A-MAKING SILVERMINES
by Jenny Haughton

One tends to think of art in big cities, urban areas, galleries, museums, arts centres and artists working on commissions that suddenly appear in public, but increasingly, globally aware artists are choosing with great benefit to the general public, to work in a locale that is devoid or ‘freed’ from the tradition of modernist art conventions. The decision by artists to work with a more diverse variety of emergent situations has not only generated new energies and creative experiences for a large number of people, but has resulted in progressive artworks which are becoming a vital part of contemporary life in Ireland.

Writer Mary Parker Follett challenges us to test and update her theories about creativity which will be attempted in relation to the work of artist Fiona Woods in Silvermines, North Tipperary. While such an attempt might seem like a race to the bottom to find what is in common between these two producers of new meaning, the intent is to add insight into how contemporary artists are centralising their practice in what has been generally perceived as the peripheral, away from ‘big’ centres. Both women place a value on the process of becoming: a-making (Follett), or a-musing (Woods).

Unusual for a woman of her time, Mary Parker Follett was a scholar with a global perspective. Her second major book Creative Experience was published in 1924. Stepping aside the feminist agendas of the time, Follett was an early pioneer in advocating human rights, an independent thinker, author and public speaker, sought and respected by progressive business leaders and senior academicians in both the USA and England.

Fiona Woods is an artist, writer and advocate for change, working individually and in a number of networks and collectives in Ireland and across Europe. She has a particular interest in art and agriculture/the rural and her practice has been influenced in part by the Situationists. Walking Silvermines is a public art public project comprising multiple actions which began in 2007.

In considering the nature of Woods’ contribution to generating a new and emerging energy in the locale, it could be argued that this was made possible because Woods tapped into a not quite dormant yet deep rooted local resource in this former industrial mining landscape. Nonetheless a value inherent in her practice is that the emergent future is leading across new and potentially boundless possibilities which have little to do with the status quo. Regarding any legacy, people are already talking of an annual walk, apps and future related activities connected with Scoil Nua.

For Follett, progress is a continually unfolding process, one which is never static nor has a concrete end, but which is continually creating. Progress is through the ‘release and integration of the action tendencies of each and every individual in society’. Through her work over the four years, Woods has envisaged people not as passive consumers, nor as co-producers, but as real protagonists in life and has worked with people on a multitude of actions. This is evidenced by the continuously progressive and evolving situation with no definitive output or end in sight. The variety of interpenetrating actions that constitute her art practice – conversations, walks, recordings, booklets,
meetings continue and no one – perhaps because this is an experience to which each person is giving of their best ability -seems unperturbed by lack of a concrete outcome. Perhaps ironically, this work has resonances in some of the more recent actions taken by people, most notably the tented village outside the Central Bank in Dublin, where there is no traditional leadership or purpose and its indignant continuance astonishes and inspires.

Follett is somewhat more pragmatic. She emphasises the value in finding out the situation. She points out that the creative attitude has to be created since it is not there to be taken. Woods has sought to create a ‘creative attitude’ by first doing a temporary museum involving contributions by people, reflecting back, then moving forward with new inclusive actions, thereby entering a new level of knowledge. Initially people wanted a museum. Woods recognises that the will of people is best situated in the event, not afterwards. By interweaving their desire into a temporary museum, Woods entered into the social process which drew on active involvement by people from the outset.

In time it became clear that the meaning of the social situation was not found in the separate views of contributors (temporary museum), but only in the total situation, hence leading to a later public moment Walking Silvermines. The artist has now found her place in the social process, knowing that she can never be made a substitute for it.

