There are creative outpourings all week, from installations to retrospectives to kinetic sculptures. The flood of creative energy is tidal. Artists lay claim to the capital in unprecedented numbers. From cathedrals to public squares to train stations, there they are.
Donal Murray's locomotive-inspired paintings go on view in Pearse Station. Some 400 works from George and Maura McClelland's collection are unveiled at the Irish Museum of Modern Art (on view until January next) and work by Meg Robinson opens at the Origin Gallery to list but a few.
In Meeting House Square, everyone is chillin' out, man. Some look chilled to the bone as they wait to see "a kinetic sculptural installation". A bitter wind cuts through the empty space, but no-one leaves. Beth O'Halloran, cellist and artist, Daragh McCarthy, documentary maker, and photographer Cillian Hayes, have come to see this particular installation kick into action. "It's about struggle and purposefulness and purposelessness," says Peter O'Kennedy, the creator of Getting There, which he is about to rev up. His work consists of two vehicles, which travel at random around the square, stopping and turning when they hit an obstruction. It's about the tensions among chance, chaos, struggle and faith, he explains.
O'Kennedy's daughter Mia Bourke (10) presents him with a kiss and a bunch of orange sunflowers. His son, Yan Bourke (12), still in his Colaiste Mhuire school uniform, does a quick interview with The Irish Times, like an old pro, explaining what will happen when his father turns the engines of the installation on.
Others present to see the weird vehicles travelling around the public space include Kate Fine, an accessories designer (especially of mirrors and clocks); Fiachra Shanks, a musician with the band Blue by Accident and DIT lecturer, Catherine Fitzgerald, who is speechless, silenced temporarily by laryngitis. Artist Sean Hillen and his "beloved" Miriam Duffy, a stage director with Barabbas Theatre Company, are also chillin' out.
Charlotte Somers, a television director, holds her 11-month-old son, Michael James Gilligan, aloft. His father, she explains, is "shooting a commercial in Colarado". Artist Clea Van Der Grijn, whose work can be seen in the Morrison Hotel, is here too with her son, Oskar Van Der Grijn (8).
One art lover, Janetta Mellet, mother of the performance sculptor Laurent Mellet, has taken the two machines to heart. "I actually got quite anxious about them," she says. "They definitely had personalities. One was grumpy and solid and playing hard to get. The other one was insecure."