THE ART OF THE COMMUNITY

DUBLIN PORT COMPANY’S ART, COMMUNITY AND EDUCATION ENGAGEMENT PROGRAMME CONTINUES TO BE ONE OF THEIR STRONGEST COMMUNITY INTEGRATION PROJECTS, WITH A BUSY PROGRAMME OF EVENTS LINED UP FOR 2023.

Dublin Port Company’s Art, Community and Education Engagement Programme has developed and grown since 2017, with the purpose of engaging the inhabitants of the Docklands, young and old, as well as stakeholders in Port communities and elsewhere, with themes of Port/City integration.

“It starts with the idea of integrating the Port and the City and the importance of the Port’s history to the City,” explains Declan McGonagle, curator of the Programme. “It is all based around expressions, through the visual arts, on the idea of Port/City integration. We look at the memory banks that the Port community have historically of Dublin Port and what those experiences and understandings are today in contemporary life.”

Declan began working with Dublin Port Company in 2017 as a consultant on a visual arts project that saw the works of acclaimed Belgian artist Eugeen Van including in community and education settings, usually involving community groups and schools in the Docklands area, as well as partnerships and collaborations with a number of higher level institutions, including the School of Architecture in UCD and various departments in the National College of Art & Design (NCAD).

City Gallery The Hugh Lane. He has since curated DPC’s Art, Community and Education Engagement Programme, directions in the intervening years to become one of the company’s most successful community integration projects, and one which has developed in some hugely interesting and unforeseen directions. This builds on the work with schools and communities, over many years, by Edel Currie and, latterly, the work of Lar Joye in developing the Port Archives, as a strategic resource for scholars and the public.

Initially, the Programme consisted primarily of engaging with local community centres in the areas around the Port, which continue to prove hugely successful and popular with local residents.

“Each group is led by a professional artist, who have experience of working in community settings and are to photography,” Declan explains. “With the heavy recent times, we will probably see a move into multimedia, including some digital and video work.

“Work takes place in the community centres, and some events have taken place in The Pumphouse. The idea is that at a certain point, we will gather all that work together and create an exhibition either in the community centres themselves, in the City Gallery or in The Pumphouse.”

Throughout 2018 and 2019, the Programme expanded, Declan reveals, to a number of third level institutions, including an ecological project in 2019 with University of

Limerick’s College of Art which was based around the as well as building relationships with the School of Architecture in UCD and various departments in the National College of Art and Design. “The focus is very much on exploring the ideas of the Port’s place in the City, the urban development issues around that and also the issue of community development and the role of creativity in that community development,” Declan notes.

While the programme, like most of Irish life, was interrupted by the impact of Covid-19 in spring 2020, it began again in earnest in the summer of 2022.

“We reinstated the workshop programme in a variety of community centres around the Port, and also reestablished relationships with UCD Architecture and a number of departments in NCAD, as well as a number of local primary schools and secondary schools, including Ringsend College secondary school in particular, whose students staged an exhibition of images in The Pumphouse in October 2022.”

The expansion of the Programme has seen it grow “in Programme is incredibly broad, stretching from the most traditional and straightforward workshops on drawing and painting techniques to new media and new techniques.”

The various strands can be summarised broadly under the following themes: Community Engagement, Education Engagement, Third Level Partnerships.

Community Engagement

Through the Programme, Dublin Port Company has established partnerships with Community Drawing/ Painting Clubs throughout the Docklands, including those in Sean O’Casey Centre, St Andrews Resource Centre, East Wall Youth Centre, Ringsend College and Ringsend & Irishtown Community Centre (RICC).

Clubs in the Sean O’Casey Centre, East Wall Youth Centre workshops based on Port/City themes. Indeed, students from Ringsend College exhibited drawings, prints and photographs in The Pumphouse in Oct/Nov 2022, all based on the broad themes of observing the Port, ‘emotional’ mapping and lived experience in relation to the Port. “Each of the other groups has produced bodies of works to date which are capable of exhibition,” Declan maintains.

Dublin Port Company’s partnership with NCAD stretches across a host of different departments, including the School of Fine Art, and has led to some innovative creations within the Port estate.

