How did the BOXOPERA project come about?
The idea arose out of the situation with Covid 19 and how I felt, during Covid and then reflecting on Covid.
I am involved with a group of artistic people in Fermanagh. When Covid emerged, I thought it felt like everyone was boxed in, suspended in time, and it felt like time had stopped and everyone had no idea what they were doing, how they might move forward. It felt like everyone was corralled into small spaces.
At that time a lot questions were asked of the arts. Lots of people were turning to the arts and it was a case of what could the arts do.
I knew a lot of people in writing groups who just kept on writing and that source of creativity provided a solace, a sense of calm, a well of resilience and purpose, in the very difficult situation brought about by Covid.
That was the first part of the coming together of the project.
From there I was reading the book, Proxopera by Benedict Kiely, and in that book, under the constructs of, and confined by, the situation of “The Troubles” and the conflict, the main character has to do something against his will, and that added another element to the ideas for the project.
How do you exhibit the project?
The finished piece was shown in a building which was open to the elements. It was a structure which had a roof but no sides.
The piece was constructed of 4 boxes, each 4ft by 4 ft, and inside each box there were 4 pieces of writing. Each page was suspended by catgut, which couldn’t be seen, inside the box, and in the centre of each box, there was a nest.
The nest represented both resilience, despite being made of twigs, and feathers and leaves, a nest forms quite a sturdy structure, and fragility, in that it can be blown away, destroyed, despite the fact that it can withstand storms, and winters and the changing seasons. That connects with a sense of our homes and perhaps even our lives, especially during Covid.
The top box, there was no nest which represented the idea, a contemporary theme, that if we look around the world today, there are people who have no homes, and that is a crisis which even here is getting worse.
We also had a picture of a black and white print of a fox. That had been drawn by a young boy, for the installation, but it didn’t quite fit with the main themes, so we exhibited that work totally away from the installation.
The fox represented the sense of going to ground during Covid but also that the fox is a predator and so Lockdown meant not all homes were safe, and we knew that sone homes had elements within them which would create an atmosphere which wasn’t safe for everyone in the home.
The other thing I had to do was to keep to nerve and stay with a minimalist structure for the final installation.
For a sries of reasons, what was supposed to be a summer exhibition, with birds chirping, and the trees and flowers in full bloom, turned into a winter exhibition. In itself we could say that doing the exhibition in winter showed resilience as well. It took place on December the 9th,
And we needed to be resilient, because Storm Elin arrived when we were showing the installation, The wind was tunnelling through the building, Conor Shields, CAP’s CEO was trying to get to the venue, navigating through closed roads, flooded roads, to get where we were.
We had the artists effectively becoming part of the installation because they were all holding bits and pieces of the installation together to protect everything from the winds. They read their work and it was a quite incredible experience.