Béal Festival

An exciting-sounding new company, Béal stages its first festival over two days this week (Wednesday 3 - Thursday 4 November 2010) in venues around Dublin. Through four events promising to combine work from the fields of art, music and poetry, twelve musical pieces - nine of which were specially written - will be accompanied by readings from poets.

The participating poets are Billy Mills, Maurice Scully, Katherine Walsh and Emily Crossland. The full programme also includes renderings of John Ashbery's 'The System' (with improvised electronic music) and Gerard Manley Hopkins' 'Repeat That, Repeat'.

Neither Use nor Ornament

Nick Pearson's exhibition Neither Use nor Ornament opens at the Dean Clough Galleries in Halifax, West Yorkshire, on Saturday 9 October.

"Minimal intervention"? "Refabrication"? Leeds-born, London-based artist Nick Pearson is a creative 'fence', filching objects from the real world and subtly re-designating them before palming them off on the viewer. Snatching conversational fragments and kidnapping the lives of redundant objects he re-presents them - like objects in a dodgy charity shop - as items that promise both utility and decoration but deliver neither. The art world calls it 'slippage'. It's always playful and it's sometimes profound (but only when you least expect it).

An exhibition catalogue with the same title will also be available. An update of the original 2004 edition, the catalogue includes reproductions and critical essays - as well as my contribution 'Why I Live in Egypt'. For this I lifted an extract from an article in the Irish Times magazine and slightly altered it in five successive stages, the presentation of which constitutes the piece itself.

The catalogue is available to order from Nick's website. The exhibition runs until 9 January 2011.

Ó Bhéal audio

An audio recording of my reading in Cork (20 September) has been posted on the Ó Bhéal website.