Bicycle on a pole peddles Ireland's surreal nature

A man teetering on a bicycle, a road diverted around a fairy bush and the suffrage movement are all covered in exhibitions that capture the essence of Ireland

UNUSUALLY, on Thursday April 24th, 1986, The Irish Times'letters section included a photograph. It was of a man on a bicycle perched atop a pole which had been submitted by JJ Toomey of Bishopstown in Cork. His accompanying letter described how, when he and a friend, David Hughes, climbed Carrauntoohil in June 1983, they were surprised to find, on the summit, "a lady's bicycle banded to the top of a three metre high post".

A small brass plaque bore the inscription: "In commemoration of Flann O'Brien's The Third Policeman." Hughes climbed up onto the bicycle and Toomey took the picture.

Bicycle, plaque and pole subsequently disappeared without trace. Toomey wondered if anyone could throw some light on the puzzle of the disappearing "monument". The solution to the mystery is outlined in detail in Seán Lynch's exhibition called Dear JJ, I read with interest . . . ,at the Dock Arts Centre in Carrick-on-Shannon, together with Anachronyby Brian Hand.

In their work, both artists delve into obscure corners of Irish cultural history, recovering stories that have been marginalised or forgotten because they are in some way odd or incongruous – or perhaps because they don’t accord with the dominant narrative.

Several large-scale colour photographs record an expedition to a misty Carrauntoohil by Lynch and a few friends in 2006. They were looking for traces of the “monument” but, he later wrote to Toomey, “Despite spending an entire day searching vigorously through mist and fog around the peak” they found nothing. That’s hardly surprising given the incredibly difficult, jumbled terrain. “Who conceived this eccentric tribute,” he concluded, “is still a mystery.”

Not quite. Toomey replied detailing the responses he’d received to his original letter. Lynch set to work on the leads they offered.

“At first it seemed as if there were two competing accounts of what happened. It turned out, though, that they were more two distinct, differing versions of the same events.”

It transpired that a man called Michael Kellett from Raheny in Dublin had carried the bicycle up the mountain and fixed it to the pole. There were photographs of him doing so. His epic, heavily laden climb was in itself a fitting tribute to O’Brien’s fiction, which alludes to the hybridisation of man and bicycle as their atoms intermingle.

Lynch’s show includes the boots he wore and the backpack he carried that day – incidentally both he and Toomey attended the show’s opening.

“The pole to which the bicycle was fixed was there already,” Lynch says. “It was intended as support for a turbine to illuminate the cross that marks the summit.”

What happened? “It’s thought that the bicycle was there for about two months. Local folklore has it that everything was swept into a ravine by severe weather.”

FOR LYNCH, THEexhibition, which includes a slide-tape presentation chronicling the story to date, is a progress report rather than a conclusion. He tends to work in that way. "I see exhibitions as indexical moments in the investigation. I suppose the next stage is to go back and try to find the bicycle. We think we know roughly where it may have ended up."

He's also showing another work, Latoon. It's a video, and he is screening it as it was originally seen, in 2006. "It hasn't changed but Ireland has, and so has the meaning of the piece. It brought home to me how circumstances can determine how we read artworks." Itfeatures folklorist and storyteller Eddie Lenihan recounting his eventually successful efforts to preserve a whitethorn bush in Latoon, Co Clare. It stood in the path of a new bypass. Surprisingly, the council changed the route of the road to accommodate the fairy bush (though someone later attacked it with a chainsaw).

Lynch points to the more recent controversy over the Hill of Tara. It’s not superstition per se, more symptomatic of a society losing the run of itself.

“To dwell authentically must be to dwell poetically,” as he put it in an interview when the work was exhibited in Germany.

Brian Hand’s Anachrony draws on The Dock’s original role as a courthouse adjacent to a gaol. He evokes a moment from the fight for women’s suffrage in pre-1916 Ireland, focusing on the experience of suffragette Mary Leigh, who travelled from England to protest the visit of Prime Minister Asquith to Dublin. “Surprisingly,” Hand notes, “the British Prime Minister, John Redmond’s Irish Party and the Ulster Unionists were all united on one issue: they were all against giving women the vote.”

On July 18th, 1912, Leigh and her companions used gunpowder and benzene in an attempt to firebomb the Theatre Royal, though not while the PM was there. But she did throw a hatchet at the carriage in which he was travelling with Redmond. It clipped his ear.

This followed a campaign of window breaking by members of the Irish Women’s Franchise League targeting the GPO, Dublin Castle and other buildings. Feelings ran high, leading to, as Katharine Tynan wrote, “a night when women were hunted like rats in the city.” Leigh was sentenced to five years was released on a “ticket of leave” by the end of September.

For Hand's show, the cast of the Abbey Theatre production of Dion Boucicault's Arrah-na-Poguecollaborated in staging tableaux based on the events of that day, photographed by Ros Kavanagh.

The Wearing of the Greenfeatures in Boucicault's drama and Hand came across another version of the song, The Wearing of the Purple, White and Green,referring to the suffragette tricolour. It is central to his installation. "It has been pointed out that Irish nationalism may have derived a great deal of its tactics and symbolism from the suffrage movement, including the tricolour and hunger strikes."

Nationalism borrowing its trappings from the suffragettes, the surreal brilliance of Kellett’s unofficial mountain-top monument, the intimation that we should, on the whole, have been more circumspect about Tara: just a few of the intriguing ideas you’ll take way from a visit to The Dock.

Anachrony, Latoon

and

Dear JJ, I read with interest . . .

Works by Brian Hand and Seán Lynch. The Dock, Carrick-on-Shannon. Until June 11th