Event type: Comedy

Each year, the Bluecoat Display Centre and Liverpool Irish Festival -working with the Design and Crafts Council of Ireland- partner to find a new Irish creative to celebrate.

We ask artists to respond to our creative brief –this year’s being ‘exchange’- and select work that a) best answers the questions we raised there and b) shows considerable skill. We are not prescriptive about the medium and have selected silversmiths, glassmakers and ceramicists from the submissions. For the second year in row, we have picked a ceramicist.

Mike Byrne hails from Limerick. His domestic ware has a sculptural quality, with surface embellishments akin to that of a printmaker’s.  With hard, thin edges like a distant horizon and outlines reminiscent of Hans Coper, Mike’s matt glazes draw you closer to touch what seem to be mineral surfaces. Available for sale, we recommend going early in the run to see as much as you can.

This exhibit is supported by the Design and Crafts Council of Ireland.

At the time of posting, the Bluecoat Display Centre is open Tue-Wed 11am-4.30pm, Thurs-Sat 11am-5.30pm and Sun 11am-4.30pm; closed Mondays.

To find out more about Mike, his work and the exhibition, read the online article, here.

A cultural connectedness exchange designed to create links, support Irish arts in England and raise Irish creative visibility.

Connecting leaders from Irish service providers in the UK and Irish makers, this Zoom session, led by the Liverpool Irish Festival and Irish in Britain will look at Irish representation, barriers to presenting cultural work and Irish arts and cultural activities ahead. We want this to be the first step in networking makers and providers to consider radicalising the provision of Irish arts and culture in England. It is a must for any Irish creative seeking to show, share or co-author work and meet those in championing Irish work in England.

You can see the session, as it was delivered within #LIF2020, below.



Continuing the Festival’s dual-heritage work in understanding communtieis, this session airs specific community differences.

#LIF2020 begins today with a theme of ‘exchange’. Following on from the Cultural Connectedness Exchange session held at 2pm, Lorraine Maher -artist and founder of IamIrish- hosts a Mixed Heritage Mixer, to which we invite people of all dual and/or mixed heritage Irish backgrounds to trade stories about
-racial assumptions and exchanges
-the lived experiences of mixed-race Irish people (at home or abroad)
-the additional pressures Covid-19 has placed on you as mixed-race individuals or communities; and
-what the role of culture has in helping you access all sides of your heritage.

This continues our dual-heritage work from 2019, whilst creating an important link between the north and south of England, through which we hope to learn more about the specific challenges posed in our communities. As a seasoned artist and mixed heritage forum host (not to mention IamIrish founder, which celebrates Irish Black lives), Lorraine is well placed to facilitate an active and thought-provoking debate, which will inform future projects we run together. For this reason, the Festival really wants to hear from you about your needs, experiences and hopes for culture here in Liverpool, in a real cultural exchange and we encourage people from all Irish mixed race heritages to be involved.

This is a Black History Month and Writing on the Wall partnered event, developed via Creative Organisations of Liverpool. It is supported by the Mayor’s Fund (Liverpool).

 

 

 

 

The film below is a quick edit of the Zoom event that was held as part of the Liverpool Irish Festival at 6pm on 15 oct 2020 and has been generated for use with subtitles. It remains a document of our start point.

https://www.facebook.com/watch/?v=978073272704603

This is an In:Visible Women marker. It shows this event continues our In:Visible Women work. These events are always open to everyone, but are female led and often contain stories pertinent to women. In:Visible Women began in 2016 and shows the Festival’s dedication to promoting equity and hearing from women who have, historically, been diminished by societal systems. This is a small contribution to making invisible women -and their stories- visible.

 

Liverpool Family Ties: The Irish Connection is a documentary about Irish women, filmed by Mersey-based artists and oral historians, John J. Campbell and Moira Kenny.

Known as The Sound Agents, John and Moira have been commissioned by Liverpool Irish Festival to document and celebrate dual-heritage stories told by women living in Liverpool.

Funded by the Irish Embassy, as part of their national St Brigid’s Day celebrations, having sprung from the Festival’s In:Visible Women programme (Oct 2019) the film hears stories from Black and Irish, Chinese and Irish and diaspora-Irish women living in the city.

The work premières on Saint Brigid’s Day celebrating the empowerment of women, their history and contribution to family life. We celebrate Ireland’s ‘second saint’ for her compassion towards the young, sailors and watermen, scholars and travellers. These concerns have such a resonance with modern issues that Brigid serves as a relevant role model for today.

The women’s stories are a start point for an exciting Liverpool Irish project, coming in 2020.

This is a rescreening of the showing at 2pm, without talks. It is presented in response to demand, after the first screening sold out.

