The whole town gets involved for the Claremorris Open Exhibition, as do several international artists. Lorna Siggins gets a preview.

What do bacon, writer Dermot Healy, British art curator Andrea Schlieker and former minister Mary O'Rourke have in common? All four have some link with a small town in south Mayo where anything can happen during three weeks in September.

And anything does.

"Truly a gallery without walls," is how Schlieker, curator of Trafalgar Square's Fourth Plinth Sculpture Project and joint curator of last year's British Art Show, puts it. For three autumn weeks - starting tomorrow - the town of less than 4,000 is "full of surprises".

Shops, library, post office, the railway station are corralled into a project which, she observes, forges an unusual bond between location and artwork, and "viewers are presented with an unorthodox mise-en-scene to heighten their experience and reading of the works". Schlieker was adjudicator to last year's event, when the town mart became the setting for a DVD on change in rural society by Megs Morley, while dust and grime on the windows of a vacant shop provided the basis for Caoimhe Kilfeather's drawings of exotic birds.

This year, British artist and curator Jeremy Millar plays judge and jury to a shortlist of 31 works selected from more than 200 entries from Ireland and abroad for the 29th annual Claremorris Open Exhibition (COE). Millar, who has curated in Europe, North America and Asia, will make his final selection for a prize fund of €8,000, some €3,000 of which will be given to an emerging artist.

Over the past fortnight, voluntary committee members including Marayde O'Brien and Jarlath Burke have been busy welcoming artists, liaising with property owners and holding spontaneous consultations in the street.

THE CORE VENUE is the gallery in the Town Hall, but "we have to wait for the Scouts to vacate it", O'Brien told The Irish Times a few weeks ago as she helped London-based artist Lorraine Neeson find power points in the Town Hall foyer as part of her "recce".

"Local businesses are very supportive - for instance, our electrical dealer Martin Murphy is great when it comes to helping out with equipment, such as projectors and screens; everyone does something," O'Brien and Burke explain as they give a tour of potential venues. The gable end of one premises may suit - it served as a screen for a projection entitled Flying Dog by Barry Jacques two years ago. Several new shop units which are still vacant will require little conversion.

"Often, we don't have some venues confirmed till close to the opening date," they admit, but such uncertainty doesn't appear to bother them. "Well, there are a lot of long hours towards the opening! In past years, committee member Pat Gleeson did an enormous amount of that preparatory work, but this year we have hired a carpenter," they say.

The final experience is akin to "a treasure hunt", as Schlieker has described it. "Truly pushing at the edges of the art world," another former COE curator, David Thorp of the Henry Moore Foundation in London has said, while Lewis Biggs, director of the Liverpool Biennial, has highlighted the "intimacy of the situation and the response of the community".

For the organisers of said treasure hunt, author Dermot Healy's oft-quoted observation may seem a little patronising now. The Booker Prize short-list nominee is reputed to have recalled how, after moving to Belfast in the mid-1980s, he was amazed to hear a group of artists discussing their submissions for an event in what he considered to be the "back end of Ireland".

Admitting he had never heard of Claremorris, Healy had obviously never partaken of the town's famous hams - for which it was well known throughout the island during the mid-1970s. And had he been aware of such delicacies, he would also have known that the COE owed its genesis to the bacon factory. As founder and Claremorris community activist Johnny Kirrane recalls, the town's annual Ham Fair was a local event crying out for a cultural input. "It was due to my own ignorance of the visual arts that I felt such a dimension would be a good idea," Kirrane says. "Listowel in Kerry was getting very popular with writers, so we felt we could make the same link here."

At the time, the only gallery of note in Connacht was in Galway. Kirrane set up a sub-committee, engaged the advice of the art teacher in the local Mercy Convent, and raised a bank loan for a prize of £500. "That was a lot of money at the time, but we felt that to attract artists of worth we should offer something like that," Kirrane recalls.

