It is hard not to be aware of the plight of the homeless in Bray, Co Wicklow, just now, thanks to an unusual art exhibition called "No Fixed Abode". Aptly, it has no fixed home. Instead, paintings, photographs and sculptures have been placed around the town in venues as diverse as the Methodist, Catholic and Church of Ireland churches, a cake shop, a fish shop and McDonald's fast-food restaurant. In the Social Welfare Office, you can push a button and hear poetry read by the singer Mary Coughlan, and the actors Niall O'Brien, Mick Lally and Eamonn Morrisey.
"The exhibition is not a sales pitch for works of art but an attempt to raise awareness of an increasing problem that is all around us," says Brigid O'Brien, the exhibition's curator.
Sleeping bags
The idea was first mooted when Brigid responded to a request from the Big Issue magazine for sleeping bags for the homeless. As she searched around at home for one that a member of her family had used, she says, "I suddenly realised that the homeless needed more than hand-outs. They needed a voice. Rather than write yet another letter to the newspapers, something needed to be done that was original and different."
As a member of the Signal Arts Centre in Bray, she approached the centre for help. "I asked local artists whom I knew would produce high quality work. I just asked and they produced. It has been as simple as that."
One of the most dramatic pieces is a life-size model of a homeless man, which was sitting in the Victorian shelter on Bray's seafront. Last weekend's storms forced his hasty removal to the porch of the Church of the Holy Redeemer. His creator is Ann Regan, a well-known local artist and teacher.
The benches and kiosks along the promenade have poems about homelessness painted on them. The Old Woman of the Roads by Padraic Colum was chosen to voice the need for comfort and security. The opening verse, familiar to many of us, reads:
Oh to have a little house!
To own the hearth and stool and all!
The heaped-up sods against the fire,
The pile of turf against the wall!
Some of the work is by homeless people themselves. "Obviously if you are homeless it is difficult to produce artistic work, but we got poetry from very young people through Focus Ireland," says Brigid.
Local schools
Bray Travellers Network is exhibiting craft work at the Signal Arts Centre. Art teachers in local schools also helped. Pupils of Colaiste Raithin have made an overnight shelter - out of planks of wood - and mounted it at the entrance to the school. Paintings and models by pupils at St Cronan's National School are on show in various locations are around the town. Many local tradespeople, for example, have lent their shop windows to the exhibition. A butcher's shop displays photographs of homeless people; a cake shop shows a dolls house; and one chic shoeshop has a pair of old boots in its window. If you travel to Bray by DART you can read a poem by Joan Jennings Contradictions of Endurance, in the Poetry in Motion series. The response in the town has been hugely supportive. Brigid feels this is because a wide variety of people have experienced homelessness at some point in their lives.
"The most extreme form is sleeping rough, but of course there are the homeless who live in emergency accommodation, in shelters, hostels or refuges. It then becomes more than being without a roof or a house. It becomes an issue of lack of security, lack of belonging and safety."
The Simon Community, which has been campaigning for the homeless in Ireland since 1969, has provided graphic photographs for the exhibition. Its role is primarily a practical caring one but it sees the equal importance of alerting the public and the authorities to the existence and consequences of homelessness. It believes that long-term homelessness is preventable and reversible and campaigns for changes in official policy and for enlightened legislation.
Dramatic intervention
"We hope to contribute to some conscience-raising, and maybe attitudes towards the homeless might change," says Brigid O'Brien. "Like many people I give a few bob to the teenager on the street who looks like my son or daughter to salve my conscience. But dramatic intervention is needed so that they don't continue to be regarded as an inevitable side-effect of the Celtic Tiger".
The exhibition has been funded by Bray Urban District Council. There is a certain irony in this, given that some of the contributors are on its housing list, but the Signal Arts Centre is emphatic that the project should not be viewed as a finger-pointing exercise. It asks us to simply view the exhibition and "be stirred, embarrassed, saddened, entertained, uplifted and provoked".
A free exhibition catalogue can be collected from the DART station in Bray. "No Fixed Abode" runs until the end of November.