Image 1, 2 & 3: Developers (installation view). Roscommon Arts Centre, April – May 2014.

Through the support of the Arts Council of Ireland’s Curatorial Residency scheme, a series of exhibitions and events have been developed that respond to the period of intense change being experienced in Co. Roscommon. These responses will unfold in multiple acts and through a range of activities including exhibitions, events, talks, symposium and commissions.

The first event being the exhibition Developers. Using tropes and devices that reflect the development of contemporary rural society, Developers strives to portray what is often difficult to decipher or goes unseen.

“Developers is a project about trying to see rapid change as it is ‘developing’, in the hope that clear seeing might be its own reward. Cootehall, my home for fifteen years, has been in the midst of a great upheaval in recent years. I wanted to approach the particularities of those changes; to see, to listen, to ‘snatch out of time’ moments that might offer some clarity in a period when clarity was hard to come by, when freezing fog – literally and figuratively – descended on the village.  A big mirror often seemed the best tool to use. Film, speech and poems were employed as tools of reflection, too. This is a display of what they yielded.

  –Alice Lyons (writer/director, Developers)

Developers was produced through the assistance of the Arts Council of Ireland Project Award.

Alice Lyons and  Orla Mc Hardy have co-directed The Polish Language (2009), which was nominated for an IFTA, received Best Irish Animation Awards at the Galway Film Fleadh, the Kerry Film Festival and a jury citation from Expresion en Corto in Mexico. It has screened in competitions in 30 film festivals worldwide and was recently part of a major exhibition,‘Script films: Script as a moving image: A dynamic archive’ at the Center for Art and Media (ZKM),Karlsruhle, Germany & FACT (Foundation for Art and Creative Technology), Liverpool.

The visual arts programme is supported by Roscommon County Council Arts Office. and curated by visual arts curator in residence Linda Shevlin.

This curatorial residency is kindly supported by the Arts Council of Ireland.