Seoidín O'Sullivan

Hard/Graft : towards community orchards

An art project by Seoidín O’Sullivan in association with Common Ground – as part of studio 468’s CITIZEN ARTIST award 2017.

HARD/GRAFT’S research continues Seoidín’s interest on issues of sustainable cities, land access, food access and spaces of 'commoning'. Through this project she will playfully tie a planting (grafting) project to an unearthing of questions of labour (graft). She is particularly interested in ideas of reproduction and the invisible/immaterial labour of people who care for others and mothers/ minders.

The graft

Hard/Graft: towards community orchards begins with fruit tree grafting.

Deleuze and Guattari in ‘A Thousand Plateaus’ site the rhizome as having a potential for disruption. "A rhizome has no beginning or end; it is always in the middle, between things, intermezzo. The tree is filiation, but the rhizome is alliance..." (Deleuze and Guattari, 1988: 25)

The Graft is the trees rhizome. By cutting branches (scion) we are able to quite quickly graft and reproduce many trees. By collectively grafting, planting and meeting we create solidarity and alliance.

Planting orchards

Working with community groups in St Andrews community centre heritage apple trees from UCD have been collectively grafted towards future orchards for Dublin 8. These final orchards will include the grafted trees and other mixed fruit and nut trees. The project will negotiate with community and stakeholders on where these orchards will be planted.

Community Orchards are a commons, they are green spaces in the city where communities are able to access free food and be connected with a seasonal cycle. They create spaces where people can relax and meet and provide a place for pollinators. 

Feminist Reading Group

While in studio 468 Seoidín has initiated a reading group with a group of feminist mothers.  Collectively they are looking at ‘Women's Labour’ and unpacking feminist ideas and biases toward housework and the home including ‘Can the home be seen and recognised as a place with political potential?’ Through regular meetings they are building up an archive of reading material and creating a solidarity and visibility to women and their labour. This investigation is lead through texts that include Bell Hooks  ‘Home Place’ and Silvia Federici’s ‘Wages for Housework’.

Tree Politics

HARD/GRAFT also looks to the politics of trees. Where are trees found in Dublin City? Are they linked to ideas of privilege?

This project emerges in response to an artist residency in Grizedale supported by The Irish Museum of Modern Art in 2016 working towards the A FAIR LAND Project   Revolving School is an an outdoor classroom or pedagogical infrastructure. A wheel barrow school, a space of common-ing , an outdoor making, workshop and learning space. A place for collaboration and possible dissent. The wheelbarrow is a tool that is both a symbol of work and is used for labouring. The infrastructure as well as being a tool used to work the land here becomes a tool for ‘schooling’ or ‘organising’. The infrastructure becomes a place of commoning and a place for imagining what that might be in relation to land usage.  

 The essential elements in the design and project are that they are mobile and can be used by everyone. They will create various anomalies of usage encouraging play, ownership and collectivism. 

‘The commons’ is about stewardship of things that we own in common as human beings. It’s about ensuring that we protect them and pass them on undiminished to future generations.’ Bollier

LAND

The wheelbarrow is a tool largely used in farming, gardening and land practices. This project talks directly to the Irish relationship with land that even today is contested with the current homeless crisis and rent crisis. Who owns land? Who has access to what land? It also talks to the concerns in my art practice around food, sustainability and land use.  We do not just labour, we converse, share ideas and learn to act and reclaim power. 

LABOUR

The Revolving School we learn by doing. We reconnect with the land whether this be by growing our own food, by planting trees or walking. We research and discover current and historical land struggles.  We situate ourselves in the now and figure out how we can act and respond.

The infrastructure becomes an important metaphor in the project where the users carry the materials in the structure. Connecting this to the outdoor activities of ‘A Fair Land’ through a playful set of educational workshop responses with children and youth using the infrastructure to mobilise, organise and move out exploring the grounds of IMMA.  These materials can vary from carrying soil to art and craft making materials.  

MOBILITY

The Revolving school becomes about movement. Moving from the gallery to the land and back to the gallery. Moving outside, working outdoors taking inspiration from pedagogical movements that talk about the benefits of outdoors work- connecting with people and place that surround you.

