The Importance of Creativity - Spirit of Folk Festival

Here’s a talk I gave recently to launch the Spirit of Folk festival on the importance of creativity. The Festival is gonna be truly amazing and I for one will be blowing off the post Dublin Fringe cobwebs there. This talk is important to me because in it I mention my ideas around the provision of art in society - which is slowly formulating as a larger scale project around establishing a contemporary art school for people in addiction. I’d love to hear from anyone interested in that.

It’s hard to know what makes someone creative. It’s hard to say whether it’s nature or nurture. I grew up being told I was creative. So someone worked it out before I can remember. My mother used to tell her friends, when she was showing them around our gaff that I was ‘artistic’ because my room was so messy. Picture paint everywhere, whole cities and villages made of cardboard boxes, hair cut from every barbie, and you might as well forget about the floor, I don’t think it was ever seen after my dad layed it down. One day one of her friends told her, out straight ; That’s not art. That is just mess.

As an artist it’s important to know what you can get away with.

It doesn’t give you license to be a prick for example. Oh that’s Dan. My arty friend. Fuck off.

I do think though, that artists see the world in a different way. I think you could often read ‘artistic’ for sensitive, and that leads to it’s own problems.

Artists find it harder to look away. We find it harder to sit back and do nothing. There’s a certain act of seeing that artists have access to. This can be very troubling.

For me, the two charactaristics that defined me for others growing up was always ‘arty’ or ‘creative’ and  the other is empathy. I simply wasn’t able to look away when I saw others suffering.

Our society is not set up to be friendly for people like me. We have a reputation for being a land of creative thinkers, but in reality, the most boring, most fearful people rule the roost and define the systems.

For a long time I was very sad. And then, I found art.

It took me a while.

Art is the ability to make. And for what you make to speak to others.

It made me alot happier.

I remember sitting at a talk in Trinity College in 2008, and hearing the words ‘If you want to be an artist, you have to give up on the idea of being rich’ so I did. Pretty soon, being an artist subsumed every aspect of my life. After years of working in retail, which made me very sad - I quit that and pursued a career in the arts hell for leather. I gave up on the idea of being rich, but I decided I was determined to make a living. And now, I do.

But back to not being able to look away. For me, art was not enough. More overwhelming than the desire to create was the desire to change, and later the desire to expose, to help others to see what I see.  To facilitate others to look head on, when what they need to see is very painful.

After witnessing the daily life of people who use drugs on Dublin’s streets, and being horrified by how people treated them I began researching a piece of work around heroin and it’s impact.

I began a research project then that has lasted well pretty much up until this second. I investigated drugs and our city. I became fascinated with Ireland’s relationship with addiction, and the cruelty that plays out every day in our streets with how addicts are treated. We see addiction as something that is an inconvenience for us. We have dehumanised drug users, with slang terms and policies. I joined a long lineage of artists who feel the responsibility to inject the conversation with imagination, and my personal quest was to bring the humanity back.

The show became a social history of heroin in dublin, starting with the 1960s and moving right up to the present day. Over 90mins we built a corporation flat on stage, and showed the journey of heroin addiction, from smoking to injecting to desperation, to getting out or dying trying. We wanted to show that there was a design to all of this, that it doesn’t just happen out of the so called selfishness of the thousands of people that choose to take heroin. We wanted to force our audiences to see, hear and feel the reasons why someone might take up the deadly drug. Through my work with Rialto Community Drug Team and now drug treatment projects all over Europe I met hundreds of heroin addicts and every one has disclosed that they were sexually abused. What do you think happened to the people who came out of Letterfrack & Daingean and Goldenbridge Industrial School? Heroin is the strongest painkilller you can get.

With those revelations I became an activist.

I decided that I wanted to use my creativity to try and expose and change things, because it is the only thing I have, and now I use it because I know it works.

It was through working on that piece that I met my friend Rachael Keogh, the author the book ‘Dying To Survive’ her memoir about her thirteen year struggle with heroin addiction says in her book ‘Writing Is An Act of Hope’ . That sentence has remained as a talisman for me and the others I work with in THEATREclub, through the darkest times of our work. We have made work about suicide, about failed housing schemes and broken promises, the sexual abuses at the hands of the church and most recently, we helped the community of Moyross in limerick to speak back to the news papers who have tried to banish them to years of controversy and rob them of all hope.

Alot of people are creative, it’s about what you do with it, what you choose to do with it. I have chosen to use my words, my actions to illuminate the conversation, because it’s all I can do. I thought about that a lot as I watched the footage of Gaza. I wondered them, as I do every day. If it is enough.

As part of the process of HEROIN we work with people in addiction through drama. One consequence of doing this work is that I have noticed that people who take drugs are naturally very good at performance.

I asked one of the drugs workers about this in a project we were working in. I was curious to see had she noticed it too… She said “Of course they are, sure it comes with the teritory, they have to lie and steal every day, they have to learn how to act”

But I wasn’t convinced. I continued to research this connection. I began asking about the drug users previous experience in ‘the arts’. Quickly I discovered that in every one, there was a desire to paint pictures or to write words.

I wonder about the barriers we experience to accessing art. For me it was easy, my uncle became an actor. For him it wasn’t that easy, he endured years of ‘get a real job’. The arts are largely seen as something additional to the ‘real’ aspects of life. But I believe that art is essential to life. My partner once told me that I make art - because “It let’s me be who I am”. Art is not a characteristic, it’s an identity.

Getting back to the drug users - Did they take drugs because they couldn’t paint pictures?

It’s hard to survive when you can’t be your authentic self. When your gay and in the closet you find solice in drink. Maybe that is the reason. Maybe that on top of everything else.

There’s something in it anyway.

But how could we avoid that? Even if it’s just a few?

why would someone who uses drugs not have access to painting pictures or writing words? It’s not secret that the vast majority of drug users come from the same few post codes. The students in the arts degrees all have the same accents. Except for the ones who came from the access programmes. And yes, there are plenty of artistic schemes for so called disadvantaged communities, I am guilty of running a number of those programmes myself. But what if it wasn’t extra curricular, or reactionary? What if the arts programmes weren’t there to make up for the how much the state has fucked up in the previous ten years of life. Everyone deserves to engage with art.  We should live in a society where art is everyday.

Art is everyone’s right. It’s not extra.

What if you were born into a world where everyone had equal access to art? Art would definitely be more interesting. Thats one thing, but maybe more people would be allowed to be who they truly are.