SCIENCE GALLERY DUBLIN
01.05.2015 - 19.07.2015
Extracts of the HERE & NOW
"Extracts of the HERE & NOW consists of two installed theatre pieces condensing the concepts of HERE & NOW, a creative research project the artist began in 2012 exploring how we live now, through the lens of housing, homelessness, spirituality and the practice of walking.
Vacant is a Grandmother’s Chair. There may be some secrets down the side of the cushion. She won’t sit there again but visitors can, whilst listening to words of LOVE and reflecting on the Irish housing crisis. Visitors can ponder the vacancies left where once there were homes.
What’s Left invites visitors to take a place inside a blue nylon sleeping bag, to see from another perspective while listening to the sound of walking west along the Camino de Santiago. Read the redacted diary of this life changing journey, or rummage through the rucksack of what used to be held close. This is all that remains post-Project Downsize, a project where the artist shed most of her possessions. There are labels signifying what she gifted, a living will with letters signed ‘Wishing you LOVE & ABUNDANCE & JOY,’ indicating there is enough for everyone, without waste.
These works are an action of potential, while contemplating how to get out from under negative equity and mortgage arrears on returning home from walking the Camino, by asking ‘what do I really need to live HERE & NOW?’"
Music:'Pass The LOVE'
Composed & Performed by Dylan Tighe
Words: Veronica Dyas
Produced by José Miguel Jiménez
'Walking West'
Composed & Performed by Madelyn Medeiros
CG Art:
Fire Animation created by Pedro Vico
Text & Installation:
Created by Veronica Dyas
Special Thanks to:
Aisling Murray and all at Science Gallery Dublin, Amy Conroy, Martin Sharry, Pat McGrath, Grace Dyas & The Tyrone Guthrie Centre
at least it hasn't rained yet - Vacant - Text for audio (2015)
White horse tied to the goal post on the tarmacked football pitch
Pigeons across the road in the flats have long since flown their coup
Winged rats some people call them
I prefer Gickna
Slang for idiot, in Dublin's fair city
like eijit, or sap, muppet,
Originating from the average pigeon
Not bred to be raced or carry a message
Carrying disease more like
No thoroughbred bird
Is our Gickna
Much like the white horse tied to the goal post as I walk by
Coming back from town through the flats
Not mine, but the ones where me school pal lived
We'd hang out there some evenings
Watching the pigeons
Then
Not now
I walk on smiling at this White Horse of freedom
Barely resembling the beatific beast I saw one day
Trotting along the camino way
Not there, not now
Tied to the goal post
No freedom here
Musing to myself with little time before encountering
An old man, his crutch leaned up against the bonnet of a strangers car
Himself stood leaning on the boot, a full fried egg on a piece of bread
A cuppa tea teetering on the roof
Someone must have brought that out to him
I think, and mull briefly on community and the obligation of origin
The Liberties still liberal I think
Only for a moment
Immediately behind this old man
A car, ajar
Parked at an angle to the road
Faces in toward the white horse
Two women sit in the front seats
My age, my age I think
And see the crack pipe in her teeth the driver leaning forward in her seat
Her passenger sits impatiently beside
Awaiting her chance
I glance
Then stop and stare
My fear is rooted there
And overhead a pigeon races
Relinquishing the days ingestion on their car roof as he flies
At least it doesn't land on the old mans fried egg
Race down the stone steps of the church on Meath Street
Giggling, mischief over all their faces, each
They're gone past me in a moment
After, immediately though yet in another dimension
A man older than my father stumbles forth across these same steps
On a diagonal he has invented for himself
A piece of tinfoil marked by fire precariously balanced in his hand
He'll never catch them up
But he'll try all the same
Try and fail over and over
Further on around the corner
Outside Tesco I meet her again
A day before I passed without her seeing
Felt the sensation
Her transformation
Petering now on the edge
Not living but existing
In the sick and tired
Of being sick and tired
She could be me
I could be her
A hair's breath standing at each of our doors
I don't have a door though
Neither does she
We both left them behind
Both with an itch we needed to scratch
Hers brought her here to walking her patch
Mine took me over the hills and far away
Only to realize I was running away
In a way, some way, some part of the way
Not when I set out to walk to Santiago
Not then
I walked with intention to be made new
To try to figure out what I needed to do
Letters arriving arrears figure rising
Bank manager comes to the door
Sits at my kitchen table and I'm not able to pay the debt that I did not cause
My walls of security closing in
This safe space sanctuary I needed to get well
I learned as I walked the Camino Frances
