Clonmel's art heroes to be celebrated at Junction 2024
2023 was a big and ambitious year for Clonmel Junction Arts Festival.
As well as a festival twice the size of recent years, which put local artists and Clonmel-produced work at the heart of the festival, the multi-disciplinary arts festival, founded in 2001, also produced one of the key Decade of Centenary arts productions with their September production at Kickham Barracks, From Out The Land.
This combination of making working about Clonmel town, giving a platform and developmental support to artists living and working in the region, as well as bringing national and international partners here to perform on the same stage, is key to the programming and curatorial policy of the festival, especially under Artistic Director Cliona Maher, who took over the role in 2019.
2024 promises to be a continuation of that thread with the exciting theme of Legacy X Next, putting a celebration of Clonmel’s established and historical arts heroes in conversation with a look at where the future might bring us.
“I joined the Town Team to be a voice for the arts in the conversation about how to revitalise the derelict and empty spaces in the town centre. One of the greatest challenges we currently face in Ireland is space, and access to space. This is obviously a huge and historical problem in terms of accommodation, but has been an issue in Clonmel since the 1990s with regards to space for the arts. We’re a large and culturally-aware town that has consistently produced excellent writers, musicians, painters and dancers, but the room for that art to be developed and to be performed for audiences has never been adequate. There are some great local and community spaces, but the effort that goes into just keeping the doors open means that people drift away, and the opportunity to showcase work in the best conditions is lost.”
Clonmel Junction Arts Festival has a long history in producing work in ‘found’ spaces – the former Chadwicks building, pop-up galleries in empty shops, and most memorably in 2022’s Everything Must GO!, a site-specific show in the former Superquinn shopping centre about the impact of dereliction in a popular retail area.
That production was a collaboration between a local Citizen Ensemble and professional theatre makers. “We want people to get involved in the festival at all levels, both as audiences and volunteers, but also on stage” explains Cliona. “There have been opportunities for Clonmel people to perform their own writing and music work, as well as to take part in larger projects, and this is something that is very close to our hearts”.
Having grown up on O’Connell Street over the family pharmacy, the revitalisation of Clonmel town centre is a personal interest for Cliona, as well as a professional core objective for the festival.
“It can be easy for people to get disheartened and think that things never change, but I believe that old chestnut about being the change you wish to see. I’ve seen a lot of transformation and a lot of dynamism since I moved back to Clonmel in 2017, and I think with cooperation and joint effort, we can achieve things that will improve Clonmel as a whole.”