Seedcorn 2023/2024

The visuality of Britain’s St Patrick’s Day parades often cluster around a familiar set of themes: shamrocks, leprechauns, pints of Guinness, and the colour green. The shortcomings of this register hardly need explaining: it is a set of motifs which does little to represent the lived realities of Irish experiences of migration and diasporic community and often plays on racialised Victorian constructions of the Celtic ‘other’.

What will the project involve? 

The project brings together researchers at the University of Bristol, in History and Theatre, community partners at W.E. Irish, and Lamplighter Arts CIC and draws on a diverse set of methodologies drawn from community engagement, co-production, critical making, social history and critical autoethnography. Together the team will run a series of workshops with Irish communities in Redfield, Hartcliffe, and St. Pauls where they will discuss complex stories of longing, belonging, aspiration and loss of the Irish in Britain, problem-solve how to communicate our ideas visually, curate new narratives for thinking about the Irish in Britain, and explore the potential of making processional artworks to facilitate the discussion of individual and collective memories of migration and settlement in Bristol.

These workshops will be supplemented by community workshop with, and archival exploration of, the Welfare State International archive at the Theatre Collection where they will explore how previous activists have used collective making, and the theatre of the procession to unlock counterhegemonic creativity and emancipatory histories. Facilitated by Lamplighters CIC, these community workshops will lead to development and construction of processional arts pieces for the St. Patrick’s day parade.

The project aims to use processional arts to create a new set of motifs which better represent the experiences, challenges, and hilarity of migrant experience with a particular focus on the last 50 years, as the Britain’s Irish community emerged from the shadow of the Troubles to be more self-confident in its identity and position in the city. A central part of the project’s inspiration for generating new narratives around the Irish past will be the archive of the Welfare State International which championed the ‘survival of the imagination’ through community participation.

The historiography of the Irish in Britain has tended to coalesce around well-worn narratives regarding struggle, resilience, and survival, and through critical making the project group hopes to allow participants to explore a new history, which, while acknowledging the challenges, foregrounds a different set of stories generated from and within the community.

The project will begin with participants being solicited through W.E Irish’s emails and social media accounts, and Lamplighters CIC’s community networks. As part of this scoping phase, a researcher will be employed to research histories and methods of processional arts, with a focus on the history of the Welfare State International, and to scope the archival history of the Irish in Bristol, to create prompts for discussion for the three community workshops, and inspirational imageries drawn from Bristol’s past to generate new images of Irishness. The first workshop will be held at UoB Theatre collection, and will draw on the collection of Welfare State International, to explore with the project team how we can use processional arts to communicate Irish diasporic histories. Three further community workshops will be held in Redfield, St Paul’s, Hartcliffe, where Lamplighters CIC have established links, and where there is a visible Irish community. At these stakeholder workshops the group will explore Irish experiences of migration – the good, the bad, the unexpected -- through storytelling, dialogue, scribbles, and making. Through these workshops, the community group will together develop images or motifs which, facilitated by Dee Moxon and the Lamplighter Arts CIC team, they will construct as large live art pieces for display in the St. Patrick’s day parade through Bristol in March 2024. All the participants in these workshops will be invited to a rehearsal where they will learn how to work individually and collectively to display processional arts, with the project concluding with the display of their creations at the St Patrick’s Day parade.

Who are the team and what do they bring?

• Erika Hanna (History, University of Bristol) is a historian with an extensive track record of research on the social history of modern Ireland. She is committed to developing and sharing her work with stakeholders outside the University and has established links with the Irish community; and she is on the executive committee of W.E Irish. Her work reflects a broader engagement with the Irish community across the School of Humanities.
• Dee Moxon (Lamplighters CIC) is an artist and creative producer of Irish heritage with 25 years experience of making and co-curating artwork within communities and with multiple artists. Storytelling is at the heart of Dee’s visual arts work where she not only makes her own work but also curates a series of images in the processional arts form. Dee currently devotes her working life to being the founding co-director of Lamplighter Arts CIC.
• Paula O’Rourke (W.E. Irish) is the chair of W.E. Irish and is a Green Councillor on Bristol City Council, and was Lord Mayor 2022-23. As a councillor, she has been working with a wide variety of city stakeholders and facilitating good communication with citizens. W.E. Irish is the West of England Irish association. It is already a highly active and successful group, running the annual St. Patrick’s Day celebration in the city and recently being awarded a Trustee Award at the Irish in Bristol Volunteer Awards. Through its email lists and social media accounts, it has links with over 2000 Irish migrants and people of Irish descent in Bristol.
• Sian Williams (Theatre Collection, University of Bristol) is the Project Archivist for the Welfare State International archive. She has been at the Theatre Collection since 2018 working on externally funded projects to catalogue and make accessible mixed media performance collections. As part of these projects, she has been involved in public engagement activities, facilitating exhibitions and workshops with archive material, and co-convening a symposium at Arnolfini framed around the personal archive of visual artist, Franko B, featuring artists, archivists, writers, curators and researchers, looking at the multitude of different ways in which archives can be accessed, activated and animated.
• Julian Warren (Theatre Collection, University of Bristol) is head of the Theatre Collection and has former experience as a City Archivist, leading the Bristol Archives service within Bristol Culture. He is currently Co-I on the Wellcome funded project ‘Firestarters - the rise of a community wellbeing movement: four decades of participatory arts, co-creation and embedded engagement in the archive of Welfare State International’, which is conserving, cataloguing and making publicly accessible the archive of this pioneering performance company.

What is to come?

The primarily output of this project will be the processional pieces which will be displayed at the St Patrick’s Day parade 2024. The primary beneficiaries will be the Irish community in Bristol, and W.E. Irish, who will use this project as a starting point for a larger project of unearthing, collecting, and archiving the histories of Irish Bristol. Dr Hanna will document the process through a research diary, which will form the basis of a co-authored article by the project team on collaborative community making and processional arts as a research tool to facilitate thinking beyond the boundaries of the empirical. The team will also use this project as the foundation of a larger grant application to the AHRC to develop a Irish-Bristol community archive and a potential impact case study in a future REF.