Fri. 3 Nov. 2023, 8pm
Ticket €10
The Model’s popular performance series returns, featuring some of the finest emerging and established voices – a selection of authors, poets, and visual artists, reflecting the contemporary Irish cultural landscape. The evening will include contributions from Olesya Zdorovetska, Charmaine T Matonsi, Emma Penney, Rebecca Christina Devins, David Fahey, Donal Conaty & Eva Martin. Curated by Patrick Karl Curley.
The title derives from a 1916 newspaper editorial in which the leaders of the Easter Rising were described as “no more than feather heads and dreamers”. This seemingly inauspicious designation seemed quite appropriate in the spirit of incorporation and inversion of old-school thought regarding contemporary culture.
The combination of live performance and visual art always provoked lively discussion and debate from the audience and this engagement allowed the event to become a living, breathing entity inspiring collaboration and a sense of a creative community.
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Olesya Zdorovetska
Olesya Zdorovetska is a Dublin-based performer, composer and curator, originally from Kyiv, Ukraine. Her work has been described as ‘an emotional and intellectual explosion' (Dash Arts, UK). As an international soloist and collaborator she works in the fields of improvised, jazz, Afro-Caribbean, contemporary classical, traditional Ukrainian and Sephardic music, theatre and film. She is a founder of the Ukrainian-Irish Cultural Platform and co-curator of Phonica, a platform for experimental music and poetry. She was a 2022 recipient of the Markievicz Award from the Arts Council / An Chomhairle Ealaíon and the best-soundscape winner at The 25th Irish Times Irish Theatre Awards.
Charmaine T Matonsi
Charmaine T Matonsi was born in Zimbabwe. She began acting in Ireland in 2018, and has worked on numerous projects as an actor, writer and collaborator, including Uprooted (Brokentalkers), The Bed (Cairde Connected), and Look No Mark (Donal O’Kelly). Charmaine recently performed her poem Blackbird at Ladies Night at the Hawk’s Well Theatre, Sligo.
Emma Penney
Emma Penney is a Lecturer in Writing & Literature at ATU Sligo. In 2021 Emma organised Ireland’s first working-class studies conference at Liberty Hall where she also launched the Working-Class Writing Archive – a collection of previously unpublished or self-published writing from working-class communities. Emma now uses this archive in teaching and is passionate about promoting and preserving working-class writing.
Donal Conaty
Donal Conaty is a poet and fiction writer based in Sligo. His poems have been published in The Cormorant and were displayed as a visual installation in the Yeats Building in Sligo in 2019. His prose has been published in Force 10. His satirical novel The Eighty-Five Billion Euro Man was published by Y Books in 2011. His short story A Man Does Nothing Meets No One was a prizewinner in the Winter Things short story competition run by The Dock and The Reading Room in December 2020. Donal was Writer in Residence 2021 at The Dock Arts Centre.
Visual Contributions
Rebecca Christina Devins
Rebecca Devins works and lives in Sligo. She studied Fine Art in ATU graduating in 2023. Rebecca is a multidisciplinary artist with an objective to break down preconceived ideas about beauty within the grotesque and reverse its fearsome reputation. Focusing on body image, Rebecca strives to explore the subconscious delving into the complex psychological patterns of growth, death, and rebirth.
David Fahey
David Fahey is a multimedia artist from Sligo and a graduate from IADT, Institute of Art, Design and Technology in Dún Laoghaire. He is currently based in Sweden. Recently he has been part of the Kinetic and Art Concrete movement in Europe and has been exhibiting in many established galleries in Bratislava, Prague, Novigrad, Budapest, Hamburg, Basel, and Paris.
A Constant State of Change is a meditative slow motion transitional study of the psychological and physiological effects of pure colour and pattern recognition and expectation. The audio soundscape was created by Irish electronic composer Barry Mulrooney.
Donal Conaty & Eva Martin
The Sky's A Lie is an animated film of Donal Conaty’s observational poems, which are called Splinters because they tend to be sharp and get under the skin of the reader. They are short verses that are full of humour, pathos and fleeting moments of poignancy as they consider subjects such as societal collapse, mortality, climate change and misogyny.
Eva Martin's audiovisual interpretation of the poems translates Donal's work into the visual realm through raw, organic lines and familiar sounds of our everyday. Her interpretations are absorbing, observational and intrusive. They take the viewer on a journey to challenge their perception of what they know to be true and hit them with a bit of reality along the way.
