“SO IMAGINE if it was the size of a car and it smashed into your garden. What do you think would happen?”
A shudder goes around the circle of rapt children and adults. A meteorite the size of a car doesn’t bear thinking about: after all, we’ve just had a sneaky feel of a piece of a meteorite the size of a tennis ball and it’s shockingly heavy.
It's not every day you can hold a chunk of rock from the outer regions of the solar system in your hand – but it's one of the activities on offer for Culture Night at the Natural History Museum on Merrion Street. Clad in a suitably scientific-looking white coat, the museum's Noel Monaghan is bringing his subject to vivid life. Just as The Irish Times is really getting into it, alas, he has to rush off. "Sorry," he calls over his shoulder. "Gotta go and see a woman about a shark . . ."
Downstairs, three massive dragonflies float unblinking over the Victorian display cases full of bugs and butterflies, the relics of an afternoon workshop where children could make their own dragonfly. There’s a touchy-feely theme going on here: if you’re brave enough, you can get up close and personal with a bearskin and a tigerskin – complete with scary heads on – or stick your finger into the grinning skull of a pilot whale.
Further along Merrion Street at the National Gallery of Ireland, a crowd of about 20 does an early-evening tour of the Dublin Contemporary exhibits. Once everyone has got over the shock of seeing graffiti painted directly on to the gallery walls – very beautiful graffiti, as it happens – we’re happy to admire Alberto di Fabio’s massive “drip” canvases. It’s all about gravity, says the guide. That and DNA. The beauty is located in the repetitions.
We move next door to Liam O'Callaghan's room-sized confection Time Find You A Good Place To Fall, which uses fairy lights, parchment, tracing paper and extension leads to magical effect, creating a spread which might be a sky full of stars or a pond full of frog-spawn. "Or semolina," suggests one onlooker, filling the room with laughter.
In the atrium’s Creative Corner children are happily producing artworks of their own under the benign gaze of George Bernard Shaw while a younger sibling in a pushchair registers a protest – or is it performance art? – by making unhappy noises and trying to remove its red desert boots.
In a tent on South Frederick Street, meanwhile, burlesque is the order of the day as two glamorous models in cabaret outfits pose for anyone brave enough to draw them.
The paper and pencils have been provided by Dr Sketchy’s anti-art school, and the finished drawings are causing great merriment and discussion.
There is, in truth, a much more easygoing vibe on the streets of the city centre than is usual on a Friday night. At The Culture Box in Temple Bar, 2½-month-old Torin is snoozing serenely with his mother Kasia, from Poland, while his sisters make Dublin GAA badges with the help of the award-winning jewellery and textile artist Angela Kelly. Are they Dubs fans, the girls? Kasia laughs. “They love messing, that’s for sure,” she says.
Inside the GPO on O’Connell Street, the An Post museum is crammed with folks who are still, clearly, interested in the ins and outs of snail mail. In the post office itself, people are writing their complimentary Culture Night postcards – pre-stamped with an 82 cent stamp so they can be posted anywhere in the world. At one of the circular desks in the middle of the floor, three Chinese students are composing messages to their families back in ShenZhen; a city, they explain, near Hong Kong. Yangyang, Ying Peng and Xinguo are studying at University College Dublin. This year, it seems, Culture Night hasn’t just reached out to 30 regions in Ireland. It has gone global.
