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Peter Power

@peterpowerart

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I make things. Nationally Funded Artist. Ex-Biochemist. Artistic Director. Composer. Writer. Designer. Poet. Co-Chair NCFA. Cork/Dublin based.

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Life’s a merry go round. by @peterpowerart

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7 days ago

Just some thoughts on @amanoanseo post this week, in a reel form (after lots of you requested it.) by @peterpowerart

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11 days ago

For a period of a few years in Dublin, in order to be able to establish my career, these two beautiful people let me sleep in their spare bed.
At the top of their landing, it meant that I was completely and utterly in their way. And interrupting any calm intimacies they might have without me on their stairs.

I remember feeling welcomed in a way I rarely feel. I suffer massively from a sense of worrying about burdening people, and yet it never really crossed my mind then. I owe them a debt I can’t repay for that time.

That lack of worry comes from the fact that they are, by their very natures, generous. And generosity is like a tide: it lifts in its presence and drops in its absence.

And I am happy to see, at a celebration of their love, across their vast network of friends, the tide of their generosity has come to lift them to even higher places.

Grá mór and more and more. by @peterpowerart

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15 days ago

Very honoured and very surprised to be the recipient of the Digital Innovation in Art Bursary award from @businesstoarts and @accentureireland alongside my collaborator @leonbutlerbold this year. In particular I want to thank all the incredible artists I’ve had the pleasure of doing this innovating with, without whom none of this kind of opportunity and recognition would happen. In fact the great lesson of any true innovation is that is takes a village, it takes a collegiate intention, it takes a disparate collection of vastly different skills to come together through an idea or an ideology, and to build bridges between islands. This bursary goes fully towards research and development of the next stages of those ideas, those people, those aspirations. I’m just sorry I wasn’t there to celebrate! Grá mór. by @peterpowerart

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21 days ago

Remembering lost friends, celebrating new ones, cherishing the ones I have. Lakes. Seas. Streets. Mountains. Buildings. Living, even as we lose. All across Europe. And in the heart of Ireland. by @peterpowerart

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a month ago

It’s not always a good feeling, to be captured. But when it’s by @wolfjamescreative, it’s an honour. Pondering futures in Vienna tonight, it’s going to be an amazing decade. x by @peterpowerart

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a month ago

Loss, the Mother of grief, cares for us in her lessons of leaving.
And learning to lose, is the lesson of living.

So in this way,
living is loss,
life is loosing and
grieving leaving.

Yet grieving too is the measure of our collective love. Love without destination.

And in that measuring, today I count two years since Mother Loss reintroduced herself to me, and taught her unwelcome lessons to an unwilling student.

Two years.
Vastly brief.
Often and seldom.
But so swollen with time I strain to remember.

It’s the time it took for two birthdays.
The time it took my hair to grow to my shoulders.
The time it took for two deathdays.
The time it takes for a child to be born, to be named, to be weaned and speak and walk and ask and know.

Two years.
The time it takes.
The time it took.

I was in the water in Tragumna this weekend, the sun and sea in cahoots.
The salty waves silky-slapping my living skin.

Two years ago, you told me that all you wanted was to be in the sea again.
But they wouldn’t allow you, because it might kill you.

And for two years, each time the water meets me, you meet me too.
Out here, wading in the waist deep.

And I give the waves to you, because I can’t swim Eoin.
And I’m a city boy.
And you were the coastline.
But we shared the stars.

And although these waves might kill me too, I feel life so keenly in their crest and collapse.
Their up and down. Their arriving and leaving.

Two years of up’s and downs. Two years of arrivals and departures.

Mother Loss. Daughter Grief.

And a measure of love that marks meaning into me.

You, and Holly. Your memory on my neck and shoulders.

For two years.

Father Time. Son Sorrow.

Fighting the forgetting, but unable to really remember.
Just the simplest of custodianships.
Tending your gardens.

Crest and Collapse.
On this, the most unhappy of anniversaries.

In the pull of these unwavering waves.
But today, I swim with you. by @peterpowerart

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2 months ago

NEWS: I’m deeply proud to be stepping into the role of Co-Chair of the National Campaign for the Arts @campaign4arts, alongside @_carlarogers , whom I could not do this without.

The NCFA has always maintained an important truth: that the arts are not separate from the life of a country. They are part of how we understand ourselves, how we remember, how we imagine, and how we find the space in ourselves to dream new futures and reckon with our pasts.

Taking on this role carries a real responsibility. We are at an important moment for the arts in Ireland, with decisions around investment, infrastructure, artists’ incomes and the place of culture in public life, being made now that will reach far beyond any single budget or political cycle.

Our task as the NCFA is to make sure artists and arts workers are present in those decisions, not at their edges, but as part of the conversation about what kind of country we want to build. If there is anything I feel the NCFA has managed to do, is to keep us in that conversation.

I can still vividly remember the moment the government announced the Basic Income. I had been asked to fill in for our outgoing chair @mariaflemingdub as the announcement had been a snap call. I arrived to a press conference not fully grasping the weight of it, and it was not until I sat down after my speech beside my NCFA colleague @dobzvaneyke that it hit me.

A change. A big change. And that change, even imperfect change, is possible.

I’m looking forward to working with Carla, our Steering Committee, our members and colleagues across the sector to protect what has been hard won, to argue clearly for what is still needed, and to imagine what the NCFA itself can become in the years ahead.

Lastly I also want to acknowledge Maria Fleming as she steps down as Chair, and thank her for the extraordinary commitment, intelligence and care she has brought to this organisation. The weight of the role goes largely unseen, and required a deftness and dedication of Maria that I can only hope to emulate.

Onwards. Image by @wolfscanlan by @peterpowerart

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2 months ago

I don’t think there’s another picture could sum up my time in Paris better than this one. L’appel du Vide, L’appel de la Vie. Thank you for your filthy beauty, your reclaimed streets, your dedication to aesthetics and grieving, and your heat. A Bientot. by @peterpowerart

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2 months ago

Paris de Nuit. by @peterpowerart

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2 months ago

Such a brilliant exhibition in Paris, ‘Beyond the Streets’. Balancing commercial work with experimental, detailed installation with lo-fi provocation, and justifying its scale through allowing audiences to occupy the universe of it. A detailed and elegant look into the world of graffiti in Paris, without losing its punch in a gallery setting. Strolled and photographed for an hour or so. by @peterpowerart

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2 months ago

Madrid you stole my heart.

An incredible honour to spend some days in the company of one of the world’s most renowned architects Rafael Moneo working on producing the new series of The Studio Sessions.

Madrid is such a vast and surprising city, every fold and facet of it revealing the historical and the contemporary. And the affect Moneo has had on the built environment is undeniable.

Architecture is art upon us.

The connection Ireland has to Spanish architecture was such a deeply revealing discovery, Moneo’s own hand gesturally found in the lines of our own architects work.

Walking around a city with architects it reminds you to do something we sometimes forget to do: Look up. by @peterpowerart

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2 months ago