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artsandhealth.ie is delighted to announce the recipient of the artsandhealth.ie Documentation Bursary 2017: Galway University Hospitals Arts Trust, visual artist Marielle MacLeman and filmmaker Tom Flanagan for the documentation of the Dialysis Arts Programme at Merlin Park University Hospital, Galway.
The aim of the artsandhealth.ie bursary award is to encourage high quality, creative documentation of arts and health practice nationally. The Second Hand of The Clock will document the creative processes that enhance time on dialysis, set against the relentless routine of chronic kidney disease. In capturing ephemeral outcomes and residual impact, the film will reveal the role of Arts and Health in fostering human connection, dialogue, and ways of seeing that enrich the everyday experiences of participants, long after their traces are wiped away by Actichlor.
Articulating the connection between ‘human’ being and ‘placed’ being in a context that extracts or excludes people from the places and activities that matter to them, the film will narrate journeys of the imagination that escape the clinical confines of the unit.
Galway University Hospitals Arts Trust runs the West of Ireland’s leading Arts and Health programme as a means of improving the hospital experience for patients, staff and visitors. It provides a multi-disciplinary programme of events and activities, including exhibitions, participative workshops, music, theatre and poetry to promote well-being and enhance the hospital environment. Through diverse means of creative engagement it aims to encourage dialogue, promote environmental improvements, and support the development of individual creative potential. Since 2012 Margaret Flannery and Marielle MacLeman have collaborated on the development and delivery of Arts Trust projects, a notable example being the haemodialysis participatory arts programme at Merlin Park University Hospital. Established with an initial yearlong Arts Council Project Award to redress a lack of arts provision in dialysis in the West of Ireland, it is now considered a vital aspect of patient care. Participants have exhibited widely, published the book The Magician and the Swallow’s Tale, and redesigned their waiting room.
Marielle MacLeman is a Galway-based visual artist and Arts and Health professional working across drawing, paint, installation, design and participatory approaches. Her work explores the relationship between materiality and narrative and the interplay between land use, cultural heritage, identity, and social mobility – frequently borrowing from fading tradition and industry, or referencing museum and conservation practices. She has worked widely in participatory arts and health contexts including the development of long-term programmes for palliative care and haemodialysis, and public art commissions spanning community nursing, paediatric, mental health, and neonatal contexts. She has written and designed for publications including The Music of What Happens (2014), The Magician and the Swallow’s Tale (2013), and The Pattern of a Bird (2008). Marielle’s projects have been supported by The Scottish Arts Council, Glasgow City Council, The Arts Council of Ireland, and Galway City Council.
Tom Flanagan is an artist, filmmaker and professional cinematographer based in Galway. His solo and collaborative work with artist Megs Morley is an ongoing investigation of the language of cinema and its relationship to political power and collective memory. Flanagan’s moving image and photographic works examine real and imagined politically complex sites and forgotten histories and attempt to intervene into collective understandings of the present, by exploring the space between images, memory, knowledge and power.
Tom Flanagan’s work has been exhibited, broadcast and screened nationally and internationally in both gallery and film festival contexts. Recent solo and group exhibitions include: EVA International 2016, Still the Barbarians; TG4 ‘Splanc’ Commission Allagóirí Chumhachta (Allegories of Power) for national broadcast in 2016 as part of their commemoration programming; Irish Art Does Not Exist (2014), Station Independent Projects, New York; Agitationism (2014) EVA International, Ireland; Building on Ruins (2013), Cirrus Gallery, Los Angeles; Lucca Experimental Film Festival (2013), Tuscany, Italy; Labour and Lockout (2013), Limerick City Gallery of Art; Momentous Times (2013), CCA Derry~Londonderry; Guth Gafa International Documentary Film Festival (2013), Kells, Meath, Ireland; Peaks of Present, Sheets of Past (2013), Mermaid Arts Centre; Rencontres Internationales(2011), Centre du Pompidou, Paris, and Berlin (2012); A Series of Navigations (2012), The Model, Sligo; Post-Fordlândia (2012), The Good Children Gallery, New Orleans; Alchemy Film and Moving Image Festival (2012), Hawick, Scotland; Post-Fordlândia (2011), Galway Arts Centre. www.vimeo.com/tomflanagan
The 2017 artsandhealth.ie documentation bursary is funded by the HSE and the Arts Council.
