Walking to class one day, I saw a piece of street art on Bolton Street that I had walked by nearly every day for the past three weeks without noticing. It was a painting of a robot on some sort of electrical-looking box. I had never paid much attention to it, thinking this was just a piece of mindless graffiti, until I noticed a yellow flyer on the side of it that posed an evocative question: “Is art here good?” Curious as to where this question stemmed from, I did some research on the group mentioned on the flyer: the Dublin Beta Project.

I looked up the website for this group, whose aim is to beautify the city of Dublin. I found the project I was looking for and discovered that this was an attempt to beautify a typically mundane item: the boxes that powered the traffic lights at intersections all over Dublin. These boxes are normally grey and prone to “tagging” by hooligans and youngsters. This project aimed to turn these eyesores into something creative. The site provided a map that listed the locations of the decorated traffic light boxes. Not having access to a printer, I hand-drew a map of the area and labeled the locations of all these art pieces, anticipating the day when I would have the free time necessary to walk the whole route and photograph these pieces of art.

Finally, an afternoon came around when I had nothing planned for a few hours. I decided to set out to find all these decorated traffic light boxes. It was a lovely day for a stroll, as long as your idea of “a lovely day for a stroll” is a day when it is cold and windy and raining heavily. I left my apartment armed with only my camera, my hand-drawn map, a pen, and (fortunately) my umbrella. I set out down Bolton Street, where the first piece I encountered was the familiar robot. From there I went down Capel Street, where I came across a thought-provoking box that stated, “Nothing happens until you…” This prompted me to think of how to finish this statement. The answer that immediately came to mind was “explore,” which then encouraged me to continue on my journey. Going on from there, I came across boxes painted to look like a bookshelf, a variety of faces, a man walking his dog at the spire, a video game, a man with a ladder into the clouds, a mystical woman, a bear smoking a bubble pipe, some abstract graffiti, and some 3-D blocks.

All of these images were unique and compelling. Each one evoked a completely different feeling. So far, this is my favorite piece of collaborative artwork I have ever seen. I love that this is a series of beautiful pieces of artwork with an adventure built in. To answer the question posed by the first piece of art, “Is art here good?” the answer is most certainly, “Yes, it’s feckin’ grand!”

For photos of all of these traffic light boxes, including the flyer and an unpainted traffic light box, click here:

Boxes

In center city Dublin lies a solitary park that has been my frequent escape for inspiration and contemplation. It is big enough to incorporate the beauty I imagined in a fantasy book, and small enough to take a stroll around the perimeter without getting lost. I don’t think I even remember the last time when I was wholly satisfied with a city park, but St. Stephen’s Green Park of Dublin did the trick—at least when I just wanted to clear my mind and get my creative juices flowing. I didn’t expect the strange feeling I felt when I went on a Saturday to catch up on some reading from the book, Dublin, Tenement Life.

My plan was to first get into the mindset to understand the wretched tales of the tenement dwellers. As I walked down the park, I turned to the statues to get inspiration, particularly the ones of Irish leaders who stood up for Ireland’s freedom and human rights. But there was something missing when I looked at those proud, yet mundane faces, leading me to become continuously distracted by how beautiful the day was. It was then when I passed the famine memorial, and something bitter grasped my thoughts. It was a feeling I got whenever I passed this particular work of art—a deranged headless figure feeding an empty spoon to a collapsed body. I knew the Irish famine was a tragic event in Ireland’s history, causing about a million people to die from starvation. Usually a memorial plaque or wall would have sufficed in paying homage to the dead, but these sculptures single-handedly brought out the grotesqueness and horror of how the famine truly tore away all hope for the Irish people. For me, just the physical construction of the sculptures was enough to make me feel uncomfortable. The thin mutilated bodies without a distinct face made them seem anonymous and terrifying. The texture of the sculptures was harsh and jagged, and the eroded color made them seem burnt and crippled. If I had not known what they were, I still would have associated them to something beastly in the sculptor’s mind.

