• Seth_T_3
  • Seth_T_2
  • Seth_T_1
  • Seth_T
  • 1998-11-01—1998-12-31

    works-seth/tallentire — Trailer

    November/December 1998

    Artists Anne Tallentire and John Seth - commissioned by Project Arts Centre

    'On a winter’s night in 1998, I was again in the same building on Foley Street. In the intervening years an artists’ studios had been established: Pallas Studios. In all, Pallas have run studios or project spaces at eleven different addresses, all but the current one on the north side of the city. A risky and tiring trail, no doubt, but such a unique view of the city over a period of immense social and infrastructural change? Where can we see what Pallas saw outside, in each changing neighborhood and what does that tell us? I was back because Pallas Studios was one of ten places in the city where a collaborative project by work-seth/tallentire was taking place. Artists Anne Tallentire and John Seth had been commissioned by Project Arts Centre as part of a programme of commissioned projects run in buildings and structures in Dublin and Galway during the centre’s re-development aided by European structural funding. Its third ‘home’, where it had been for almost twenty five years, at that stage, was originally also city centre factory space, a printing works. I started working with the arts centre as the old building was decommissioned. The ‘off-site’ project by work-seth/tallentire was called ‘trailer’.i The locations were chosen because of their distinct functions in the city. Audiences called a free phone number each day for information about where the screenings would take place. A website archived still images from the work carried out earlier each day. That night in Pallas Studios at Foley Street I took some photographs before the audience arrived. The small TV sets and video projection used for the screening at Pallas can be seen of course, and a couple of technicians who worked on the project. Then there is the staircase, lit from outside by sodium streetlights, the individual studio spaces themselves lit with single tube fluorescent fittings hung at right angles, and white-painted partitions almost to the ceiling. Plastic boxes, cardboard packages, handwritten labels, small paintings, easels, palettes, sweeping brushes, large plastic bottles filled with different colours inside, a hat and books, mirror, gas canisters, cardigans, hand-saw, cotton sheets, spirit level, timber, handmade greeting card, Calvin Klein, milk carton, paint-covered table, pencil, and some folded photocopies. Almost none of the artist-led, run, driven, centred or cultural tenants who hosted screenings as part of ‘trailer’ are still in the same buildings. Neither are the property development companies that owned or occupied others.
    i. For more information, see The Project Arts Centre Papers, Collection List No 152, prepared by Barry Houlihan, assisted by Máire Ní Chonalláin and Luke Kirwan.'

    text by Val Connor, an excerpt from Brown Studies and Artist-Led Enthusiasm, Published in Artist-Run Europe: Practice/Projects/Spaces, by Onomatopee, Eindhoven, 2016.