Metaphorically it is about the institution/ museum 'Revolving'. This movement spirals outside from The Museum of Modern Art to the local area- who are IMMA’s neighbouring communities? How does IMMA engage with them?  Do we take art/material to them? How to we make art relevant and responsive to contemporary struggles.

REVOLUTION and 1916

Revolution:

The project emerges from research into radical and critical pedagogies  in Irish Education

-Hedge schools

-Countess Markievicz 1916 : Scouting schools to produce an Irish Nationalism/ Revolution 

The Countess Markievicz School http://www.countessmarkieviczschool.ie/

-The University of Revolution (Frongoch Prison Camp)

-The Murder Machine : P.H. Pearse http://www.cym.ie/documents/themurdermachine.pdf

- IMMA as a proposed site of the FREE INTERNATIONAL UNIVERSITY. Joseph Beuys

Curriculum

The curriculum is created in response to the happenings and work going on at the time of its situated-ness.  What are the grounds and place like where is is currently located? Can we reveal new knowledge or lost knowledge? What is the knowledge held by the participants? What are the contemporary and historical land struggles of this region? We devise the curriculum together.

Revolving School is a project by Seoidín O'Sullivan 

The infrastructure, drawings and models have been designed by architect Karol O'Mahony.

Seating System was commissioned by Dublin City Arts Office and was made in collaboration with architect Karol O'Mahony. Seating System can be used for talks, reading groups, exhibition and library. The boxes are modular and together form a closed circular system, the boxes can be separated to make smaller dynamic sets. The seats are a kind of nomadic school system. The audience can break away from the feeling of a conventional lecture space, and shift into formations suitable for intimate conversation or public discussion. The design has been influenced by my involvement in activism and research into critical pedagogies, it aims to create a space for commoning, creating a space of empowerment and possibility. 

Patrick Bresnihan from The Provisional University whose current research is on ‘The commons’ and ‘commoning’ has responded to the piece and its relationship to ‘commoning’ with a short text.

"1. The commons are not a 'resource'. The commons are based on ongoing relations between people, animals, plants and things. The commons are thus not understandable as a resource, whether forests, water or knowledge. The separation of commoners from their living, grounded relations with the earth is where the tragedy begins. Commons are thus better understood as a verb, as commoning.

2. The commons are non-instrumental. The commons are produced in response to specific, concrete questions. How can we arrange these wooden boxes into a space of learning? The commons thus emerge from and relate to the specific needs and desires of the people involved. This means that the activity of commoning and the value which is produced through it are inseparable. This differs from wage-labour where the value of the activity is measured by and subordinated to money.

3. The commons are non-hierarchical. Because there is no ultimate separation between the process and the product, there can be no external authority who claims to know what is best for everyone else. While expertise is still required in specific situations there can be no lasting hierarchy of knowledge which categorizes people on the basis of intelligence. The only way to create a collective space is by doing it collectively.

4. The commons are non-exclusive. While the commons always involves specific collectives of people acting in a specific situation, there is no 'community' which exists outside the actual activity of commoning. Thus, anyone who is actively and materially involved in the use and reproduction of the commons is a commoner.

5. The commons are materially and socially productive. Through the arrangement of boxes an empty space is transformed into a space of learning. As well as transforming the physical space, the activity of commoning produces new social subjects: the activity of working together produces vital and nourishing bonds of trust as well as expanding our individual capacities. We learn new skills but we also learn how to relate differently to people and things, to recognise previously unknown potentials."

Patrick Bresnihan, The Provisional University, 2013

Seoidin O’Sullivan (Artist) and Roisin Byrne (Landscape Architect)

RIPARIAN TRAIL: River Mayne

RIPARIAN: relating to or living or located on the bank of a natural watercourse (such as a river) or sometimes of a lake or a tidewater.

We initiated and developed the Riparian Trail art and landscape project in 2016. For that iteration of the project we focused on the river Mayne between Belmayne and Baldoyle Estuary. During that initial stage we conducted research, connected to interesting potential partners and did the initial mapping and ground work for the project. Riparian Trail is a project that brings the practices of Landscape Architect, Roisin Byrne and Artist, Seoidín O’Sullivan together. We are looking out how we can make the River Mayne and its ecological potentials visible. We are doing this through a set of field explorations and river journeys. Each walk or exploration is attended by different people with different sets of expertise and different lens to walk with us along the river and share their knowledge and respond to the river.