Winners in that first year, 1978, were Vivienne Roche and Camille Souter, while the adjudicators were John Behan RHA, John Fitzmaurice Mills, and Hugh McCormick. By 1980, it had been agreed that one external adjudicator would choose a short-list of exhibitors and make the final selection.

That the town didn't actually have gallery space was not an obstacle. The first exhibition was hung in the school gym of St Colman's College on the Sligo road. The Arts Council began offering funding, the COE started to earn a name, and Kirrane remembers that Cecil King's rejection one year inspired "big news in Dublin".

"It shows the quality of the man that he submitted a piece again the following year, which was accepted, and we were able to joke about it. It also showed other artists that the contest was wide open, and a name was not necessarily going to secure the prize," Kirrane said. "The fact that we also opted for external adjudication also helped."

IN 1996, WHEN the COE committee was planning to put its exhibition on tour for the first time, the Arts Council withdrew its support unexpectedly. Alternative sponsorship had to be organised, but the committee now believes the council's move gave it a fillip. Under a revised format in 1998, which re-engaged the council, the COE made an "escape from the white cube" - as in moving art "out of the privileged space of a gallery and into the real world", to quote Irish Times art critic Aidan Dunne's definition of same.

Selected artists were given a dossier of information on available sites in the town - be it a lakeside or a vacant shop - for their work. The catalogue by Trigger Communication became a part of the adventure. The COE had transformed from a conventional one-dimensional experience into a site-based multi-media exhibition at a time when it was still a relatively new concept on the weather-dependent western seaboard.

The new format attracted many younger artists working in various media, and nurtured opportunities for political content. For instance, Air signs, an installation by Angela Darby from Belfast in 2001, used Phillips's clothes shop to screen a video about adolescents and the influence of global commercialism on the branding of sportswear. Sinead Cahalan's installation, Haliqa in 2005, invited female visitors to don Islamic dress and photograph themselves.

John Langan's Alternating Nativities in 2003 explored recent vandalism of a Christmas crib in the town through a series of postcards which were sold during the period. Last year, David Beattie baked and photographed "Ireland-shaped biscuits", which were available for 50 cents each in a local coffee shop. The artist's red-sugar coated northern border was never quite the same on each piece of shortbread.

It is a measure of COE's success, as it approaches its third decade, that some artists have bequeathed their submissions to the town at locations such as Clare lake, the Lawn community housing estate, the railway station and Main Street bridge, while a number of pieces have been purchased privately over the years. Its arts committee hosts a winter exhibition - last year staging the work of Claremorris artist, Aoife Casby, who was in school when COE was evolving.

Jarlath Burke, COE public relations officer and a secondary school teacher in Athenry, Co Galway, credits Fianna Fáil senator Mary O'Rourke with one of the most astute observations on COE. Speaking at the opening one year, the politician described how there were two types of art in her view - "art that speaks to the heart, like landscapes, and art that speaks to the head, as in Claremorris".

This year, Lucy Hill is COE artist in residence, while it is also planning a series of fringe events. That the official opening was on the eve of the All-Ireland final didn't worry the committee too much. Plans were afoot to incorporate and acknowledge Sunday's county creativity on pitch as yet another dimension to the COE.

Open days

The Claremorris Open Exhibition was opened on Saturday in the Town Hall, Claremorris, Co Mayo, by writer and journalist Eamon Delaney - son of artist, sculptor and Claremorris native Eddie Delaney.

The exhibition of work by 31 artists from Ireland, Britain, Norway, Italy, Serbia and the US runs for three weeks. The programme's fringe events include readings by Dr Louis de Paor and Sean Lysaght on September 21st, and a talk by Dr Mark O'Brien of Dublin City University entitled Backbencher: The Life and Times of John Healy on September 28th.

For more details, the COE office is at D'Alton Street, Claremorris, Co Mayo, tel 087-6680107 and website www.coearts.org