The Devil’s Bit: Cathal Roche Reflects on his Navigator residency at Source Arts Centre

I began my work on this residency by focusing on the abstract landscape paintings of Eddie Kennedy that were on show in the Source’s gallery space with the aim of creating a musical response to the work. Having recently composed a number of short spatial pieces for saxophone quartet and electronics derived from the writings and cubist paintings of Mainie Jellett, I saw here an opportunity to shift focus to another form of abstraction.

Kennedy’s exhibition ‘Lines of Engagement’ reveals something of the threshold of the here and now and the conscious and subconscious boundaries we frame our experience in. Here, there is a sense of ‘underworld’, a dark abstraction embedded within familiar glimpses of Irish landscape and seascape. A number of contributors had told me that Kennedy was from a place known as the ‘Devil’s Bit’ North of Thurles. Legend says that the devil broke his teeth taking this bite and spat the Rock of Cashel from his mouth to where it now stands, leaving a noticeable bite on the horizon to anyone driving from Thurles to Sligo. Kennedy’s use of color is bold and wonderful, his brush work, relaxed and layered. An immediate residency response like improvising solo soprano saxophone pieces to each painting seemed like a solid idea, but I suspected that spending more time learning about Kennedy’s home town and local artist community would speak something new of a something we both shared, an impulse and personal need to create.

In the time that the residency afforded, I found myself reflecting generally on the intuitive response in painting, and how this relates to the improvised musical response I have been exercising for almost 3 decades now. I have lived among visual artists during time spent at the Leitrim Sculpture Centre, and later at studio residencies at both The Dock and The Model arts centres in the Northwest. Painters and musicians have very different relationships to time and space, I knew it would be best to naively engage with the other side to better understand my own. It dawned on me one quiet evening out recording the bells of the cathedral in Thurles that eliciting a local group discussion on the nature of the intuitive response across disciplines seemed like a fruitful way to help explore my own work and Kennedy’s in tandem within a broader public context, moving as it were the very ‘lines of engagement’ within my own established workflow and engaging more personally with local contributors.

With huge help from the Source’s Director, Brendan Maher and local artist, PJ O’Connell, I was able to consecutively interview 7 local visual artists about their thoughts and experiences of the creative process and the exhibition on show.

These conversations were recorded, and late nights were spent listening carefully and repeatedly to the contrasting voices of these local artists who I had just met, searching for something out of sight. Reflecting on the diversity of drives and reasons to create and make art that were harvested allowed the familiar and systematic causes to fall aside and for the personal and underworld of creativity to very slowly reveal something of itself, something of myself, something of Thurles’ artistic community, or something personal, like the Devil’s Bit in Kennedy’s horizon.

With no list of questions at play I entered into each encounter with the aim of capturing honest and revealing speech utterances from each artist which through editing might appear to be deeply connected or in conversation with each other, musically and thematically these connections were hidden within the familiar phonology of everyday conversation.

By the second day of interviews I was convinced that what I was compiling had both a temporal and spatial dimension to it, that I was in fact theatricising and composing an unforeseen work derived from a common curiosity for abstraction, that the contributors were in fact a musical ensemble to be augmented by a woodwind septet, and collectively repositioned in time and space to help reveal the nature of the universal need to create and perform.

Through a massive glass wall overlooking Thurles town, the studio space on the upper floor of Source became extremely hot during this summer’s heat wave. Resisting the urge to allow both cool air and town noise into the space in which I had placed 24 speakers for developing and installing the spatial element of the work, I opted for drinking water and taking breaks on the balcony and broke a weeklong sweat.

In many ways listening to recorded voices in an isolated studio may seem counter effective to making the most of a new location and new contacts, but I felt that I was getting to know myself and my volunteer artists more closely by arranging their phrases out of context, recycling their words in a search for meaning within an immersive dome of speakers.

Working with SpatGRIS and Reaper, I was able to both localize and animate the voices as they spoke and position subjects in relation to one another and scenes of an imaginary group dynamic were created. Multitracking the group voice with automated clarinets and saxophones was to allow for a moving ensemble of diverse parts as backdrop to a live performed response to Kennedy’s show. Once these parameters had been answered the race to deliver a performance through over a kilometer of cable was underway.

Creating an hour-long performance from hours of interview material is something I had done previously over a much longer timeframe. My 2023 work ‘Love of Moving Parts’ was created over a 2-year period. Adapting my workflow to deliver a complete and technically flawless performance under a 2-week deadline was a major challenge I had set myself through Navigator.

Although not a prerequisite for the award, I chose to end my 2 weeks in Thurles with a performance-installation for solo saxophones, community voices and speakerdome. The logistics of installing the dome were greatly helped by Source who provided technical assistance, lightweight scaffolding and a generous amount of time and encouragement, all of which were greatly appreciated.

I would like to thank all of the staff of IMC, especially Louis Scully; Source Arts Centre, especially Brendan Maher, (Director) PJ O’Connell, and Artist Eddie Kennedy (from Devil’s Bit) for starting this conversation and the inspirational studio visit. I’d lastly like to thank all of the contributing artists who came and spent time talking with me on a very hot day in Thurles: Frank Rafter, Jennifer Ryan, Larry Doherty, Maeibh Sheehan, Eddie Kenehan, PJ O’Connell.