With the fires of creativity still smouldering here at Castletown, we say goodbye to our artist’s from the SPACE Programme 2009.  What a fortnight it was! This year’s programme was bigger and bolder than last year, sparking even more connections, collaborations and creativity than we ever imagined.

SPACE led to numerous artistic discoveries, challenging experiences and even some large scale performances a video performance in the river Liffey and a guerilla art installation on the streets of Celbridge and including a magnificent “Paper Ball” in Castletown’s grand entrance hall. We’ll keep you posted on further outcomes of the work begun as they appear.

Thank you as well to all the external participants who gave their time to expand our artists work:

Evan Flynn – Video Editor, Lorraine McCrann – Make-Up Artist, Tom Swift – Associated Writer, Alexis Nealon – Sound Engineer/Composer, Bairbre Ní Caoimhe – Performer/Director, Ciaran Bagnall – Photographer/Lighting Designer

Here’s some of the feedback from this year’s artists:

“SPACE helped me to reach out beyond the boundaries of my artform and explore other approaches to work. I mixed with practitioners I never meet with in a work context and whilst learning to create in new ways, I also reflected on my own process and how it is viewed outside of my field. This was invaluable.”

Hilary O’Shaughnessy – Performer

“The SPACE Programme was an inspirational two weeks; meeting and working with other artists from Ireland and abroad during which I made an installation piece and wrote songs for the first time ever.”

Michelle Read – Theatre Maker

“The SPACE Programme is a truly unique programme which allows practitioners across a range of arts disciplines to engage and explore the idea of collaboration in a challenging but safe place.  The Performance Corporation excerises its generosity and ‘can do’ spirit in offering possibilities, facilities, ideas, feedback, opportunites and problems.  A great, ambitious, daring (and well executed) project in an Ireland which is ever more tentative and conservative in its view of arts practice, in its questions about what is and isn’t art, and its ideas about what art is ‘for’.”

Alan Howley – Performer

“The SPACE programme is an absolutely generous initiative which, an artist can not more than admire and thank. It recovers the playful feeling we should never loose while carrying creative processes and gives a totally unique opportunity to look at ourselves as social beings in the context of artistic collaboration allowing us to have a honest, fearless look at how we are and if there is anything we can do to strengthen our work and abilities for exchange. “

Valeria Primost – Dance Maker

Here is a photographic flavour of SPACE