BEYOND LEAVING iii

 Beyond Leaving will be at exhibition in the National Photographic Archive, Temple Bar, Dublin,
from November to early March 2017. It is the biggest Irish platform to date for my work. The installation will feature some 25 new large scale photographic works, video, and artifact generated over the  period of net emigration from 2009 to 2016. Thanks to all who pledged support to the  Fund: it , campaign, although it is now finished you can see the details here click here to have a look



On the 24th of August 2016 the Central Statistics Office of Ireland ( CSO )made a very important announcement. It was this. To the year ending in April 2016 there was a return to net inward migration for Ireland for the first time since 2009.

The tone of this announcement is reflected in the global Irish Newsletter from the office of the Junior Minister with responsibility for the Diaspora in which the headline events are the Fleadh Cheoil, The Rose of Tralee, and the All Ireland Hurling and Camogie finals. Granted there is articles about the Irish Australian Support and Resource Bureau, Melbourne, Australia, and the upcoming United Nations Migration Conference, but the emphasis here is on the other and not the self.  And although the issues around Irish migration have proven to be thorny over the years, the discussion about world migration is far bigger than any conversation we could have about the current Irish experience. So this months newsletter amounts to one thing, deflection.
Although there is still the small mater  of the 76,200 people who left here in that year there was in fact the small number of 3,100 more people entering the country than those who have left.
This signals the end of a cycle.
We can now quantify the movements of this period. In fact the CSO has done this for us and I suppose having things  tied up neatly with a bow is what the we as consumers of the media and presented fact demand! I will only present one figure from the chart below and the rest can be extracted by your own gaze. The light blue of the period of net emigration adds up to half a million people.

Looking beneath the surface of the Irish experiences at this point is  an essential part of building an understanding of  of this period of net emigration. Following on from my personal project On Leaving, I have been working on a further research project with some of the recently departed and some of those who have chosen to return home. The work has been conducted as part of  IADT Dun Laoghaire practice led research project and I am grateful for the guidance and counsel of both Dr. Mark Curran and  Dr. Justin Carville as I move towards exhibition of these work.
The video clip above is a short extract of some conversations had with some of my collaborators.
 Thank you for reading this post and I would be delighted to receive your comments and of course your support  for the fundit campaign at http://fundit.ie/project/beyond-leaving

BEYOND LEAVING ii

Its been such a pleasure being back in an exhibition space, showing work, talking with those who came to see it, or who just ventured in after they had lunch in the building, or indeed, after they had visited EPIC. I am delighted and excited about the response to the work and feel assured that audiences will be very interested in the next step along this road to understanding what in fact it is to be a modern Irish person. Either here or there!
To this end I am now introducing Beyond Leaving  and the concept behind my next show. A couple of years ago now I set off on a new smaller, but a little more rigorous research, to try and fathom the distance between  expectation  and the reality of today for a small group of people who collaborated with me in the production of the Leaving Dublin series.
This research will culminate in a show in the National Photographic Archive this coming November.
The show will feature new photographic works, video, interview, audio-visual, and research documentation.
One strand of these works will be a series of skype interviews which have been made with collaborators. The clip here is demonstrative of the many ways that this kind of communications can be laborious and unfruitful and it can sometimes be hard to realise ones intent.However as              e-communication platforms expand there are now several alternative ways to talk with video  to people all over the world, facetime, whats app, facebook messenger video,  and google hangouts all look like making this area of communications easier and more fruitful into the future.

So here is my opener, my first piece so to speak.
I hope you enjoy it and what it has to say.
there is lots more to come in this stream.
Please like ans share and as alway your comments will be appreciated and replied to as they will help  to shape the process of making the exhibition.

With thanks
David

OH FOR A NEW YORK PROJECTION!

Welcome to my first post of 2012,well over the two year threshold and 96 posts behind me,almost 45000 page views,with 30,000 of them in the last year.Thanks to all of you who keep coming back!
Keep spreading the word, after all the Lilliputians world is the small one!!
As mentioned in my last post I have arranged 3 projections of my Leaving Dublin video piece
"on leaving" for march next.I noticed whilst looking for a suitable New York venue that the Irish arts centre had recently (dec 7th last)  made a 2 hour projection of a piece by Andrew Duggan  onto the side of a building on 51st street.As they have gone through this process I really would like to talk to someone there. So if anyone could get me contact details of the person who orgainised this show I would greatly appreciate it!


My next sitter now finds herself working in New York and was delighted to meet with me whilst spending some time at home in Dublin for the Christmas holiday.Aoife Mooney has been living there for almost a year now but I missed her on her original departure and we have been in touch via fb a few times  to organise a shoot when she made it home for a visit. Here is what she had to say.