TEELING AND TAYLOR:
in the glow of a frozen flame
17 May – 21 July
5. NOISE
On the 13th day of September 1922 the stone and metal bollards of Emmet Place shook, clattered and clanked. 1It was a painful noise. Sore to the ear. Funnelling through the drum. Violent in volume. The noise echoed through the area. These typically mute bollards were as loud as a storm. Their movement did not look like fear nor courage. They were mindless and repetitive. Their behaviour, strange. Left, right, left, right. A couple of feet in height, they made impact in numbers. Close enough together to hit one another. Their spherical tops meeting each other at accidental angles. Clank, clank, clank. They shook and made unbearable sounds for most of that day. As the day moved on, the clanking eventually stopped. Leaving a ring and tremor in local ears. The noise had shape. It shapeshifted to fit the complex tunnels inside ears until it settled, at the bottom of stomachs, making them sick and making new ground for what would become silence. The clanking broke again on the 20th and 22nd day of September. 1Same movements and more impact. Existing remnants of noise grew. It would thrive inside flesh. The walls of stomachs and guts unknowingly allowed the noise to clog and silence instinct and power. These weren’t the first times the bollards shook. They had dents and crevices from ferocious movement almost two years prior. On the night of 11th December 1920 the bollards bolted side to side when the first drop of petrol hit Alex Grant & Co. 3They didn’t stop until the next day. Clanks could be interpreted as uncontrollable laughter, emerging from a place of ignorance.4Shattered by the burning, they survived to witness in pain. Sometimes, utterances from rooms materialised into irregular shaped matter and filed out of windows, second floor, third floor. The shapes hovered across Emmet Place. Zig-zagging like bunting. Each one spoke, repeating a word that was said inside at a meeting. It was difficult to make out what each shape was saying because they all spoke in unison. Mr. B decided to create a contraption in his workshop. The new tool would help him isolate the utterances from the hovering shapes and identify what each one was saying. He worked on a side street, adjacent to the multiplying shapes. He used his metalwork tools to elongate an iron tube, the width of a dilated pupil and the length of a railway. He installed the device on the roof of his workshop so that it reached across the rooftops and protruded onto Emmet Place. He brought a stool, paper and pencil up onto the roof and he sat to listen; ‘dance’, ‘theatre’, ‘violet’, ‘drake’, ‘duck’, ‘hockey’ were some of the words he picked up. 5A specific and powerful shudder of noise collaborated with shaking bollards on 6th December 1922. 6On this day, some bollards shook so hard that they uprooted from their position. 7They lay flat and forgotten and permanently mute. New minds showed up as busy left to right eyes. Heads buried in bounded knowledges. Ready for subtext and speculation. 8A witness is still. A gaze is frantic.
1. On this day, the Anti-Treaty IRA attacked Johnson & Perrott’s premises on Emmet Place.
2. There were subsequent attacks on the 20th and 22nd of September. Four soldiers and two civilians, Delia O’Brien and a Miss Morrissey, were injured in the last of these attacks.
3. The burning of Cork on 11-12th December 1920 was a Crown Forces reprisal during the Irish War of Independence. Fifty-seven premises at the heart of the southern capital were destroyed by fire, twenty were badly damaged and twelve were wrecked and looted. Five acres of property – the equivalent of about three football pitches – were involved. While there was no loss of life as a result of the fires, some £2.5m worth of damage was caused and over 2,000 people lost their jobs.
4. “One fireman told me that he had also seen ‘men in uniform’ carrying cans of petrol into the Hall … Around four o’clock there was a tremendous explosion. The Tans had not only placed petrol in the building but also detonated high explosives. The City Hall and adjoining Carnegie Library with its hundreds of priceless volumes was suddenly a sea of flames …They turned off the fire hydrant and refused to let the fire crews have any access to the water. Protests were met with laughter and abuse. Soon after six o’clock the tower of the City Hall crashed into the ruins below”. The Irish Revolution Project UCC:
5. Code words in general meetings during the Irish Civil War included: at a dance = captured; at a theatre = escaped; at a dance with Violet = caught with a gun; drake = an armoured car; duck = a machine gun; playing hockey = plan of escape. The Silent Civil War, RTE documentary, 2022
6. On 6th December 1922 Miss Kay Feehely was killed in an Anti-Treaty IRA bomb attack on St Patrick’s Street. She was one of four killed and seven injured in the city due to Civil War violence that month.
7. The Irish Civil War is remembered as being “disastrous and unnecessary”. Sean Dowling speaking in 1972, The Silent Civil War, RTE documentary, 2022
8. “The need for a public library in Cork was fully demonstrated within three days of opening in 1924 – within those three days the modest Juvenile stock, fewer than 500 volumes, was exhausted. It must have been a bizarre sight: the shelves were emptied. Within six months the librarian had nearly doubled the number of Juvenile books, but even this level had to cope with an extraordinary Juvenile issue of 19,832 in the first half year…A new generation of Irish readers had arrived with the Free State and, in his report, Mr. Wilkinson marveled at this ‘unexpected extraordinary demand for children's literature’”. (McCarthy, 2010, p. 57)
Audio performance by Pretty Happy.