It was hard to look away, and I soon found myself molding dark and ghoulish characters in my head for a future animation project. On the plus side, I was in the mindset to read my book. But even then, the sight of tourists taking pictures with the memorial sculptures and little kids running by them without a second look made me wonder about the statues in the park overall. Were they all there simply to invoke a reminder and emotion? Or could some sculptures be there for another purpose entirely—like a play-thing for children or a source of inspiration for creative work? It was a thought that occupied my mind for the rest of the day. I never got a chance to get back to the book.

—   Julisa Basak

Finding the Book of Kells was a magnificent discovery, even though I had no intentions of discussing it for my travel writing blog in the first place. For all I knew, it was only the text within the book that mattered—the handwritten manuscript of the gospels that intrigued me more for its age than its content. Out of sheer whim, I followed two of my classmates to Trinity College where they kept the text behind glass, and I saw for myself what I was missing within the book’s ornate pages. It was not simply the grand composition of the words, but the meticulously colored pictures around them that were awe-inspiring. In fact, I came to realize that the whole book was, in fact, a piece of art—a collage of several Christian symbols visually and symmetrically converged into one. The art style is what historians have come to define as Insular art. To me, it was not the definition that mattered, but what the art style invoked within my mind.

Of course I am not going to start on some clichéd revelation, but I will admit that I got strangely excited when I saw the shapes and patterns enveloping the iconic Christian figures in the text. The artwork was almost hypnotizing. Moreover, it was oddly nostalgic. That was when I realized that my brain was associating the illustrations from the Book of Kells to the oriental paintings I saw when I lived in India. Although Insular art is an abstract form found commonly in ancient texts from the British isles, I could not deny that many of the designs in the Book of Kells resembled the ones found in Indian and Persian art forms. I remember the tapestries that outlined the walls of old forts in India, and how they used to belong to Islamic Mughal lords and Hindu kings, telling stories of great battles, extravagant marriages, and simple court life. Just like in the Book of Kells, the religious ideologies of Hinduism were depicted on several ancient paintings and sculptures in India. But it did not end there.

I think what is really interesting is that these South Asian designs are still recreated today, most commonly in henna art, a type of temporary tattoos for women. In one of the popular pages of the Book of Kells, I noticed that the patterns and hidden drawings of religious figures and animals all told the story of Christ. In the same way, new Indian brides get henna on their arms that intricately depict the age-old customs and rituals of marriage. If such ancient art forms still continue to mesmerize us, then I now know why the Book of Kells is still a source of fascination. It is a shame that it was behind a glass case—I could have used some new ideas for future henna designs.

— Julisa Basak

During the second week of my summer study away adventure in Dublin, Ireland, I trekked over to the LAB gallery to meet up with my classmates and professor and learn more about the arts in Dublin. I was feeling extremely confident in my navigation abilities, as I had found my way to the LAB solo without once taking a wrong turn in the labyrinthine streets of this nonsensical city. After our whole class had gathered, we stepped into one of the galleries of the LAB. This gallery contained several different art installations, had huge windows with a view of James Joyce Street, and had some kind of bizarre whale sound effects playing loudly in the background. Of all these sights and sounds that immediately overwhelmed my senses, I was struck by one particular piece: a line drawing of a wave, with thinner lines drawn parallel to the line of the initial waveform many times, curving and distorting to create a strange, almost three-dimensional effect that played tricks on my eyes. Although the drawing was very simplistic and looked like something I’d doodled in my physics notes in high school, there was something about the boldness of it and the stark contrast of the black lines on white wood that really caught my eye.

As a student studying media production and hoping to find a career on the technical side of the music industry, I really liked the use of a sound wave as the basis for this piece. I study and work with sound waves quite frequently, and I’ve always found them fascinating. I wondered about the intended meaning behind this drawing and I was curious to find out more about the artist and the inspiration for this piece.

