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Underbreath was a site specific installation located in the Bonded Warehouses on the Customs House Quay in Cork. The work was commissioned by the National Sculpture Factory as part of the Daylighting Festival in 2002. Underbreath comprised a series of locked cupboards made for existing alcoves in the warehouse walls. In order to unlock the cupboards, visitors had to pick up a ring of keys from Security at the entrance to the Quay. The work was made in collaboration with the working dockers as well as past employees of the Bonded Warehouses.
Sometimes I might say I am a choreographer, because it seems to me that I am always that. So that watching the Irish matches in the World Cup in the summer of 2002, with the dockers, in their lean-to shed across from The Idle Hour is the work of a choreographer, because the labour of gaining the confidence of such working men, when I am a tiny thing and English too, is a work of negotiating space. By the end of June 2002, when we are all thrilled by the victory over Germany, strong tea is pushed towards me in mugs in the lean-to across from The Idle Hour, down on the docks, and when we open the piece, it is the dockers who leave their crates of cigarettes, to help a nervous public wrestle with big padlocks. And the movements of these two sets of hands, some of them manicured, and down from Dublin for the festival, others moving like old trees, and dark with sun; well this is my choreography. |
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