A new series of workshops began in St Andrews Resource Centre and Ringsend & Irishtown Community Centre in January, with the former combining visual arts and creative writing groups in association with the Fighting Words literacy project. Output may take the

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Workshop: Unit 100, Grange Way, Baldoyle Industrial Estate, Dublin 13.

Workshops are led by experienced artists and, in the case of East Wall Youth Centre, by collaborative artists with the Re-Create Project centred on the use of recycled materials. Re-Create will jointly initiate an open air ‘summer school’ project, using recycled materials, centred on The Pumphouse and plaza, in summer 2023.

Workshops normally take place in each community centre and the intention is for some workshops also to take place in The Pumphouse, where larger scale and collective working is possible, based on the studies and table-top works already produced in each centre’s workshops. Declan points out that the plan would be to organise large or small-scale exhibitions, either of works community engagement group.

Similarly, the Dublin Painting and Sketching Society, whose members have previously engaged in a process of open air painting/sketching days at vantage points within themes, in Port Centre and in the Gallery at CHQ, as well as holding their own annual exhibition. The Society may also use The Pumphouse as a large ‘studio’ workspace for future projects and potentially an exhibition space.

Third Level Partnerships

Dublin Port Company’s partnership with UCD’s School of Architecture is one of a series of Graduate Research/ Studio Groupings on ‘real’ life issues, and involves

‘Building Life’ and sourcing archival memory. In practice, this has led to an exploratory ‘residency, with up to six students attached to The Pumphouse at any given time, with a regular presence on-site from January to May

2023, with links also to the Department of Film Studies/ Time Based Media at UCD.

The relationship with NCAD’s School of Fine Art’s Painting and Print Departments sees second year print students utilising The Pumphouse as an in situ base for visual research on the working environment and archival research on visual memory of the Port, to be worked up using College facilities, as course work. The Painting around a presence in The Pumphouse and the wider Port area, based on non-traditional drawing techniques –including digital and multimedia.

Education Engagement At All Levels

The Programme’s partnership with NCAD stretches

School of Fine Art and School of Education, in association with city primary schools, which crosses over into the realm of education engagement at primary level.

NCAD are currently working across 18 Access primary Schools in the Dublin 1,2, and 8 areas. Content for lesson plans takes cues from the Port/City integration themes local Port community engagement and intergenerational relations, assisted by current Engagement Programme

Dublin Port Company has made The Pumphouse available for many of these projects, with workshops taking place in The Pumphouse at regular intervals. RTE an art teacher and students in January 2023 on-site in The Pumphouse.

Primary Schools involved over the period include Central Model Senior School, Gaelscoil Choláiste Mhuire, Rutland National School, St Laurence O’Toole’s National School for boys & girls, Our Lady Star of the Sea, Gardiner St Convent School, St Patrick’s Boys National School in Ringsend and St Joseph’s Co-ed Primary School in East Wall.

At second level, the Programme engages regularly with students at Ringsend College, most recently on their exhibition of drawings, photos and prints in The Pumphouse in October 2022, which proved incredibly successful.

Community Reaction

The Programme has really struck a collective chord with the public since its humble beginnings in 2017. “There is

“Each of the community centres we work with has been extremely welcoming and Dublin Port Company has provided incredible supports in terms of materials, access etc. With some of the younger groups from St Andrew’s Resource Centre, we organised trips to the National Gallery, so they could see other types of artworks and respond to that in their own workshops.

“This Programme has been very well received in the communities. The work that has been produced has been

incredibly positive response.”

Notably, the various strands of the Programme have engaged people across the age spectrum, from primary school age to retired members of the community, something which Declan is proud of.

“One of the things we are developing this year is some inter-generational activity between younger and older age groups. We are going to connect the younger, primary school generation with some of the older generations and have them work jointly on some workshop activity around port themes in The Pumphouse, so they will share ideas, stories and working processes. There will hopefully be a skills transfer, where people will learn new skills, from traditional to very modern.”

The future for the Programme looks very bright indeed, as Declan explains. “Covid punched a hole in everyone’s momentum up to summer 2022 but since then we have been incrementally recreating the programme and building momentum right across 2023 with a host of workshops and events, many taking place in the Port itself in The Pumphouse and the plaza.”