In sensitively mapping the river a whole ecosystem and place of connection and dislocation is discovered and revealed. The word Riparian sounds so much like ‘repair’ and this is something this river system our collective resource needs. We imagine potential round table workshops to facilitate dreaming of what the Mayne rivers riparian trail may be. Mapping experts potentially reveal invisible influences and affects on the river from the anthropomorphic to the ecological. Who has responsibility to our commons and our rivers? What role should developers be held to in contributing to and protecting ecological resources. Through this project we hope to bring collective attention to ways that communities can create agency and this can possibly be mapped for and used as a template for other Irish rivers. We want to advocate and develop a project that has at its heart the idea of collective care and responsibility to Ireland’s river systems.

This river receives the effluent and water run off from Dublin Airport yet at its end is the Baldoyle Estuary an area that protects migratory birds and is a protected Eco Unesco site. The flight and migration through aeroplane, the flight and migration of bird. How can we start to make connection and take collective responsibility for place, for commons, for rivers? Social inclusion: possibility for participation through invitations to join us on the walk and interact with outcomes on the web platform. The project maybe considered the beginning of a longterm conversation on what may happen on a modest size place within Dublin and set a precedent process which considers citizen exploration and dreaming key in developing place. “An engagement process may activate the place for generations to come, by connecting people to place. Being in a place, particularly which is wild, which we can question are we ‘trespassing’ or recreational users? Can we consider walking the wild lands a way to create a culture of care? This is now so important in our changing world affected by climate change. Presently Fingal people walk by the river or along the various paths. Out on the trail there is evidence of interventions, a plank of wood makes a bridge; a rope keeps a gate in place so the horses may not wander too far. The Mayne River is flagged as a connected route between Fingal and Dublin city council lands. We hope the project will contribute to how the Mayne river riparian trail may be sensitively developed in the long-term.

TREE SCHOOL a project by Katie Holten and Seoidín O’Sullivan

Look what’s branching out in Dublin:

Tree School!
Tree School is a free school.
Tree School is a school without walls.
Tree School has no homework, only love work.
Tree School invites visitors of all sizes, no one’s too young or too old.
Tree School has no leaders, we are all students.
Tree School encourages radical action and radical inaction.
Tree hugging is encouraged, but is not mandatory.
Tree School keeps the same hours as trees: We’re always open.
Tree School is rooted in James Joyce Street in Dublin’s inner city.
Tree School explores all that is political and poetical about trees.
Tree School is creating a new ABC....written with a Dublin-specific Tree Alphabet. Who doesn’t want to write a love letter with trees?
Tree School offers grafting workshops because the world needs more trees and we can plant them.
Tree School disputes the myths of scarcity. Nature is abundant if we could access land, plant a seed, grow a tree. Tree School grafts ideas, unearthing the rhizomatic potentialities of trees.
Tree School wants every child to have access to a tree to climb and pick fruit from.
Tree School curriculum is germinating...

http://treelineproject.org/tree-school/

Tree School will meet almost daily at the Circe Pavilion in Liberty Park on Foley Street, July 9 – 22, 2017.

Look what’s branching out in Dublin: Tree School!

 Tree School grows out of many things, including Community Garden movements, edible cities, hedge schools, futurefarmers Tree University, Free University International, Beuys’ 7000 Oaks, Andrea Zittel’s A-Z West, Fritz Haeg’s Salmon Creek Farm, 1000 Plateaus by Deleuze and Guattari, The Chipko movement, critical pedagogies, outdoor school movements, deep ecology, Irish Seed Savers, We are the university…

Tree School has many branches, including Oonagh Young Gallery, 1 James Joyce Street; Circe Pavilion, Liberty Park, Foley Street; local community gardens including NEC Farmer’s Hill Community Garden, Mud Island, Hardwicke Community Garden and the city streets in between.

Tree School friends include UCD Geography Department especially Tine Ningal and Gerald Mills, Sweet Water Foundation Chicago, Irish Seed Savers, Kevin Kenny (tree grafting), Rialto Men’s Shed, Common Ground, CREATE, IMMA, Hyde Park Arts Centre, Jim Duignan, Hardwicke Community Garden, NEC Farmer’s Hill Community Garden, Dublin Community Growers, Patrick Bresnihan, Flanagans Field Fatima, The Hide Project…

Tree School thanks Amy Franceschini and futurefarmers for reminding us of Thoreau’s quote “Men have become the tools of their tools.”

