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Loopline
Film proposes to create a documentary that charts the 20th
Century battle for the development and acceptance of contemporary
Irish art. The film will delve deeply into the world of the
avant-garde and its lasting impact on Ireland.
The title of our project, 'Outside Looking In', underpins
our ambitions. We will go on an exciting and tumultuous journey
with those artists that have flown the flag for Irish art
both at home and in the international arena. The film will
not be simply an account of the various artists' work but
will also mirror the emergence of the Irish state through
its political and cultural institutions.
Through looking at how Irish artists today and in the past
have developed relationships with the world, questioning notions
of identity and culture, we will investigate what this means
for the country at large.
This documentary will explore and examine how Ireland has
treated her artists and valued them as interpreters of the
life of the country. Since there is no question but that we
have traditionally seen ourselves as a literary nation, we
must explore how our culture has, thus, been dominated by
the oral tradition and interpreted accordingly.
In this film, we want to firmly grapple with our visual culture
and traditions over the last century, the changes they have
gone through, the battles lost and won and the enrichment
of our culture as a result of exploring ourselves in the visual
media.
In short, we want to probe and reflect upon modernism in Ireland
through the eyes and ears of our artists, past and present,
to look at developments outside of Ireland and the impact
they have had on Irish artists here, to locate and value the
visual in our culture and to take a look at where it might
be leading us in the 21st Century.
Visual material already gathered for this project includes
an exclusive interview with Louis Le Brocquy at his home in
Dublin and extensive interviews with Declan McGonagle and
Dorothy Cross at IMMA. We have also filmed with Dorothy Walker
and conducted meticulous filming of the work displayed in
the IMMA exhibition 'Shifting Ground' which catalogued the
last fifty years of modern Irish art.
Loopline Film also travelled to Venice to film Anne Tallentire
when she represented Ireland at the 1999 Biennale and collected
a lot of very interesting material for the project there.
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