall of Channon blacksmiths on Saturday, July 8.

His artwork will take inspiration from a postcard and