Tree School remembers Joseph Beuys and his plans to site the Free University in Dublin with baby oak trees harvested from his tree. Will you help us plant them? Tree Schools’ “Every school a forest” aims for schools around Ireland to plant acorns this year for future forests.

Tree School celebrates James Joyce and his guests at the Tree Wedding Ceremony in the “Cyclops” episode of Ulyssesthrough a new ABC, an alphabet made from trees. Want to write in gobbledygook?

Tree School is full of questions: If a tree falls asleep in its wood, how would you know? Trees have bark, so why no bite? Do ants have birthday parties? Do bees? Are xylem + phloem friends, or not?

Tree School wants to meet you.

Join us!

Tree Line Project is a project curated by Mary Cremin and Oonagh Young. In the spirit of ‘7,000 Oaks’ by Beuys and the ‘marriage of trees’ in the CYCLOPS episode of ‘Ulysses’ this project intends to change the existing streetscape through artistic practices that attempt to transgress traditional aesthetic boundaries.

Proposed changes on the street will include planting trees referenced in ‘Ulysses’ and a ticker tape LED display system with the text of ‘Ulysses’.

A summer season of events will take place in a temporary pavilion that will be built in Liberty Park. The purpose of this structure is for artistic and social engagement and for community groups to use. The tree planting enterprise provides a “very simple but radical possibility for regeneration whereby the society would be activated by means of human creative will” or ‘social sculpture’, a term devised by Beuys.

From CYCLOPS (Episode 12 Ulysses James Joyce)

As treeless as Portugal we’ll be soon, says John Wyse, or Heligoland with its one tree if something is not done to reafforest the land. Larches, firs, all the trees of the conifer family are going fast. I was reading a report of lord Castletown’s…

Save them, says the citizen, the giant ash of Galway and the chieftain elm of Kildare with a fortyfoot bole and an acre of foliage. Save the trees of Ireland for the future men of Ireland on the fair hills of Eire, O.

Europe has its eyes on you, says Lenehan.

The fashionable international world attended en masse this afternoon at the wedding of the chevalier Jean Wyse de Neaulan, grand high chief ranger of the Irish National Foresters, with Miss Fir Conifer of Pine Valley. Lady Sylvester Elmshade, Mrs Barbara Lovebirch, Mrs Poll Ash, Mrs Holly Hazeleyes, Miss Daphne Bays, Miss Dorothy Canebrake, Mrs Clyde Twelvetrees, Mrs Rowan Greene, Mrs Helen Vinegadding, Miss Virginia Creeper, Miss Gladys Beech, Miss Olive Garth, Miss Blanche Maple, Mrs Maud Mahogany, Miss Myra Myrtle, Miss Priscilla Elderflower, Miss Bee Honeysuckle, Miss Grace Poplar, Miss O. Mimosa San, Miss Rachel Cedarfrond, the Misses Lilian and Viola Lilac, Miss Timidity Aspenall, Mrs Kitty Dewey-Mosse, Miss May Hawthorne, Mrs Gloriana Palme, Mrs Liana Forrest, Mrs Arabella Blackwood and Mrs Norma Holyoake of Oakholme Regis graced the ceremony by their presence. The bride who was given away by her father, the M’Conifer of the Glands, looked exquisitely charming in a creation carried out in green mercerised silk, moulded on an underslip of gloaming grey, sashed with a yoke of broad emerald and finished with a triple flounce of darkerhued fringe, the scheme being relieved by bretelles and hip insertions of acorn bronze. The maids of honour, Miss Larch Conifer and Miss Spruce Conifer, sisters of the bride, wore very becoming costumes in the same tone, a dainty motif of plume rose being worked into the pleats in a pinstripe and repeated capriciously in the jadegreen toques in the form of heron feathers of paletinted coral. Senhor Enrique Flor presided at the organ with his wellknown ability and, in addition to the prescribed numbers of the nuptial mass, played a new and striking arrangement of Woodman, spare that tree at the conclusion of the service. On leaving the church of Saint Fiacre in Horto after the papal blessing the happy pair were subjected to a playful crossfire of hazelnuts, beechmast, bayleaves, catkins of willow, ivytod, hollyberries, mistletoe sprigs and quicken shoots. Mr and Mrs Wyse Conifer Neaulan will spend a quiet honeymoon in the Black Forest.

