You left the Black Box a little while ago. Where are you working now?
I was on a train on the way to work and I saw a job advertised at Creative Lives, formerly Voluntary Arts Ireland. I already had some connection with Creative Lives, because at the Black Box we had nominated the Volunteer Team for a Creative Lives Award, and they won the Ireland Prize. During the pandemic, I had been part of some of their creative conversations and I thought they were doing interesting things.
I applied to be Creative Places Edenderry Coordinator in County Offaly. The project runs across the south of Ireland, there are projects in Tuam, Shannon, the Cork Islands, lots of other places, and I am based in Edenderry. The coordinator supports a local community by organising groups and running sessions and the idea is to set everything up and then let the community take the lead. See link to project here: artscouncil.ie/creative-places/
Creative Lives is the lead partner, then there is Arts Council Ireland, Offaly County Council, North Offaly Community Development Company and a group which came together for the application, Creative Edenderry.
It sounds like this has been a good development for your career?
I think so. I like the fact that we also have a cross border element to this work. I wasn’t able to do this with the Black Box. The furthest we were able to travel for a project was Derry.
I have always been interested in cross border work, and there are currently lots of shared island initiatives. I think that it is more important than ever post Brexit to have island wide working in the Arts.
I work four days a week for Creative Places Edenderry, and Creative Lives have asked me to do some freelance work in Northern Ireland. I have just finished a poetry and photography project called ‘My Creative Life’ which took place with 12 different groups taking part in poetry workshops with 4 poets. There is a publication from that project, ‘Mostly Questions About Butterflies’ which should be out at the end of the summer. This was funded by Arts Council of Northern Ireland.
Are you still playing as a musician?
When I was interviewed for the job I did talk about how Community Music would be quite useful for this project, because the project is designed to support people be creative in somewhat hostile environments. In Edenderry there is no Community Centre so there is no space to be creative. The first thing I did was to facilitate a music workshop. I am getting to know all the local musicians and we are working on how they could have a regular all-inclusive music group.
So, I am playing through work and I also play with a number of groups, The Vintage Revue, TS4 (Colin Reid’s project), Organs and performers like Colin Hassard, a performance poet. I am very busy.
I want to encourage other people to be creative, particularly through music, and I always find that if you bring music into the conversation it establishes and broadens the possibility to bring people together, and I also want to be creative through music.
Where to now?
I was gifted a cello just recently and I would like to learn to play that instrument and I would like to do a bit more writing. I’m taking some time off during the summer so I might make some efforts to write and do a lot more playing my saxophone and piano.
