Summer 2001 - Aidan Dunne's column
C96 Column: Visual Arts South Artists, property and the BMW One recurrent subtext in artists' biographies is the mystery of their economic survival. This doesn’t apply to all of them by any means - Monet, who had little or no money for a long time, turned out to be a particularly astute financial speculator when he finally managed to get some, and these days one has the impression, at least, that more and more artists are quite well off. Brit Art engendered a New Money (or Monet?) class of British artists, for example. But in a surprisingly large number of cases, careers that assume greatness and inevitability in retrospect turn out to have been built on credit and desperation. The way that works made on meagre resources transmute over time into blue-chip commodities is echoed in the much noted demographic effect of the presence of artists in an urban region. That is, artists colonise a run-down area of a city, enliven it culturally and are then edged out as property values rise and commercial interests prevail. In Ireland, Temple Bar is usually cited as Exhibit A in this regard. The moral of the story may simply be that artists make poor entrepreneurs, or are slow learners, but then their minds are presumably elsewhere (not necessarily on their work). And it has to be said that there are, after all, surviving artistic enclaves in Temple Bar, usually negotiated by artists themselves at some level. The problem is that, in the midst of an unprecedented property boom, anecdotal evidence suggests that finding affordable studio space in Dublin has become virtually impossible, apart from carefully husbanded schemes like Temple Bar or the Fire Station Studios. There are other independent initiatives, including the Broadstone Studios, but there is a distinct feeling that options are dwindling rapidly. Which is where the question of the wider context of the whole country comes in. The well-known phenomenon of the artists' colony has been observed in several locations in Ireland, including Allihies, though artists there tend to play down the notion. It's more, they say, that a large number of artists happen to have settled in a particularly beautiful locality, without any binding interconnections of style or personality. This is a generally more accurate description of what happens. Over the last decade or so, we have seen the gravitation of a large number of artists to the northwest, specifically to the North Mayo-Sligo-Leitrim region. There is what looks like logic at work here. In fact it is tempting to see, enacted on a national scale, the first part of the Temple Bar Effect. In the midst of a national trend of steeply climbing property values, it is notable that this area, part of the designated BMW regions, has proved fairly resistant. Dwellings and land are still relatively affordable and, furthermore, affordable in the midst of a rather beautiful, undervalued (and not just in a monetary sense) part of the country. A number of factors are both part of, and have helped to encourage, the concentration of artists. These include, in various ways, the Ballinglen Arts Foundation at Ballycastle, the upgrading of the Art Department at Sligo Institute of Technology, the energetic efforts of the Sligo Art Gallery and the establishment of the Leitrim Sculpture Centre in Manorhamilton. The Model Arts Centre would also figure on this list but now, as it happens, in re-Modelled form, as the Model Arts and Niland Gallery, it represents an intriguing new element in the mixture. Aidan Dunne Column reproduced from CIRCA 96, Summer 2001, p. 7.
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