Birch, Sylvester, Holly,Hazel, Daphneªplant), Rowan, v creeper, beecy, myrtle, Olive?, Maple, Honeysuk? Poplar, Mimosa? Base for blooms viola, Hawthorn, Cedar, Aspen, Hawthorn, Holmoak, Larch, gloaming heather? larch, spruce – catkins – Hazel

Eight Heritage Apple Trees from Irish Seed Savers form part of an installation 'Orchard System'. The Trees will be planted by the pupils of Lettergesh National School where they will continue to inspire, feed, shelter and act as resource for play and education.

TULCA 2015 is about creating a platform for conversations to illustrate and encourage imaginative responses to both the history and future of the climate debate.

The starting point of the exhibition Seachange, at its conceptual core it focuses on the legendary island Hy-Brasil: an island, noted on maps as early as 1325, which the Genoese cartographer Dalorto placed off the west coast of Ireland. Mythologised through oral history and written accounts, Hy-Brasil was said to be inhabited by a highly advanced society, although it could only be glimpsed through the fog every seven years. It was only omitted from sailing charts in 1865 when its location could not be verified.

There are different hypotheses on the existence of this island, and the debate continues as to whether it is fact or fiction–for instance, a raised bank off the Atlantic coast is thought to mark the site of the island which sank like the legendary Atlantis. The ways in which the myths associated with this island reflect the changing landscape of our environment form the central line of inquiry of this exhibition.

An informal banquet and screenings/artworks in and around the SCR community food garden and St Andrew's, Rialto on June 29th 2013. A Gracelands (curated by Vaari Claffey), the food thing (led by Jeannette Doyle) and the SCR Community Food Garden Project (initiated by Seoidín O'Sullivan) , in association with Common Ground and Studio 468.

The Producers is a collection of films, sculptures, readings and art installations in both St Andrew’s Community Centre, Rialto, where Studio 468 is based, and the South Circular Community Food Garden, informed by the ethics and practice of foraging and food production, as well as by the work of the community centre. Art on show in St Andrew’s Community Centre will include installations by Seoidín O’Sullivan and Rhona Byrne and a screening of Asparagus Ballet by UK artists Pil and Galia Kollectiv together with an elaborate presentation of foodstuffs prepared by the food thing (led by Jeanette Doyle)  - with produce from the South Circular Community Garden and foraged locally. In the Community Garden, where a series of artworks by Garrett Phelan, Lucy Andrews, Oisin Byrne and Marie Farrington are installed, a programme of artists films will be screened including artists  George Kuchar and Margaret Tait. Also more food will be prepared and served.

See here for more information: The Producers

http://www.vulgo.ie/features/here-come-the-producers-with-an-evening-of-food-foraging-and-art/

TRESPASS is a collaborative art project which combines two artists (Aoife Desmond and Seoidín O'Sullivan) divergent practices. Together they investigate and intervene in disused urban space. They research and reveal the delicate balance between nature and the built environment. TRESPASS investigates the different issues around land use and ownership through documentation and performative actions. This project was initiated in Dublin where the two artists are based. They worked in several sites between 2005-2008. They participated in Rirkrit Tiravanija's The One Year Project at The Land in 2008 where they developed a new body of work in response to their time there. They have published two books recording there projects. This work was exhibited in The LAB gallery in 2009. See more here TRESPASS

TACTIC is a cross-national laboratory for tactical art making: investigation, intervention, testing and application. We work on our own projects and aim to provide forums for activists, artists and other interested parties to meet in Dublin and South Africa, inform each others practice, develop projects and engage a public. Tactic is Seoidín O'Sullivan and Ralph Borland. See more here: TACTIC

“Tactics... are isolated actions or events that take advantage of opportunities offered by the gaps within a given strategic system, although the tactician never holds onto these advantages. Tactics cut across a strategic field, exploiting gaps in it to generate novel and inventive outcomes.” (wikipedia)