NB. The image used to promote this event is of Mr Kwok Fong and Mrs Elizabeth Fong (nee Gannon), provided by family member during the filming of the documentary. It features their first-born grandchild, Roma.

“Two souls, alas, are housed within my breast, and each will wrestle for the mastery there.” Faust/Goethe

Robbie McManus is tortured. His psychopathic comrade ‘Padre Pio’ McCann is never far from wreaking havoc. His punk cousin, Rex Mundi, has arrived from England and is getting in the way. His father is imploring him to finish his A-levels and get the hell out of Belfast – and then there’s Sabine, the mysterious loner in The Pound who shimmers, trancelike, on the dancefloor to the opening track of David Bowie’s Low. Her hair dyed jet black in a Cleopatra cut, she is a moving hieroglyphic that Robbie is desperate to decipher.

From the summer of 1978 to a frenzied Irish Cup Final day nine months later, and, through a series of smuggled ‘prison comms’, to the paramilitary-stalked Belfast streets of the late 1980s, all threads collide in a tense, thrilling denouement. At turns shocking and heart-breaking, Two Souls is a deeply affecting novel that crackles and enthrals, tragically exposing human nature’s futile efforts to make the right decisions and to choose a life worth living.

Author of Two Souls, Henry McDonald reads from the book and answer questions from journalist and former head of BBC Radio Merseyside, Mick Ord. This event is held in partnership with joint COoL member Writing on the Wall.

Henry McDonald is a staff writer for The Guardian and The Observer and has been a journalist covering conflicts around the world but specialising in the Northern Ireland Troubles for more than 30 years. He is the author of eight critically acclaimed non-fiction books including the histories of terror groups ranging from the INLA to the UVF. McDonald grew up in central Belfast and witnessed first-hand many of the key early events of the Troubles from Internment in 1971 to the carnage of Bloody Friday a year later. He was a punk rocker in the 1970s as well as a follower of Cliftonville Football Club, which he supports to this day.

Mick Ord is a journalist and the former head of BBC Radio Merseyside, covering the Heysel Stadium disaster, the Hillsborough Tragedy, the Warrington Bomb, Liverpool’s successful bid for European Capital of Culture in 2008. He’s also directed high-profile BBC campaigns and received numerous awards for his journalistic work, including the NUJ Regional Award for Journalist of the Year for his documentary on the Cheshire Regiment’s time in South Armagh.

The Institute for Creative Enterprise, Edge Hill University is a cultural leader in policy and arts training.

In this session Edge Hill Professor Martin McQuillan chairs a panel to discuss this critical topic as part of #LIF2020. Speakers include: Susan McKay, Mary Cloake, Professor James Moran, Professor Victor Merriman.

Just like other parts of the economy, the cultural industries rely on the unhindered movement of people -and ideas- across the border between Ireland and Britain. How can me make sure that creativity continues to flow in both directions after Brexit? What barriers does Brexit throw up for creative practitioners working between Ireland and the UK? What opportunities does it present for the creative economy? How should writers, artists, musicians and thinkers respond to Brexit and its social and political uncertainty? Can workers in the creative economy create their own backstop to keep channels of communication open between Ireland and the UK in the event of a no-deal Brexit?

This panel will explore these questions and much more.

 

A collaborative digital and physical exhibition, run by Art Arcadia at Sefton Park Palm House for #LIF2019, A Trip here, a trip there grows across the Festival, hence its original title Watch Me Grow.

Art Arcadia takes up residency at the Palm House during the Liverpool Irish Festival for a remote collaboration with Derry based artist Locky Morris. The outcome of this daily conversation, taking place across the Irish Sea, is an experimental exhibition that unfolds over the length of the Festival. Locky’s unique perspective on collective identity, experience and humour will, undoubtedly, play a witty hand in this project that develops -in parallel- on Instagram and at the Palm House. During the residency Art Arcadia also aims to connect with local artists to explore possibilities for future collaborations and residencies in Derry. A trip here, a trip there is the outcome of a visual conversation between Art Arcadia’s Paola Bernardelli and Locky Morris.

Each day in Liverpool Paola will publish a photograph taken in Liverpool on Art Arcadia’s Instagram account, triggering a response from Locky. This reply will be printed and displayed in the Palm House, in a project running simultaneously digitally (via Instagram) and physically (exhibtion at Palm House).

The title of the project, A trip here, a trip there, conjures the unpredictable, zigzagging and unsteady nature of an exchange that has the potential to guide its contribu;tors to unknown destinations and myriad outcomes.