Silvermines village and surrounding landscape could be perceived as a quiet, well kept urban/rural area, probably fairly typical throughout Tipperary county and indeed much of Ireland today. On 21st August, Walking Silvermines comprised the presentation of individual audio recordings at different locations. This was just one public moment in this project. Words by young and old transferred rich dialect as well as different facts, in line with Follett’s ‘finding the situation’. Here are a selection of words extracted from the recorded texts which are also included in an accompanying booklet. :

…Wobs are we….calamine (zinc oxide) gets it name from the town of Kelmis in present day Belgium…the Waelz plant was constructed for this purpose (supply of armaments for the Korean War)…,paradise…lime trees to mark the 1932 Eucharistic Congress…Mrs. Siney’s sweetshop…Cornelius McGrath the Irish giant…anti-refill campaign…employ the people, enrich yourselves.. Rich words indeed. Woods calls this psychogeography. Without doubt our perception of the quiet landscape and the experience of walking is disrupted to reveal a complex and diverse tapestry of realities. Following the presentation of each recording, people in the group clapped in delight and
heartily applauded the speaker who was in our midst, something more akin to real theatre.

What has been Woods’ role in this process? Regeneration has been bandied around with particular reference to artists in urban situations and outcomes do not always live up to expectations. Follett writes about regeneration from a psychological viewpoint, and draws her analogy from the industrial landscape particular to the 1920s. Her metaphor is a radio receiving set which takes in only a small amount of energy from the electromagnetic waves that reach it, which is then made to control the output of a source of considerable energy located in the set. She points out that in some sets a part of the latter energy is carried back to the former, so that the former is intensified and effects an increased output; and the process repeats itself, building up the power of the set, perhaps a thousandfold.

While this ‘regenerative’ action occurs in many physical and chemical processes and is used by engineers in devising mechanical and electrical apparatus, it has an aptness here, since the area in focus is post-industrial, and people have been previously energised in a successful campaign to reverse a decision to allocate the open mine for infill waste disposal. A critical point here is that the power already exists in the area, and that a small amount of energy (Woods) can help to magnify this a thousandfold, but only if it hits the relevant source.

To generate is however only one step and this was not the sole purpose of Woods’ intent, which was to create a social production, ‘to activate physical spaces in the area but also to activate narrative spaces within the local culture’ and by so doing, ‘break away from any kind of bounded idea of the local so as to invite trans-local reflection and connection’. Woods does not name it here, but one can perceive a flattening out of production so as to get closer to a genuine encounter of different values with the potential to synthesis space and narrative so as to arrive at what Follett calls a ‘plus-valent’.

Follett writes about thinking as willing/purposing – that it is specific relating of the interdependent variables, individual and situation, each thereby creating itself anew, relating themselves anew, and thus giving us the evolving situation. What is happening in Silvermines is a study of the whole and parts in their active and continuous relation to each other. By watching an activity we are watching not parts in relation to a whole or whole in relation to parts (Gestalt), but we are watching a whole a-making – the additional part is the total situation a-making. Woods in her turn has a blog ‘a-musing’, which is a public sharing of her thinking through and drawing on additional knowledge. Woods’ notions of social production are not a compromise, but integration- what Follett calls the active principle of human intercourse. This is no compromise, but a genuine activity so that in the doing values are being built and grown.

The groundswell of artists who have elected to work in the locale is significant and Woods is not alone in her approach and method. Artists Aileen Lambert (En Route), Deirdre O’Mahony (XPO) in and Alan Counihan (Townlands Project) have through a diversity of strategies, variously churled up complex human and cultural geographies. Nor is this particular to rural situations. Artists such as Fiona Whelan (What’s the Story?) have recognised the slow yet continuous and progressive evolution of their practice, often over a number of years. All have worked with people whose connections constitute a range of truths and realities so that what emerges goes far beyond a single viewpoint, once again disrupting the presumption of one text for one public. Like Follett, Woods is comfortable with multiple perspectives but she is not afraid to insert the surreal or add ambiguity, two tactics that relieve the potential of boredom in facts alone and bring us firmly into the arts domain.

If artists are working in evolving, multi-annual timeframes, it would be expected and hoped that relevant supports whether through the Per Cent for Art or Leadership schemes would recognise and adapt in keeping with contemporary art practice, and that the diversity of people, groups and associations connected with such work are acknowledged and awarded appropriately.

Jenny Haughton/ 2011