“These "ways of operating" constitute the innumerable practices by means of which users re-appropriate the space organised by techniques of sociocultural production...  the goal is to perceive and analyse the microbe-like operations proliferating within technocratic structures and deflecting their functioning by means of a multitude of "tactics" articulated in the details of everyday life;... to bring to light the clandestine forms taken by the dispersed, tactical, and makeshift creativity of groups or individuals already caught in the nets of "discipline:" Pushed to their ideal limits, these procedures and ruses of consumers compose the network of an anti-discipline..” (Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life )

The Artist’s Armada is a curatorial project by Anne Mullee that united works by artists working with boats, rafts and watercraft; whether building, sailing or otherwise engaging with the element of water as voyagers and explorers. It took place at Dublin’s Grand Canal Dock, a confluence of waterways serving the interior and coastal areas of our island nation. 

The Artist’s Armada offered an intersection for ideas to collide and exchange, sparking new dialogues and reclaiming this site for artistic endeavour. Here the artists will formed a flotilla of watercraft – the ‘Armada’- and gathered for informal and structured discussion.

For the Artists’ Armada iteration of Floating Dialogues, my modular  raft was  anchored in the Grand Canal Dock, where it hosted a dialogue between myself and Dr Patrick Bresnihan exploring ideas of WATER AS A COMMONS.

Dr Bresnihan is an Irish Research Council post-doctoral scholar in Maynooth University, Ireland. His research examines the different ways ecological crises are understood and the politics that arise from that.

His first book, Transforming the Fisheries: Neoliberalism, Nature and the Commons (University of Nebraska Press) is due to be published in early 2016. His current work looks at the politics of water and water infrastructure and he has just returned from a research project in Cochabamba, Bolivia.

See more on the project here: https://theartistsarmada.wordpress.com/

‘Field Work’ ran as the Red Stables Summer School in 2012.  The Red Stables Summer School included a rolling series of talks and field trips with invited artists, geographers, botanists and architects. I worked with The Dublin Naturalists Field Club and converted the Red Stables gallery space into a pedagogical space where discussions on the relationship between art and ecology could take place. The field and all ideas surrounding it was my point of departure. 

Working with Bourdieu’s idea of the field : 'Fields are organised both vertically and horizontally, not anologous of classes, and are often autonomous, independant places of social play. A field is a social arena in which people maneuver and struggle in pursuit of desirable resources. A field is constituted by the relational differences in position of social agents and the boundaries of a field are demarcated by where its effects end.'

My output included walks and talks, drawings, photography, and the launch of  "Seating System."

Floating dialogues is a modular swimming raft designed by artist Seoidin O’Sullivan that acts as a temporary dialogue and play platform that was anchored within the river Barrow of Graignamanagh, Co. Kilkenny. A weekend of public events was planned around the raft to ignite conversations around the future of a town on a river in Co. Kilkenny.

Saturday 18th October
11am / Old Boat House Raft construction & workshop with Graiguenamanagh Scouts Club 1pm / Public Launch of raft on river Barrow

Sunday 19th October
12am / Riverside ecology walk with Mary White of Blackstairs Eco Trails 1pm/ Autumn riverside feast

All events take place or begin at Graiguenamanagh Boat Club.

Exploring our common landscape and built environment, Forecast is a project taking place in five Kilkenny towns from September to December 2014 which invites people to contribute ideas for the future of these towns. Forecast has been devised, and will be delivered by, Hollie Kearns and Rosie Lynch in consultation with Kilkenny Leader Partnership and Forward Planning Department, Kilkenny County Council.

This was a commission for CONNECT, Trinity College Dublin. Architect Karol O'Mahony and I devised a pedagogic interactive unit with Jessica Foley for Grey Area that is an evolution of our project 'Seating System'. This will again be a space for 'Commoning' used by PHD research students.

Responding to a 2 month residency on a wasteland space in inner city Dublin I created  ‘SITE WORK’. Using a nomadic green house tent to intermittently work in site over a year seasonal cycle.  An ecological and socio-political response was built over time. I linked my research to the international The Wasteland Twinning Project: http://wasteland-twinning.net/sites/4178/.

A Buddelia stalk that I harvested from the site of art Lot was fashioned into a whistle by instrument maker Ed Devane. A live improvisation performance was held on site with Nick Roth playing whistle and Keith Lindsay electronics.  See more here: ART LOT

My residency at Studio 468 began in November 2006 for 9 months. I moved into the artist studio situated in St Andrews Community centre, Dublin and while there confronted my ideas on art, participation, activism and ownership.