I looked at the info card and found that this piece was called “The Fine Line,” drawn by Cian O’Sullivan with Maeve O’Neill. This piece was part of O’Sullivan’s work to explore the senses and attitudes towards disability. “The Fine Line” was intended as a visual representation of what it’s like to be deaf. I found this very interesting, as I have many deaf family members and I have always wished I could understand their world better. I looked at the drawing again with this new information, hoping some epiphany would strike me and I would suddenly understand what it was really like to live in a world without sound. However, after several more minutes of contemplation, I really had no idea how this cluster of parallel lines was supposed to represent what it’s like to be deaf. The lines looked cool, but still didn’t mean anything to me.

So maybe I didn’t completely “get” this piece. I don’t have to understand it exactly as the artist intended it in order for me to appreciate it to some degree. That’s what I love about art; art has the ability to cross cultural barriers, like different levels of ability or different nationalities, and bring people together in common pursuit of something awesome.

View photos of the piece here:  Fine Line

Street art in Dublin is not something I thought held great significance to the Irish people, at least not compared to the street art in Philadelphia. Though Dublin is filled with diverse performances of music and theater, I came across only a few remnants of the visual arts created by street artists. But even then, these remnants were hidden within alleys and street corners. So what was the point?

Luckily, I found that point while walking down Rathmines Road during lunchtime. I was not particularly looking for anything, except for food. That was when I came across the “Bernard Shaw”, a small quaint restaurant, like many others, but splashed with a plethora of symbols, quirky characters, vibrant colors, and pop-art style convolution. The paintings were all integrated into the pub’s architecture, turning the latter into a giant canvas. I was almost about to step into the restaurant, but I began to fight a stingy game in my head—should I spend money for lunch at the Shaw or should I wait for the pubs at night? The pubs of course!

But walking away did not turn out to be such a bad idea, especially since I did not expect what lied in store when I decided to wander around the perimeter of the restaurant—a beautiful display of graffiti art that illuminated the surrounding walls.

These super-stylized pop art graffito had more than just an aesthetic quality. They were rough, grotesque, and hopelessly blunt. One artwork of three clowns with the words, “Here Today Gone Tomorrow” seemed to reflect the live-in-the-present attitude of the Irish towards their contemporary surrounding. The clowns, for one, were not even the happy kind. To me they resembled young rebels with war paint on their skin, standing up to the remnants of English authority still prevalent in this part of Dublin.

The best of the work was the graffiti on the alley walls that was interlaced into a beautiful collage. It appeared that people used the alleyway as a shortcut, unlike the graffiti-stained alleys in Philadelphia that were often avoided. But it was interesting to see casual middle-class men and women, even if a few, take a detour through this curving alley full of mesmerizing contemporary street art. They were like an art gallery of their own.

What I really liked about this set of graffiti art was the way it beautified the space rather than demeaned it. Though the Irish sentiment and political strife burns underneath the beauty, it is because of that that I believe this type of art is acceptable to the public. In fact, Dublin is supposedly filled with these types of street art as part of a project started in 2011 called Roadworks. To know the many levels of Irish culture is to view it through its art. If there are other such works throughout Dublin, then I plan to scout them out.

On my first full day in Dublin on a summer study abroad trip, I had an hour lunch break after my Travel Writing class. Feeling more wanderlust than hunger, I decided to use this time to explore the streets of lower Dublin. In my jet-lagged state I stumbled across a little restaurant called the Bernard Shaw. It was surrounded on all sides by alleyways adorned with fantastic street art and whimsical murals. In the center of these alleys, atop a rundown building, protruded neon lettering that spelled out “emancipate yourself.” I thought it was cool, snapped some photos, and moved on. Thinking about it later, that piece stood out to me more than the other artwork I had seen that day. The more I thought about it, the more interested I became. I decided to do some research to see if I could find anything about the artist. Not sure where to begin, I did a Google search for “emancipate yourself,” which, unsurprisingly, yielded only Bob Marley lyrics. I tacked on “Dublin” to my search and was pleasantly surprised to find exactly the information I wanted. I then embarked on a journey across the Internet to learn more about Irish history and street art.

