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Galway: Aisling O'Beirn at Tulca Arts Festival As part of the Tulca Festival, an emerging contemporary-art festival in Galway, Aisling O'Beirn, a Belfast-based artist, engaged in a series of works which she called Home Town Nick Names . The work took the form of a series of street signs which were erected in site-specific locations around the city. The artist, who is originally from Galway, describes her work as "looking at localised vernacular information that gives the cities their identities."
However, one such street sign, Flea Lane , provoked controversy amongst local residents, who objected to its presence and asked for it to be removed. The controversy over the signage raises several issues. In the fifties, Lenaboy Avenue was referred to as "Flea Lane" by Galway locals. In these changing times, properties in this much-sought-after area now fetch exorbitant prices, and with new developments cropping up it is perhaps easier to forget its recent past. Rebecca Solnit, in her paper The art of memory and the art of forgetting , refers to this form of selective memory as "West Coast Amnesia." Her criticism on the "history of erasures" within Western culture characterises the above situation and O'Beirn's work is an interesting comment on this.
Although Galway's Salthill area is experiencing major 're-development', slot machines and take-aways are still very much its currency. It is evident that O'Beirn questions the loss of urban memory in this project, and work like this has a great capacity to reframe our experience of public space. However, such an experience can only occur through dialogue and participation with the local community. The acceptance of an artist's work into the community and the public domain is dependent on this very fine balance. Marie-Louise Blaney is a visual artist living and working in Sligo. Aisling O'Beirn: Home Town Nick Names , Tulca Festival, Galway, October 2003
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