Roscommon Arts Centre Presents New Visual Arts Programme DEVELOPERS, Now thru May 15

Roscommon Arts Centre is delighted to launch the visual arts programme for 2014 with Developers by Alice Lyons and Orla Mc Hardy. This exhibition opens next tonight 5th April at 7.30pm. All are welcome.

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.

This multi media and film installation addresses the recent social and cultural transformation of the Irish landscape and it's villages due to the proliferation of constructed developments. The work in this exhibition comes from quietly observing a community reasserting itself and trying to adapt to its newly evolved appearance.

Writer and director of Developers Alice Lyons says, "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 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.

Alice Lyons (writer/director, Developers) was born in Paterson, New Jersey and moved to County Roscommon in 1998. For her poetry she has been the recipient of the Patrick Kavanagh Award, the Ireland Chair of Poetry Bursary and numerous bursaries in literature from An Chomhairle Ealaoine/the Arts Council. Her recent poetry has been published and is forthcoming in POETRY (Chicago). For many years Lyons taught on the fine arts course at GMIT in Galway and Castlebar and is just completing a PhD in creative writing at the Seamus Heaney Centre for Poetry, Queen's University, Belfast. She works as curator for visual arts for The Dock in Carrick-on-Shannon.

Orla Mc Hardy's (art director/animator, Developers) work spans from single channel films to site-specific gallery installation pieces. Using interdisciplinary animation processes as a starting point, she has collaborated with poets, radio producers, sound artists, architects, designers, animators and has crossed over into live-action and documentary film-making. From Donegal, Mc Hardy studied Animation at IADT, Dun Laoghaire and went on to complete an MFA from the Department Film, Video, New Media & Animation at SAIC, the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2011 having been awarded an SAIC Trustee Scholarship and a Bank of Ireland Millennium Scholarship. A recent recipient of the Arts Council's Film project award, she is currently working on a new body of work.

Developers continues until May 15th and is accompanied by a Live Event on May 2nd and workshop as part of the Bealtaine Festival on May 7th.

The live event on May 2nd will take place at King House in Boyle at 8:00pm. Admission is free. Alice Lyons, poet and writer/director of Developers will be reading from her work Developers along with visuals from the film of the same title.

The workshop on May 7th will take place at Roscommon Arts Centre from 2:00pm-4:00pm. Admission is free.
WORKSHOP. The event is titled Using Techniques from the Visual Arts for Creative Writing with Alice Lyons. Book by contacting Roscommon Arts Centre at artscentre@roscommoncoco.ie.

This programme has been developed to respond to a period of intense change being experienced by the County and will unfold in multiple acts and through a range of activities including exhibitions, events, talks, symposium and commissions.

Huge challenges remain such as how to balance the relationship between urban and rural communities, how to safeguard a plurality of ways of life, how to sustain a balanced ecology and agriculture, how to navigate a path between protecting history and promoting economic development.

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