NEW WORK:
SEACHING 2012
In 2011, with The Mermaid Co Wicklow Art Centre, the artist carried out a 6-week engagement looking at perceptions of identity following the loss of fiscal sovereignty. A programme of exhibition, performance, talks and films took place.
Film, performance and photo works again used the persona of The Irishman, based on Socialist filmmaker Philip Donnellan's 1966 documentary THE IRISHMAN: PORTRAIT OF EXILE. The persona has identifying motifs. The labourer's black suit and white shirt, the steel suitcase and the long handled Irish pattern shovel.
SEARCHING FOR THE UNIMAGINED CONSCIENCE OF MY RACE was a 20min film work, shot, edited and premiered during the engagement. The film shows The Irishman returning to Ireland before dying. He drags his suitcase from London back to The West Coast. Once here he burns his shovel on the beach. This begins the Dreamtime quest of the title.
The film was constructed from three questions asked of audience regarding relationship to place real and imagined. Responses showed the influence of popular imagination within national self-defining. Song titles and place names repeat to highlight the specificality of allegiance. The unimagined conscience is to be found between a real and an imagined world.The Irishman therefore must keep searching between the worlds.
WHAT ARE POETS FOR (in a destitute time)? 2011
A new work premièring at ABSOLUT FRINGE 2011 follows from touring BRIGHTNESS/BOHOLA MEN in the UK, Ireland and Australia. Mindful of Goya's reminder in THE SLEEP OF REASON that "Imagination without reason brings forth monsters" the artist tries to conjure a new vision text for the future from old mythologies. He fails and gives up. It is only when he abandons reason and falls headlong into Dreamtime does a Vision finally emerge.
WHAT ARE POETS FOR (in a destitute time)? follows the artist's mature search for purpose in troubled times.
"An intellectually charged one-man show from live artist Denis Buckley, which forces us to question the events presently occurring in this broken destitute Ireland through the spoken word. Staged in the new intimate surroundings of the CityArts theatre complex, he uses visual imagery, video bank and live narration, to takes us through a streaming consciousness of poetry.
In both the opening and closing acts, he cleverly challenges his own thought process. Religious undertones questioning creation emphasize the dark nature of his consciousness in which he concludes that the word itself is power and the basis of an ordered society. He is a man searching for meaning in modern Ireland looking to the poets of the past to find his answer. This piece is very much a work of art and an interesting use of juxtaposing the spoken word with visual imagery"
Sophia Purcell The Journal.ie
WHAT ARE POETS FOR (in a destitute time)? Performance Trailer
WHAT ARE POETS FOR (in a destitute time)? ABSOLUT FRINGE PROMO
SEARCHING FOR THE UNIMAGINED CONSCIENCE OF MY RACE 2011
A six-week investigation into current perceptions of identity in Ireland carried out in conjunction with Mermaid Co Wicklow Art Centre. A series of talks, films and performances were held each week. Three questions were asked throughtout relating to the subject. An original film was shot, edited from responses to the questions. The film was shown to finish the engagement.
- Where is the real place you most belong to?
- Where is the imagined place you most belong to?
- What song/poem best describes the place you most belong to?
See film in full here
BOHOLA MEN 2010
BOHOLA MEN was the result of the artist's communication with Paul Long, head of media studies at Birmingham University and Ciaran Walsh, curator and former gallery director at The National Folk Theatre of Ireland.
Paul Long has long championed the collectivist practice of broadcaster/producer Charles Parker and filmmaker Philip Donnellan. Ciaran has written and organised exhibitions on the influence of song in folk culture.
In BOHOLA MEN a narrative is mixed live onstage with Donnellan's pivotal film of Irish immigration to Britain, THE IRISHMAN: PORTRAIT OF EXILE and the artist's 2004 film A ROSE FOR JACK DOYLE.
The narrative is set in The Bohola House Bar in London's East End. It is All Ireland Final Day 2007. BOHOLA MEN tells of the experience of arriving and working in the UK black economy of the 1980's and goes on to relate how maturity tempers the view of country and countrymen in the light of the financial support the Irish community in Britain gave the post war Irish economy.
See BOHOLA MEN Sampler:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PZ78O-zJ3nE
BRIGHTNESS 2009
BACKGROUND
BRIGHTNESS started as a Once-Off project at the site of the National monument to the Gaelic Vision poets of the 18th century in Co Kerry on Ireland's South Western Coast.
The original intent was to return the night sky behind the sculpture of The Sky Woman, (An Spéir Bhean in Gaelic), which recent construction work had removed and deliver a bi-lingual contemporary version of an Aisling or Vision Poem.
The performance was given at the site by two overlapping voices in Gaelic and in English. Behind was a projection of a commissioned filmwork shot and edited in the region.
The project was funded by the Irish Arts Council, Kerry County Council and supported by Killarney Summerfest.
A studio version was created and performed for the Shunt Arches in London. The script was rewritten to accommodate solo performance.
In 2009 The Swindon Festival of Literature asked the artist to reproduce the performance for The BBC Big Screen on the opening day of the festival.
A new soundtrack was added by French producer Fred Defaye incorporating multiple voices in Gaelic and English and the video was re-edited to compensate for the absence of the sculpture.
Since then the work has been travelled back to Ireland and most recently to The Brisbane Festival in Australia
"Arguably one of the most ambitious works to be showcased by this year's Under The Radar progamme"
Time Off Brisbane
"Buckley was inspired by the Muse in a medieval poem who upbraids the poet to forsake his arty ways for the sake of Ireland in terms that reminded me of the irreverent slanging match between Kirsty MacColl and Shane McGowan in the Pogues' song "Fairytale of New York." It was Buckley's sincerity that convinced this fellow Celt, with its perspective on place that seems only shared by the Indigenous first culture in this country"
Douglas Leonard RealTime Arts Australia
BRIGHTNESS MOST BRIGHT Killarney Co Kerry 13/07/08 Image: Don MacMonagle
CONCEPT
BRIGHTNESS is a reworking of a unique art form in the Gaelic Bardic tradition. The Vision Poem, (or Aisling in Gaelic), wherein a woman descends from the sky to show the poet what the future holds, was used most effectively in describing the systematic destruction of Gaelic culture.
The poets of the early 1700's, who had hitherto held a linage of metrical structure, found the calamity they witnessed required a freer verse form to prescribe their anger, leading to the creation of a unique and indigenous expression.
This current audio visual Vision takes myth makers, monks, bards and romantic nationalists, (known here as The Poets), forward to see the influence of their Vision texts in the reality of Irish political life.
Using a mixture of original free verse in English, ancient/contemporary poetry, popular song in both Gaelic and English the suggestion is made that Irish identity is formulated from their poetic imagination. The maintenance and sometime hijacking of this imagined identity has in the past and still today works its way into Irish realpolitik to bolster a flagging neo-liberal agenda.
BRIGHTNESS 2009
BRIGHTNESS 2011 SAMPLER
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