Clough hosts Joyce-inspired celebration

Residency at Thomas MacDonagh Museum

As part of Irish Design Week, join contemporary composer Alastair White at the Thomas MacDonagh Museum, Cloughjordan, at the outset of adapting James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake for the musical stage. The week-long residency, selected as part of Design & Crafts Council Ireland’s flagship initiative, invites audiences to see opera in the making and witness how literature, theatre, fashion and music can intersect and redesign one another.

White’s work has been hailed as “a whole new exciting genre of art” (BBC Radio 3), and this latest project seeks to capture the joyful, multidimensional beauty of Joyce’s text through an approach that treats it as a surface rather than a depth. It offers an opportunity to engage directly with this creative process and experience opera not as a finished product - but as a living, evolving form.

White explains how “central to the adaptation’s approach is a radical re-reading of Finnegans Wake and the modernist canon: that authors such as Joyce, Eliot and Hemingway continue to be misread through romantic and post-modern analyses that sees them as depths rather than surfaces. The project contends that - like the sparse prose of Hills Like White Elephants - Finnegans Wake has been ill-used by approaches that attempt to ‘decode’ it through what is absent: in ignorance of the sheer joy that the language embodies. There is no iceberg, no skeleton key; Finnegans Wake is not a cipher. It is only itself.”

The open studio kicks off Finnegans Wake 100, a series of works which will lead to the centenary of the book’s publication in 1939 - designed by White and his creative partner and wife, Tipperary-born curator Gemma A Williams. Education lies at the heart of the open studio, which includes talks, practical workshops and an outreach programme. The residency runs in the heart of Cloughjordan: home of the poet Thomas MacDonagh, whose teacher parents taught in the local school.

Gemma A Williams says: “We are truly honoured to be taking part in Irish Design Week and especially delighted that they have allowed us to do something to spark creativity and conversation in my hometown of Cloughjordan. This is an ambitious project that seeks to reimagine one of our great literary giants, Joyce, so we are excited for the possibilities and to see how these can shape our work in the future.”

FURTHER INFORMATION

Venue: Thomas MacDonagh Museum, Main Street, Cloughjordan

Opening Hours: 10am-4pm daily from November 18-23, November 17 11am-4pm.