Tags
We returned from our two-day-cation (what an abomination of a portmanteau!) in Allihies and threw ourselves straight into the Skibbereen Arts Festival. This impressive festival has a huge range of events, installations, exhibitions and music ranging from LOWmountain to the Sacred Harp Singers. This afternoon’s activity is the launch of Discovery Box, Book and Text in the West Cork Arts Centre. A Discovery Box is “an access route via which the very young, aged 18 months and up, can engage with visual art and a gallery environment using the language they innately understand – play!”. This particular box is developed by Tomasz Madajczak, and, as far as I can tell, the box is a chest full of items that reflect and engage with the hosting exhibition. Children can play with the contents of the box in order to examine and explore the themes of the encompassing art. There is also a Book, which is an old fashioned soft cloth book designed by artists Susan Montgomery and Sarah Ruttle. “It is designed around the motifs of the exhibition and the activities of the Discovery Box and focuses very much on the sensory elements used to investigate the exhibition”. The Text aspect of the installation is “the witness text of Toma McCullim, artist and academic. She writes of her experience of the…exhibition and Discovery Box from the perspective of a parent as well as from a point of view of an arts practitioner. This thoughtful and poetic text is being launched as a limited edition publication.” I love the idea of the combination of box, book, and text, and am viewing my own fancy dress box with a new eye!
Then this evening, weather permitting, there will be an outdoor showing of Hitchcock’s The Birds at 10pm in the grounds of Abbeystrewry Church. The sound of the raucous evening chorus of real avian flocks will add to the atmospherics. Personally, I find The Birds far less scary than the flying monkeys in The Wizard of Oz which is tomorrow’s daytime outdoor screening.
And finally, on a cautionary note, do not order a tuna panini and a chicken panini from an apparently hungover man in a shop on the Beara peninsula. You will end up with a warm tuna and chicken combination panini, which I have to say is the most disgusting thing I have ever eaten, and, trust me, I’ll eat almost anything! Apart from that our two day holiday (an unpacked portmanteau is far more attractive) on Beara was paradise.