I was part of the initial group of activists that set up Dublin’s first community garden on the canal in Dolphins Barn in 2005. This was the first time that I grew my own food. That year I learnt so much on the environment, food, gardening, collective organising, the creation of a positive space, trust and on how important community gardens are for our contemporary cities. There was no teacher it was non hierarchical, merely learning by doing and skill sharing.

Community Gardens are collectively organised sites concerned with food production in a city. The community garden is about relationship with neighbours, with land use, with food and with nature. It is a space where skill sharing and learning can take place.

This squatted garden acted as a locus and knowledge sharing point for a number of activists and people living within the community wanting to respond to the direction that Dublin’s development was heading in.

During my residency in Studio 468 the gardeners were evicted from the site on the canal. I called a meeting in Studio 468 and through the art residency managed to get permission from a local landowner to use a wasteland site for free. The studio in St Andrews with its glass fronted doors acted as an incubation space for vegetable and fruit seeds in April 2007.

The site that we used and are still using to this day is on loan from St Salvage. They kindly gave us permission to use the site up till the planning application for apartment blocks had been approved and building on the site can go ahead. Even though we knew the site had planning permission on it, we decided to go ahead with the project anyway. We could at least create a prototype project that other community groups could be inspired by and Dublin city council could see how they work and possibly support them at a future date.[1]

With the economic down turn we may have the site for a good few years to come.

The residency at Studio 468 gave me the leverage to accelerate the next phase of the community garden project. I was in the enviable position of being able to use my connections and links with the St Andrews community centre to give the project validity. The Studio team had outlined that we did not have to come up with a finished product but that the space was an opportunity to work with a community group of our choice. Their ethos provided me with the time and space to experiment and push my art practice.

The project only works through a collective effort. It is all run on a voluntary capacity. It has been inspiring over the last three years to see and meet the many dedicated individuals who have given time to the project all adding their creativity, skills, input and aspirations.

It’s a small project with big ideas on the future of our cities.
 

“Lines of flight are everywhere. They constitute the available means of escape from the forces of repression and stratification. Even the most intense strata are riddled with lines of flight.” – Miguel Rojas-Sotelo

The project ‘Mapping Flight’ looks at issues of land use and conflict from what supposedly seems like an apolitical starting point- the eagle. By developing a relationship with the Golden Eagle Trust, O’Sullivan introduced the students from St Mary’s, Manorhamilton, Leitrim and St. Clare’s, Brollagh, Fermanagh to this once extinct and now struggling bird of prey through drawing as well as kite making and flying.

They worked closely on this project with Lorcan O’Toole project manager from ‘The Irish Golden Eagle Reintroduction Project’ following the movements of Conall, a golden eagle in Leitrim. The students built kites that they then flew at one of the sites that Conall was roosting on. During the project Conall was poisoned. The project responds poetically and critically through the collaboration with the creation of film, drawing and photographic work.

Lines of Flight was made in collaboration with pupils from St Mary’s Brollagh; St Clares Manorhamilton with the support and facilitation of Community Connections.

See more on Leitrim Sculpture Centre website  

 I am a regular Swimmer to the 40foot which Joseph Beuys visited in 1974. This history is little known and so I have written a blog to document it: Beuys at Sandycove . The Beuysian Swimming Club is a playful response to this history and was launched as part of an exhibition ESSOMENIA curated by Saoirse Higgins and Cora Cummins in June 2012 supported by Dun Laoghaire Arts Office. .

Drawing forms a central part of South African/ Irish artist Seoidín O’Sullivan’s practice: ‘I draw in order to plot, trace, plan and create. I often draw between projects to refuel, using this time to visually experiment and explore new processes. Drawing provides a free, improvised space and a means of expressing concepts that I am playing with and discovering.’

‘Loose Structures’ is a constellation of her own drawings shown along-side a drawing installation made with IADT students in situ at 'The Drawing Project' 

Workshop (12-1pm): 
The Communal Draw: creating a collective modular drawing with students in-situ at “The Drawing Project”.

Artist Talk (2-3pm): 
Discussion about the artistic influences and thought processes that feed into Seoidín's drawing practice and projects.