I discovered that “Emancipate Yourself” was created by Dublin street artist Maser. The piece was originally housed in an art exhibition called Dublin Contemporary 2011, hung unimaginatively against a beige wall. After its installation in its present location in Fall 2012, the piece made a much bolder statement. Seeing the piece from the street level, the viewer sees these words from behind the iron bars of a tall fence, as though the message itself is in its own prison from which it yearns to be emancipated. The lettering towers powerfully over the viewer, giving a strong sense of authority.

One detail that I almost didn’t notice and didn’t immediately realize was part of this piece is the face of Daniel O’Connell, known as the Emancipator, to the right of the words. Maser has stated that this piece is a tribute to O’Connell, who emancipated Ireland from English rule. Knowing this, the piece takes on a whole new meaning as a political statement of anti-English sentiment in Ireland as well as a message of personal freedom.

Maser stated that his inspiration for this piece was a neon sign on O’Connell Street that read, “Why go bald.” This inspired Maser to think of the self-conscious teen he used to be and all of the people who are struggling to free themselves from their personal demons. After reading about this inspiration, I thought of the piece in relation to me personally, and my motivations for traveling to Dublin. It got me thinking about all the things I have emancipated myself from through travel and other means. With only two words, Maser managed to create a political statement, a message that resonates with viewers on a personal level, and a lesson in Irish history all wrapped up in one.

View photos of this piece here:

Emancipate Yourself

Dublin never struggled to inSpire…

I arrived at Dublin airport at around 11am on Monday morning. Appreciate that it was actually 6am back home and I was lucky if I got an hour of sleep during the 10 hours on the way over. Upon arrival I could only think of sleeping but my travel directors wouldn’t hear of it. As soon as I put my bags were in my room our welcoming party rushed us into an orientation.

The students I was traveling with congregated outside the apartments. We went through the ritual orientation that barely informed us of anything, but it did the service of covering the host company’s ass. We were designated a generous hour to get our affairs in order and we were on our way… once again. Following the instructions we were given, we made a “quick right out of the gate and sort of a sharp left” which ran us into Henry Street.

Dublin was nice enough. It was a cute city but it failed to impress me at first sight. We made a right onto O’Connell and I was so deep in my state of dense delirium that I failed to even notice the 400 foot tall pillar that was standing right in front of me.

The spire in Dublin has the official title of “The Monument of Light” and is the tallest sculpture in the world. The exterior is coated in a shiny silver metallic. At the base of the statue is one of its most unique features. The contractor took a core sample of the earth where the spire would stand and cut the geological pattern into the three meter base of the sculpture. The spire actually replaced the “Nelson’s Pillar” which was destroyed in 1966 by an IRA bombing. The IRA was a paramilitary group that opposed the British influence. They destroyed the monument because of its symbolic representation of British power over the Irish.

After getting over my feelings of embarrassment for having missed a giant monument right in front of me, I couldn’t help but wonder how and why I’d never known that this piece of art existed. I always think of the United States as having a strong grasp on world culture but this was evidence that growing up in a particular geographical location had little to do with my knowledge of international monuments. This was a truly amazing sight and I even dropped my jaw a bit in awe.

The spire is a unique and valuable contribution to the city of Dublin. Being right in the middle of the city gives everyone the opportunity to see it and is an accurate representation of the city’s grand mentality. As I lost sight of the spire on my walk up the street, I knew that Dublin had only started to show me the mystique that she had hiding in her alleys. The next few weeks of my visit would prove to be eventful and my expectations would be exceeded.

During our studies in Dublin, Julisa Basak, Jenny Hackbarth and Joseph Rega are the students who will be covering the Fine Arts scene, including painting, drawing and sculpture.