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“It is not in the nature of currents to end, as rivers end when they empty into the sea.”
Dallas Murphy, To Follow the Water

Infiltrating the island of Ireland from coast to coast, the country’s waterways are witness to the ecology and built landscape of our rural and urban spaces.

To Follow The Water continues an exploration of these watercourses initiated during 2015’s The Artists’ Armada, when a flotilla of artist-made craft sailed around Dublin’s Gand Canal Dock.

Newly commissioned work from four Irish artists – Olivia Hassett, David Fagan, Mary-Jo Gilligan and Ciara McKeon – opens dialogue around the significance, history, being and sentience of these channels. The locus for these observations is the 73M, the former working ‘Guinness’ cargo barge built in 1936.

On board and nearby, the invited artists use performance, sound, object making, and psychogeography to pose questions around the phenomenological and ontological nature of water, the social history of the canal and the organisms inhabiting its depths.

The Grand Canal Dock is close to the convergence of three waterways – the Grand Canal, the Liffey and the Dodder. They are the onlookers to this rapidly changing part of Dublin, a landscape once steeped in grimy 18^thCentury industry, now transforming into a shining technology burg. In this fabricated vista the former engineering marvel of the canal is central to this reshaping, as we bystanders strive to comprehend the implications.

Supported by Dublin City Council and Waterways Ireland Heritage Plan 2016-2020