‘My commission from The Dock gives me invaluable support to spend focused time with my current work. It is exploring what can be imagined when relating already existing and newly written texts, sound and visual material.
At home growing up, we only had RTÉ television. In conversation with friends, I noticed early on that what they and I saw was often different. I have mostly worked in the arts, and much of that time was spent in broadcasting. Both experiences may be somewhat linked to my being drawn to early Irish arts television: its architectural and cultural contexts, and what people saw.
Beginnings of making can be alluring. Conditions are new. Approaches to production and output happen in their own presence. They are not yet situated in the betweenness of archive and memory, between that which no longer exists and may be forgotten, or in what can be made new again. These considerations are integral to my present work around early Irish arts television.
My sources include the paper archive of Spectrum, RTÉ television’s earliest arts series directed by Jim FitzGerald. It began transmission in 1962, without its output being fully kept. None of its completed programmes that people saw on television can be re-watched today. Also, of significance to me are published texts written around the time of the early years of RTÉ. One of those is the 1963 article The RTÉ Television Building by R. Furneaux Jordan. It was published in the influential Architectural Review accompanied by images taken at the time by the renowned photographer John Donat. Valuable too, are timely interviews I have been recording as well as some made in the past. Those interviewed include people who worked on Spectrum, who contributed to it or whose work the series featured.’
