The power of the imagined story

Our neighbor Paddy died the year I was born, but his house did not. Like Mary Celeste his last days were preserved in a dusty stillness. Not a thing was moved within the confines of his home for over a decade after his death. His children had moved to America and only returned for his funeral. They either didn’t have time to pack up the house or had wanted to preserve his memory a little longer. I chose to believe the later.

I would make it my daily ritual to peer intensely through the ground floor windows. First I would look into the kitchen to stare at his breakfast plate and teacup that sat unwashed beside the sink. A towel hung over one of the chairs, and a jar with its lid off was cast carelessly on the counter. Then to the bedroom with its perfectly made bed and two faded pictures on the table. One drawer was slightly ajar and I angled myself every way possible to see what was inside and never could.

I imagined the house inside to be huge and smell of bogwood and burnt bread maybe, and that upstairs was filled with toys and maybe even an attic with private diaries, or even a trunk with a mystery key with God only knew what was inside!

Years later I got into Paddy’s house through a broken window. I walked the rooms and finally made it upstairs. The illusion was shattered and my intruder’s step reduced the imagined place to that of the mundane. So I made the decision that imagined things were far more exciting than the reality. I became an artist.

I had imagined Art College to be full of impulsive, dramatic dreamers, and to some extent this was true. But the academic environment dissected creativity, questioned it, and shone a giant ‘what does it mean’ light on everything your hands produced. I began to second-guess the intuitive freedom that came with creating and started to make Art that was researched and painstakingly overthought. I had anesthetized the process of Art making into a cart before the horse kind of sequence. Think first then make.

So I decided not be an artist. When I say not be an artist, I mean kind of. I wanted to make Art that at first didn’t appear to be Art, to create a happening or an event that a random person would tell and retell and I would never know the words they used. I started to deliver thousands of love letters to strangers houses dressed as my own masked version of a super hero. Going out late at night with my bag of letters quietly and anonymously connecting with unknown people, and more importantly for me the unknown stories these letters generated.

When I lived in Sweden briefly I picked a street called Sigfridsgatan and dedicated my time to writing it letters and songs. This may have been a step too far as the police were alerted by the neighbors who were concerned about the masked love letter giving woman.

Police report:

Troubled people in the area around St. Sigfridsgatan reaction from them to the police on your website.

What are your intentions with the letters you put up and what’s going to happen on 4 / 12?

Hear from you as soon as possible.

Unperturbed I took these actions further upon my return to Dublin. I devised and filmed a personalised soap opera with 6 actors who were green screened and inserted into my local street. I would deliver each installment (in the form of a 20 minuet DVD snippet) of the soap at Coronation Street time (7.30pm) into their letterboxes. Unsure whether I was interfering enough I went as far as using a 3.4ghz transmitter that would override their radio signals with my soap made just for them. The anonymity of these actions and the imagined events they created filed my hours with invented stories and conversations that may have happened as a result.

As years went on I developed many ways of being a public nuisance with good intentions. I created invisible lines on the street where I would run up and award people with a 1st prize medals specifically in Athens and Belfast. Then there was the Dirty Look at the Dáil Day where I tried to rally a few thousand Irish people to give the Dáil a good long Irish style dirty look of disgust. The idea was seemingly catchy and within 1 day I was on national radio and ‘lighter side of the news’ sections. The reality of the Dirty Look Day itself was about 50 people turned up to give the house of government a strongly un-worded ‘Look’.

Then I met another stranger that consumed my time, an old derelict Fire station. Like the empty house whose windows I peered in I became transfixed with the possibilities of bringing to life this derelict space. For eighteen months we gutted its insides and gave it new floors and windows to be paced and gazed out of. It is still old ramshackle but now a gallery and studios where artists can tell their stories. For the first time the reality was better than the imagined. I had finally married my love of abandoned spaces and the public to interact with each other.

So in short I realised it was not the imagining that inspired me but strangers. Stranger to me does mean odd but fascinating and full of possibilities. Places retain memories of their occupiers and small actions can be transformed into grandiose tales.