Created by the legendary Ardú Street Art
Ardú Street Art continues to brighten up the streets of Cork year after year, as artists recently took to the streets for the fourth annual outing to produce two new large-scale murals in Cork city.
Collaboration is at the heart of this year’s series, with the first new mural commemorating Tomás MacCurtain on Coburg Street, created by artists and co-organisers of Ardú Shane O’Driscoll and Peter Martin.
Shane is a visual artist from Cork and has painted in a number of Street Art festivals throughout the country, as well as having two large scale murals in Cork City. Peter Martin, also based in Cork, has worked predominantly in public art over the last few years where he creates large scale figurative artwork in mediums such as murals, tiled mosaics, and stained glass.
History, culture, and identity feature strongly throughout his work, and he endeavours to create work which is a commentary and often a celebration of place.
Their mural commemorates Tomás MacCurtain. A man that contributed so much not only to the revolution in Ireland and Cork over 100 years ago, but also for his contribution to arts and culture in our city. It is the culmination of a project with TY students from St. Angelas and Christian Brothers College.
The artwork explores MacCurtain as a musician and Celtic revivalist. It depicts MacCurtain with his fiddle and surrounded by his wife, Elisabeth, and 3 of their 5 children. The image of the Lark represents his favourite traditional song – ‘The Lark in the Clear Air’.
While travelling the county as a recruiter for the Irish Volunteers, MacCurtain is known to have played this tune in many houses where traditional Irish musicians lived throughout Munster. MacCurtain is also known for setting up the volunteers pipe band in Cork City and this is also referenced in the ‘Air’ of the pipes. The Lark soaring through the clear air also evokes the idea of MacCurtain’s struggle for the freedom of his country and city.
The second new collaborative mural can be found on Harley Street, back where Ardú began. Shane O’Driscoll painted the first Ardú mural on Harley Street in October 2020, he says “We never knew at that point the direction that Ardú would go. We certainly didn’t think that we’d be getting to a point where we would be repainting murals from our first year… That’s just the nature of street art and murals only have a certain lifespan.”
James Earley, Tony Byrne, and Cian Walker have been friends of the festival since the beginning and have been painting in Cork for over 15 years. They have now completed their collaboration in the city.
Speaking about the large-scale mural, they explain:
“When we first met to discuss potential ideas for this mural, we found that each of us had been exploring similar ideas, a positive sign from the get-go. We had a fruitful meeting wherein we discussed ideas of industry, geography, and the ever-changing facets of Cork as a city. Given its significant history as a thriving port city, we wanted to create a work that alludes to the River Lee, its movement and its importance to the trade of Cork, and Ireland as a whole.
“Utilising earthy tones offset by more vivid and vibrant colours we feel that the piece pays homage to the history of the county and its energy in moving forward as a city of cosmopolitan modernity. Hard-edged geometric shapes make reference to the urban elements of Cork City, in combination with more organic forms that suggest links to the sediment of the river and the more rural areas of the county.
“There are visual cues hidden within the composition, abstractions on the logos of Dunlop and Ford, for example, the water from the image on the county flag, alongside less oblique references such as the use of Cork marble in the piece, our aim was to create an exciting, stimulating mural that allows viewers to appreciate on a purely aesthetic level but also one that offers nuggets of reference and inspiration for those who wish to explore more deeply.”