Conors and Lowrys rub shoulders with local working-class heroes in Belfast

BEHIND THE scenes at the Belfast Metropolitan Arts Centre yesterday, the air was filled with industry as builders and artists sorted final snags at the new £18 million (€22 million) venue.

After 16 years in gestation, the venue known simply as the MAC will finally open to the public on Friday with highlights including an exhibition of paintings by celebrated artists Belfast’s William Conor and Manchester’s LS Lowry.

In the foyer, artist Mark Garry was busy putting up the final 80 of the 400 multicoloured copper threads which make up his conceptual artwork The Permanent Present. Even in an unfinished state, the threads strung across the high ceiling above the venue’s cafe added an ephemeral beauty to the space.

Surveying all this last-minute activity, MAC director Anne McReynolds recalled fraught meetings in the early days, a time when one consultant on the project kept insisting that “this bird won’t fly”.

It is almost airborne now. “Everyone involved is exhilarated that, after talking about it for years and putting so much work in, the MAC is finally happening,” said McReynolds.

Already more than 100 volunteers, known as MACtivists, have signed up to donate their time to the hugely anticipated venue, which sits in St Anne’s Square in the creative hub that is the Cathedral Quarter of the city.

The venue has an industrial feel, but playful furnishings such as cactus pouffes and leather sofas add warmth. There are also a couple of striking “boardwalk” concrete walls imprinted with long beams of wood that McReynolds reckoned were likely to attract “concrete nerds from all over the world”.

In the Tall Gallery, the main visual art exhibition is A People Observed, which brings together the works by Conor and Lowry. Both artists were born and died within a few years of each other and were keen observers of working class life in the first half of the 20th century. The instantly recognisable Coming Home from the Mill, one of the Lowry paintings hanging in the climate-controlled gallery, is valued at £2.5 million.

The Upper Gallery is home to a giant furniture installation by American artist Robert Therrien No Title (Table and Four Chairs), which is at the MAC courtesy of an arrangement with Artists Rooms, an initiative jointly owned by Tate and National Galleries of Scotland. The work had to be hauled through a window, flat-pack style, a kind of giant, and very expensive, Ikea delivery.

“We had to seal off roads and use cranes – and pray for good weather,” said McReynolds.

A deceptively small-looking building from the outside, with an exterior of black Antrim basalt, at 5,000sq m (54,000sq ft) the MAC is “a bit of a Tardis”, said McReynolds. The building, designed by Hackett Hall McKnight, holds two theatres, three art galleries, a dance studio, an artist-in-residence space and a bar, along with offices for four resident groups and various workshop rooms. The publicly funded centre is expected to bring 160,000 people a year into the area and host more than 1,000 events in its first 12 months.

Thomas Howes, an English actor from Downton Abbey, could be spotted wandering around the venue this week. “It’s a busy day, anybody would think we are opening a new theatre,” he mused on his way to the rehearsal space at the top of the six-floor MAC. Howes is starring in the venue’s first drama, a specially commissioned play about the aftermath of the Titanic disaster by playwright Owen McCafferty.

The Titanic commemorations may have reached saturation point, nowhere more so than in Belfast, but Titanic (Scenes from the British Wreck Commissioner’s Inquiry, 1912) uses lesser excavated evidence from the inquiry to tell the personal stories of survivors.

Downstairs in the 350-seat theatre, the set was still being assembled in preparation for the play’s opening night on Sunday. Quite by accident, the opening date marks exactly 100 yearsnsince the Titanic inquiry was announced.

On a short break from all the snagging, MAC curator Hugh Mulholland said it was “exciting and wonderful” to have a space with the capacity to show such a range of practices. “There was a deliberate intention to have exhibits which are critically engaging but which also bring new audiences to the visual arts,” he said.

The curator’s own favourite work being shown in the venue is by Belfast artist Nicholas Keogh who, in his 13-minute film A Removals Job, celebrates the camaraderie of a group of workers, including Keogh, during a house clearance of a traditional two-up, two-down red-brick Belfast terrace. It can be viewed in the space where the Conors and the Lowrys are hanging.