Developers – Alice Lyons and Orla McHardy
Join us in the very special surroundings of King House on Friday 2nd May at 8pm for this one-off event combining a poetry reading by Alice Lyons and visuals produced during the filming of the installation piece Developers, currently on view at Roscommon Arts Centre.
Admission is free but booking recommended.
“Developers is a project about trying to see rapid change as it is ‘developing’, in the hope that clear seeing might be its own reward. Cootehall, my home for fifteen years, has been in the midst of a great upheaval in recent years. I wanted to approach the particularities of those changes; to see, to listen, to ‘snatch out of time’ moments that might offer some clarity in a period when clarity was hard to come by, when freezing fog – literally and figuratively – descended on the village. A big mirror often seemed the best tool to use. Film, speech and poems were employed as tools of reflection, too. This is a display of what they yielded.”
Alice Lyons (writer/director, Developers)
Developers was produced through the assistance of the Arts Council of Ireland Project Award.
Alice Lyons and Orla Mc Hardy have co-directed The Polish Language (2009), which was nominated for an IFTA, received Best Irish Animation Awards at the Galway Film Fleadh, the Kerry Film Festival and a jury citation from Expresion en Corto in Mexico. It has screened in competitions in 30 film festivals worldwide and was recently part of a major exhibition,‘Script films: Script as a moving image: A dynamic archive’ at the Center for Art and Media (ZKM),Karlsruhle, Germany & FACT (Foundation for Art and Creative Technology), Liverpool.
Alice Lyons (writer/director, Developers) was born in Paterson, New Jersey and moved to County Roscommon in 1998. For her poetry she has been the recipient of the Patrick Kavanagh Award, the Ireland Chair of Poetry Bursary and numerous bursaries in literature from An Chomhairle Ealaoine/the Arts Council. Her recent poetry has been published and is forthcoming in POETRY (Chicago). For many years Lyons taught on the fine arts course at GMIT in Galway and Castlebar and is just completing a PhD in creative writing at the Seamus Heaney Centre for Poetry, Queen’s University, Belfast. She works as curator for visual arts for The Dock in Carrick-on-Shannon.
Orla Mc Hardy’s (art director/animator, Developers) work spans from single channel films to site-specific gallery installation pieces. Using interdisciplinary animation processes as a starting point, she has collaborated with poets, radio producers, sound artists, architects, designers, animators and has crossed over into live-action and documentary film-making. From Donegal, Mc Hardy studied Animation at IADT, Dun Laoghaire and went on to complete an MFA from the Department Film, Video, New Media & Animation at SAIC, the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2011 having been awarded an SAIC Trustee Scholarship and a Bank of Ireland Millennium Scholarship. A recent recipient of the Arts Council’s Film project award, she is currently working on a new body of work.
Developers exhibition continues until May 15th at Roscommon Arts Centre.
