Art
This is a selection of art projects that I've been involved with, from documenting beautiful painting to being lead creative for large scale installation.
THE BRINK! COLLECTIVE
Two friends & me co-founded an artist & innovator collective called Brink! Paul Kelly (Form Native) & Neil Beattie (Binhoker). We need to be at a lot more than we currently are.
THE OGHAM GROVE
Culture Night Belfast returned to the Cathedral Quarter September 2021 with a new format and a new approach designed for a COVID-safe, post-pandemic environment, with sustainability a core theme for the festival, where I was Creative Lead for the installation.
Fionn's Window
Building on the success of last year's monumental sculptural event & digital trail 'The Ogham Grove' is back with Fionn's Window.
I produced a trail around the Cathedral Quarter in Belfast, comprised of wooden plaques. Each plaque had one of the 25 ogham characters etched into it, along with a QR code that could be scanned by any smartphone camera.
Fire Festival: Artist Offerings
As part of The Ogham Grove project, and specifically attached to the Fionn's Window launch this year, I wanted to produce a piece of art, music, or something creative to recognise the importance of the eight annual Fire Festivals.
To celebrate each one of the them I have selected a different style of art to present the theme of each individual Fire Festival.
NAKED - SHAWCROSS
I was asked if I would be interested in spending a few evenings with Neil Shawcross over a couple of months, to both film and photograph him producing his new work.
Neil & Bernard Jaffa let me just do whatever I wanted to do. I'd never filmed anything like this before, or anything with as many cameras.
Once a week for a number of weeks I got to share time with Neil, painting a selection of paintings that were outside his comfort zone. They were both an exploration of a style and a technique, which was ballsy.
I didn't really appreciate it fully at the time, and that was probably a good thing because we just hung out doing our own thing alongside each other .. it was such a wonderful experience & he is such a gentle human to have been so open to my being part of his journey.
ARGY BARGY
In 2009 I produced Belfast's first alternate reality game (ARG) as part of the Cathedral Quarter Arts Festival, where we used newspaper ads, email correspondence, secret phone numbers, an old warehouse, some actors, a bunch of guys in balaclavas, and a white van to bundle someone into as part of a live kidnap .. all in the name of alternate reality gaming. And it was a lot of fun. This video is a trailer for what we ran, and a link to photos of some of the folks who took part.
KVLR - EMOTIONS
In 2017 I asked Belfast artist KVLR if he would produce a unique piece of artwork for our office space in Sensum based on the theme of human emotions. He spent a good while sketching up his ideas, testing colours, and then got laced into producing this wonderful piece of art.
BELFAST MUSIC & LITERARY BELFAST IPHONE APPS
The iPhone wasn't long released, and I was asked to produce a digital strategy for Belfast Music, to accompany the great efforts that Belfast City Council's music team were putting in. This accompanied the support for bands to go to SXSW and Nashville, as well as winning the European MTV Music awards.
As part of this I pitched to brand Belfast Music and develop the world's first music tour mobile app, to allow people to tour the city of Belfast finding locations that would trigger more information on what music was important to that location, and play a piece of music from a great Belfast-born musician.
We negotiated a new way for music to be licensed from publishers in mobile usage and mapping, and these are some of the screen shots from that app, sadly no longer in operation.
Based on the success and interest in the Belfast Music app, and the fact that Belfast City Council were getting behind our rich literary heritage from a support and marketing perspective, I was asked to bring the Literary Belfast iPhone app to life.
This was a privilege to do, not only to learn so much more about our city's literary giants, but also to actually met them, talk to them and film them so that we could have them doing readings at each of the tour locations, from pieces that they'd written. We were so fortunate to be able to record Seamus Heaney as he sadly passed on not long after we shot this.
These are the photos from 2 weekend's shooting around locations in Belfast for the 'Literary Belfast' iPhone tour.
PINK TANK
George Dubbyah had never left the United States Of Amoeba, and it was his duty to come and kick some ass ... But it needed to be somewhere that was safe, because he didn't want to actually have to fight ... that was someone else's job.
In a strange turn of events, that smacks of sucking his brain out with a straw, Tony 'The Tiger' Blair decided he was gonna hook up for tea and scones with Georgey, after donning his finest sheriff's star and snakeskin boots.
And they decided the place to meet for this hot date would be Northern Ireland! So we decided to break out the Pink Tank, and welcome the guys to our shores in true style.