 

Paola Bernardelli is an Italian lens-based artist who has made Derry her home since 2002. She has exhibited in Ireland, Canada, Iceland, Italy, Spain and the UK. In 2016 she established Art Arcadia.
Locky Morris rose to prominence in the 1980s with works such as Town, Country and People (1985-86) and An Bhearna Bhaoil – Gap of Danger (1988) which used the language of international art to comment on the local realities of life during the conflict in Northern Ireland. He has exhibited extensively from the mid-1980s both regionally and internationally. Locky Morris’s work is often underpinned by humour and sometimes triggered by what he refers to as ‘daily epiphanies’. His current practice has, for the most part, been marked by a concentration on the familial and the familiar – sourcing a large amount of his material directly from the interstices and interactions of life ‘…where it seems as if he is trying to establish the border between humanity and the appearance of humanity…’.
Art Arcadia will be at the Palm House during these times:

Thu 17th 2:00pm-4:00pm

Sun 20th 12:00pm-4:00pm

Tue 22nd 12:00pm-4:00pm

Wed 23rd 12:00pm-4:00pm

Thu 24th 12:00pm-4:00pm

Sun 27th 10:00am-2:00pm

The exhibition can also be viewed during Palm House opening hours.

You can visit the project page here and follow it on Instagram and Facebook.

Please email paola@artarcadia.org for additional info.

Art Arcadia is an artist run organisation based in Derry, Northern Ireland, providing local and international artist residencies with associated exhibitions and public programmes.

This project is kindly funded by Arts Council England, Derry City & Strabane District Council and Arts Council of Northern Ireland.

Liverpool Family Ties: The Irish Connection is a documentary about Irish women, filmed by Mersey-based artists and oral historians, John J. Campbell and Moira Kenny.

Known as The Sound Agents, John and Moira have been commissioned by Liverpool Irish Festival to document and celebrate dual-heritage stories told by women living in Liverpool.

Funded by the Irish Embassy, as part of their national St Brigid’s Day celebrations, having sprung from the Festival’s In:Visible Women programme (Oct 2019) the film hears stories from Black and Irish, Chinese and Irish and diaspora-Irish women living in the city.

The work premières on Saint Brigid’s Day celebrating the empowerment of women, their history and contribution to family life. We celebrate Ireland’s ‘second saint’ for her compassion towards the young, sailors and watermen, scholars and travellers. These concerns have such a resonance with modern issues that Brigid serves as a relevant role model for today.

The women’s stories are a start point for an exciting Liverpool Irish project, coming in 2020.

This event comprises a talk about the film, a film screening and a Q&A with The Sound Agents’s Moira Kenny and Liverpool Irish Festival Director, Emma Smith. Please be aware, there is a second sceening (without talks and Q&A) at Bluecoat, the same day at 4pm. As with this event, tickets are free, but must be booked.

NB. The image used to promote this event is of Mr Kwok Fong and Mrs Elizabeth Fong (nee Gannon), provided by family member during the filming of the documentary. It features their first-born grandchild, Roma.

Starting his career in Dublin, award winning Irish stand-up comedian and actor Rory O’Hanlon is a firm favourite at comedy clubs across the UK and Ireland. Described by Chortle as having “presence, poise and timing” and the Irish Times as having “a joke every 30 seconds”, his rapid fire delivery regularly has audiences crying with laughter.

A regular face on Irish TV, Rory has been seen on RTE’s New Comedy Awards, Republic of Telly and alongside Des Bishop in Under the Influence. A veteran of stage performances, too, he has 7 consecutive solo shows at the Edinburgh Fringe under his belt, not to mention numerous international appearances at major venues.

In a funny twist of fate, Rory returns to his old stomping ground, where he worked 20 years ago, before fame and fortune came knocking. The night will tell of this time and the stories that remind him most of his former Liverpool life.

Image credit © Ed Moore.

100 years ago Constance Markievicz was the first woman elected to the British parliament.

She was in prison. She had been a leader of the Dublin Easter Rising, but her pacifist sister, Eva Gore-Booth, was campaigning for her release. Wealthy young women from Sligo, they had turned their backs on convention. This “stunning and evocative” play tells the remarkable story of these Irish sisters through theatre, poetry, songs, music, dance and over 600 archival images.

Constance married a Polish count, was an artist and ran a soup kitchen in the Dublin lock-out. Eva was a poet who campaigned for the rights of barmaids and other working women in northwest England with her lifelong partner, Esther Roper.

This new production by Lynx Theatre and Poetry of Jacqueline Mulhallen’s play is directed by William Alderson and choreographed by Siân Williams (of the Globe Theatre and the BBC’s Wolf Hall). It is supported by Arts Council England, the Irish Government’s Emigrant Support Programme and Unite the Union.

Saturday’s showing will be followed by a Q&A for those who wish to stay on and discuss the production, story or archive.