Micheál O’Connell LG takes part in residency at West Cork Arts Centre. July – August 2025.
The residency supported a project between three different artists: Tomasz Madajczak (visual/multimedia), Micheál O’Connell LG (visual/technology), and Mairéad Vaughan (movement). It began with the simple fact of diggers in the Irish landscape, but shifted into other questions. Over the past year they have met often, building an archive of video, images, experiments and notes, through meetings, ‘spontaneous’ actions, movement practice, and fieldwork (including literally digging holes in a field). The residency was a chance to test working together while keeping autonomy.
Each artist brought their own ground, Vaughan from choreography, movement and dance, Madajczak and O’Connell from visual art, but all have long experience in art contexts. They worked with an inventory already forming, chose some material for presentation, and left open the possibility of collective work. Their discussions turned on collision, agonism and resistance rather than on neat ideas of collaboration, and these informed the experiments. The residency gave a short, sharp time to examine this in practice.
At the end they opened the doors for other artists and visitors, and new work was developed. They are still reflecting on what happened, and on agonistic collaboration itself.
The question of whether to extend the project is undecided. But, as Vaughan said beforehand: “I don’t hope to achieve any particular outcome, other than researching, collaborating, inquiring, pushing against.”
You can find Micheál’s new works arising from the Diggers project documented here.