That I'm still an addict
I'd walk for a mile in the dark before dawn just for a cigarette of a cafe solo
Without regard for my safety or thinking it through
To get nicotine into me, and I still do
The difference is marginal, circumstantial at most
Some can be present and some learn to ghost
There's a haunting that happens that drags one away
From the life that you're building day by day
Something that lingers and echoes, then screams
Brings your mind back to the torture that made you want to use in the first place
I am you
I want to tell her outside the Tesco
But I can't speak the words that will crumble it all
She needs reassurance a grace in her fall
You know how to do it, you've done it before
You're endurance inspires me I've witnessed your strength
This isn't you I say with tactical traction
It's just what you're doing for now, it's only your action
Tossing my plastic bag from the right hand to the left it's digging into me with the weight
How are you supposed to stay clean she says
When you're moving and moving and moving again
Up at seven out by nine walking the streets til ten
Under all conditions comes to mind
But I get what she's saying more now than before
I'm an unlikely landlord I'm sleeping on someone else's floor
Handing over the keys to my own door brings with it a new humility
If I could have gone back to my house just then
In that moment maybe I would've
Three years, almost, of my nomadic existence
Stopped dead in my tracks when it all catches me up
My house bought in fear in the white knuckle recovery
No sense of entitlement nor large scale plans
Just a small terraced house with my own key to the door
Where I crawled the floor, bawled my eyes out,
Smashed a plate, one or two
Trying to stay dry, stay clean the terrifying thought of facing into it all
Then someone would call in for a cup or tea and I'd be free of it for five minutes, at least
It served me well
My safe haven shell
The time I lived there I steadied myself
Incremental change is what I had
and grateful I was to even have that from where I'd come from
But I can't journey backwards
No, not anymore
Someone else lives in my home now
How do you let go?
Absolutely
Easy to say hard to do
It's the knowingness that thwarts and paradoxically helps us fight
Sit with the feelings whatever comes up
Stay in The LOVE is a phrase that helps me
Stay with myself and keep looking outwards is all that really means
That's how it works, why I didn't use a substance to alter, to hide the abuse
But that's a feat when you get itchy feet
In liminal space I see her face on mine, mine on hers
That unbearable existential pain
The last thing was using and maybe that was sane
A hair's breadth is all
One extra finger nail hanging on to the precipice
I held on a moment longer that's all
Just for today
Just for a moment if it needs to be that
Sit on my hands, hold them flat
I've done it and may do it again
Hold the space or grip tightly
It's hard when you've seen all that can be
To accept the not yet of being totally free
Knowing what I don't want
Something else
Something else
Shifts into acceptance some grace in this mess
Trying to shed what I've carried for years
Literally, metaphysically, staring into my fears
And this is Dublin, this is home
A land I love a land we own
These are our people strong and true
All of us, we all are you
Perhaps to say I is better
Less presumption reduce the assumptions
I thought I'd arrived but I can't arrive alone
If she's still standing on that street
And he's still dying on his feet
And they're still sitting in that car
And another and another generation are watching it all
I can't arrive until we all do
Home to our home
In this our city, in this our land
Each individual, every single one
Has but survived, we haven't all thrived
I could bullshit and wangle my way to justify anything that I want to say
But reality is the only game in town
The truth is what we have and that truth is all around
And these are my people
These are my ways
These are our rebels bold and true
This is our pain
Our suffering our shame
carried over and over and over
Generation savaged and we're ragin' again
White horse trot on
Gicknas take flight
This is the pest
This is the blight
Turned inwards we can barely live
An individual cannot thrive outside the collective
Insidious fracture
This insular decay
A debt we didn't cause
This price that we pay
The house I can't live in still fencing me in
To start to begin something else has to end
I ponder as I look back turning the bend back on to Meath Street
Leave her leaning over the bin facing into the road
Pigeon coos on the rooftop opposite at least it hasn't rained yet.
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| After the exhibition what's left... |
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| what's next... |
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Giving the elements back to Nature from where they were borrowed      |
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