E8
For a couple of years I tried to raise the finance for the science fiction feature film & transmedia project 'E8' written by Ian McDonald, and this was the promo video that we produced. Sadly I wasn't able to find the finance, but some day I may try to bring this back to life.
THE BEAT HOTEL
The Beat Hotel show follows the lives of the slightly unhinged residents of and old rundown hotel. They pay their way through trade such as Art or Music pieces and practically have free reign to do as they please.
I was one of the first European artists to run a Kickstarter campaign, which actually turned out to be quite a hindrance, since it's all about having access to the community to raise cash fast! But it was a fantastic learning experience to understand the online world of crowd-sourcing, and to be at the start of a new age of creator-audience engagement.
We created a huge amount of content for the campaign, across podcasts, side-shows with other characters, and promotional pieces with the core characters, all of which can be viewed on the Beat Hotel YouTube channel.
You can check out photos from the set & shoot here as well as photos of the awesome set.
And a bunch of other shots from the concept & puppet build through to the Kickstarter campaign.
SHAM & MARLOW
At some point everyone in the world will find themselves tracing their roots back to Ireland. In 2011 this was proved beyond doubt when the Holy Trinity of Obama, The Queen & the Dalai Lama came to Ireland .. in search of their roots! But the secret service think there's something fishy going on. Someone driving these Chinese whispers. And someone must go to find out, someone no-one will suspect.
Sham & Marlow will reveal all. You can view all episodes here
You can check out photos from the prep & shoot here
This was part of the supporting content created for The Beat Hotel.
THE PODCAT
Belfast's poets and comedians join with Chairman Miaow for The Beat Hotel's "PodCat." Rusty Lane, one of the Beat Hotel residents has a cat fascination, and has one for each of her birthdays ... 101.
Chairman Miaow is the only cat to have escaped her clutches, and now broadcasts 'Podcat' across the pirate airwaves for his brothers and sisters in captivity. As part of the on-going content creation for the world of The Beat Hotel we wanted to work with spoken word artists; poets and comedians and those who can paint pictures and emotions with words.
Chairman Miaow, his producer Fidel Catro, and their new anchor Henry (who is actually Julie) host the biweekly podcast, with CM interviewing a different artist each week, followed by the guest delivering a poem or comedy material in one minute, the 'One Beat Per Minute' feature!
You can view all episodes here.
This was part of the supporting content created for The Beat Hotel.
CLAWS FOR CONCERN - THE BEAT HOTEL CAMPAIGN
As part of the Beat Hotel Kickstarter campaign we produced some additional content to go out every couple of days for community engagement.
'Claws For Concern' was produced by Beat Hotel resident Jim Fawndah & you can view all 6 episodes here.
This was part of the supporting content created for The Beat Hotel.
TART : T-SHIRT ART
I started TART (T-shirt ART) with the guys from Liberty Blue after finishing up from 5 years of running the club night Evolution. We chose 100% cotton t-shirts and all designs were screen printed onto decals, which we then heat-pressed onto the t-shirts.
We had two collections, one which was to showcase designs produced by local artists, and a second collection which were made up of vintage decals that we sourced through Ebay & online. A large proportion of those were Big Daddy Rat & Ratfink designs, along with old music and musician ones, and we even managed to find 5 original Snoopy & Charlie Brown decals that had been specifically produced for the Apollo 11 moon landings. We sold these t-shirts all over UK, Europe & America.
WORLD BEARD CHAMPIONSHIPS
Every two years the World Beard Championships is held in a different city around the world. Having begun in Berlin it has journeyed to many cities, and in 2007 it came to the UK, hosted in Brighton, at the Convention Centre - the same place where the political parties hold their annual conferences.
People came from all over the world to take part in the competition, across 17 categories covering moustaches, partial beards & full beards. There were painted people, people in fancy dress, there were bearded ladies, and hirsute icons from across the ages.
Nick Cave was even one of the judges! It was like 'Best In Show' meets 'Crufts' for facial fuzz, and the audience were absolutely hammered by 3pm, shouting to all the participants on stage .. to be fair a good chunk of the participants were fairly lit too.
There were some extraordinary facial constructions, and an incredible amount of effort in the costumes & performances.
It was a great day out & I managed to come 4th in my category of 'Full Beard Styled Moustache'. Just don't tell anyone that if you didn't come 1st, 2nd or 3rd that all the people in your category got joint 4th.
