We’re standing near the car park near Salthill Aquarium. The one across from the prom which regularly floods during storms, photos floating around social media of semi-submerged cars. It’s reclaimed land, like so much on our coastline, which has fluctuated over centuries as nature and humanity battle to colonise.
It’s the perfect place for Ríonach Ní Néill to start her walking tour of temporary outdoor artworks in Hope it Rains, one of the few Galway 2020 projects the public within the county can experience in person rather than on a screen during lockdown, and which will stretch into summer, beyond the extended European Capital of Culture year. When in-person isn’t possible during restrictions, or anytime, people can DIY via an audio self-guided tour with multiple voices: artists, climate scientists, activists, parents.
The mother and daughter in the background could be us in a few years' time. They're dressed like us, struggling through, in the wrong place in the wrong gear
The title is a ticklesome play on the abundance of rain that’s part of life in the west (Galway is one of the wettest and windiest places in Europe), but has more serious application for climate change, our biggest challenge. Those car park vehicle drownings seem more frequent in recent years, along with serious flooding in streets near Spanish Arch. Film-maker/artist Joe Lee’s two large-scale montages on the aquarium’s walls are at first glance playful and futuristic: this spot, flood-waters higher than usual.
“The mother and daughter in the background could be us in a few years’ time,” says Ní Néill . “They’re dressed like us, struggling through, in the wrong place in the wrong gear. In front of them is a near-future person who seems to have adapted” – a child with inverted goldfish bowl headgear, part of a costume designed by Deirdre Kennedy for our future flooded world, semi-swimming in high waters. “The goldfish is free and we’re the ones living inside bowls to survive.”
Stilts
Around the corner, a riff on west of Ireland visual art tropes: women of our near future, wearing Claddagh cótaí dearga, perched on stilts like exotic birds, wading through debris as they look out to sea at an ominous wave approaching. “Can you imagine what our normality will be? Better put the stilts on going to the shops because there’s a bit of flooding,” says Ní Néill. “We should all enrol with Galway Community Circus to be ready.”
While there’s a surreal, fairytale aspect to Lee’s Drowned Galway montages, it’s also serious business, which is why “we chose high-risk flood locations. We’ve seen something like this [montage], but it’s exaggerated. Except it’s not. It might not have happened yet, but it’s due very soon,” and is possible within 10 years, she says.
Making the Galway 2020 project, the challenge was “how to get people to think of it as immediate. It’s a crisis, but we’ve our heads in the sand.” Key is “the idea of the abnormal becoming normal. And asking, how close does the future have to come before we actually care? Is it five years, 10 years, tomorrow? We know all the facts. We don’t act because we can’t imagine ourselves or anybody we love in it.” That was where Lee’s Drowned Galway montages came in.
A dancer/choreographer, but also a geographer, Ní Néill curated Hope it Rains (Soineann nó Doineann) to “turn our bad weather to good use, effect a cultural change in our relationship with weather”. The multi-layered project started “from the body”, commissioning artists to make clothes for a flooded city, allowing us to imagine “the most mundane things. How do you go to school when roads are flooded, or you’re constantly knee-deep in water? What are the adaptations?”
Photomontages
The costumes and characters and scenarios grew out of that into Lee’s photomontages of the world in which these future beings – us – live. They’re real people in the photos, educationalist and local hero Brendan Speedie Smith and Blackrock Babes regular swimmers among them. “People recognise them sometimes. It brings it home.”
What are we prepared to lose? The view, the houses, the road? What's the payoff?
Over the (elastic) Galway 2020 year, between and around lockdowns, several projects involved 20-plus artists and inventors and community participants from across city and county. Some of them created the future-us tableaux for Drowned Galway.
Ní Néill is a mix of impassioned and quirky in her approach. Walking along the prom, then by the Claddagh and South Park (which Galwegians know is really The Swamp, a hint about the nature of this reclaimed land) towards town, we reach a spot where kites are flown, as part of another strand of the project: artist Jenny Roddy’s Umbrella Orphanage. The large kites are made from 649 abandoned umbrellas, “orphaned by the wind”, dismantled in a workshop just before lockdown, yielding nylon and 54kg of steel and aluminium.
We pass large houses on Whitestrand, facing the bay. Despite plans for half-metre high seawalls, they’ll need to be 2.5m high for protection, based on recent modelling, she observes. “What are we prepared to lose? The view, the houses, the road? What’s the payoff?” We’re walking on a landbridge of reclaimed land. “We think of this as permanent shoreline, but it’s constantly moving.”
Orange snake
In town, temporary flood barriers – an ugly, fat, orange snake – edge the water at Spanish Arch as we walk by, a pertinent reminder. Tucked discreetly around the city are more photomontages. In “my gallery in a car park”, just inside the entrance near Jury’s, montages envisage a tsunami engulfing Long Walk, and a line of Blackrock Babes wades through chest-high floods on High Street. On Church Lane off Shop Street, two boys paddle a makeshift raft through a sea of debris and water flowing through Spanish Arch. In NUI Galway, goldfish bowl-encased Speedie Smith contemplates an iceberg near Long Walk.
Shane O’Malley’s new rain-reactive mural in Athenry changes colour depending on the weather, and a rain machine installation – or “weather modulator” – on Gaol River, opposite Galway Cathedral, is playful, and quite the engineering challenge. Artist Paddy Bloomer, who makes kinetic and interactive sculptures, built it on two crannógs perched above the water-line. When swans are nesting nearby, the rain machine is off. Otherwise, a sensor detects when it’s not raining, and a rain generator simulates a shower using solar energy. It spins and sprays, rises and lowers like a fairground ride.
This is engaged, campaigning art with a light touch, making climate change relatable. While Ní Néill tones down the apocalyptic for younger audiences, it’s still a call to action in the playoff between tackling global warming while managing to live our lives, by visualising our future drowned world.
