IAC Commissions: Melatu Uche Okorie

“These stories needed to be told. We, as migrants are used to being spoken for, yet these are our experiences.”—Okorie in the New York Times

Melatu Uche Okorie is an author and member of the Arts Council of Ireland. Her 2018 short story collection, This Hostel Life, was shortlisted for the Sunday Independent Newcomer of the Year Award at the Irish Book Awards, and adapted into an operatic work by the Irish National Opera.

Bob Gallagher is an award-winning Irish filmmaker described by Werner Herzog, under whom he studied, as a “good soldier of cinema.” He is most well known for his visual collaborations with musicians (Girl Band, Lankum, Villagers, Pillow Queens), and his music videos have received international press and multiple awards. Totally Dublin describes him as “one of the nation’s premier creative forces in the visual arts.” 

Recently his focus has been on traditional singing; for MusicTown Festival 2021, he curated and performed in Aiteach: From Cú Chulainn to the Quare Fellow, an exploration of sexual identities in Irish music and literary traditions. He is currently developing his first feature film, The Song Collector, through the Director’s Concept Development Fund. He is the 2021 artist-in-residence at D-Light Studios Dublin, and an associate artist of Ireland’s National Folk Theatre, Siamsa Tíre.

Clement Chigaru is a Dublin-based actor originally from Malawi, who has lived in Ireland for the past 13 years. He studied at the Gaiety School of Acting and Bow Street Academy of Acting. Clement is an avid kendo practitioner and is proficient in various forms of stage combat. 

Clement has featured in various productions ranging from comedic sketches such as Republic of Telly and The Mario Rosenstock Show to action dramas such as AMC’s Into the Badlands, where he shared the screen with Nick Frost and Danny Wu. 

Clement can be seen in the short film Nightmare, directed by Bob Gallagher. Sitting in the Car will be the third project that Bob and Clement have collaborated on.

Eleanor Bowman is an award-winning cinematographer who seeks out creative, inspiring, and emotionally impactful projects. With a background in both fiction and documentary features, her cinematography also spans the shorter formats of music videos and television commercials. Her work on the short film The Girl with the Mechanical Maiden won her the best cinematography award at the Fastnet Film Festival in 2014. In September 2019, she was nominated at the Underwire Film Festival for her cinematography on Five Letters to the Stranger Who Will Dissect My Brain. 

Aside from working in narrative, Eleanor has a strong body of work in documentaries, including RTÉ’s OCD and Me, for which she received an IFTA nomination for cinematography. The documentary Strong at the Broken Places received a special mention for her cinematography at the Fastnet Film Festival in 2019. More recently, she was the cinematographer on the 2020 IFTA-nominated The Grass Ceiling, for which she won the best cinematography award at the 2021 VIWFF in Vancouver.

Gareth Quinn Redmond is an ambient musician based in Dublin, Ireland. To date, Gareth has released a two-part environmental music series inspired conceptually by the music of Satoshi Ashikawa. 2019 saw the first album in this series, Laistigh den Ghleo, released alongside the first ever reissue of Ashikawa's ambient masterpiece Still Way on WRWTFWW Records. 

Gareth has also collaborated/performed with many artistsm including Villagers, Bell X1, Glen Hansard, David Keenan, Stephen James Smith, Myles O’ Reilly, and visual artist Conor Campbell. 

In 2020, Gareth released An Fhuaim is Caoine, an ambient piece written for music box, synth, and strings. It was followed up in January of 2021 with his latest collaboration, Life's Slow Build, with Dublin-based producer and multi instrumentalist James Smith (Yurn). Currently, Gareth is writing three new albums, one of which will be released later this year.

Stephen Tiernan is a sound engineer, music producer and musician based in Dublin. He releases alternative music under the name Participant and produces music for other artists. He is currently recording his debut album, which has been funded by the Arts Council of Ireland.

Marie Denham is an illustrator, production designer, and theatre maker. As well as having worked on film and music video productions, she founded the shadow puppetry troop Flight of Fancy Shadows. Using overhead projectors and handmade puppets, the troop write, design, and perform magical shadow performances, experimenting with light and dark, color and movement in both moving images and live puppetry. 

Marie is also a nurse and frontline worker who recently illustrated and published a young adult booklet on cochlear implants. She also recently completed illustrations on the children’s book The Moonfox, in collaboration with writer Emmet O’Brien.

The pandemic has forced humanity into an involuntary state of uncertainty that may last a long time. This is troubling, of course, but, as with any of life’s terribly sad moments, is not without redemptive possibility. We are challenged to find a new comfort level with uncertainty as a more constant companion. 

Like everyone, we at Irish Arts Center are entering a new phase of grappling with all of this. We still don’t know when it will be safe or allowable to gather in groups for live performing arts experiences. We continue to innovate our digital programming and prepare for our magnificent new building that awaits us, soon enough we hope. We develop scenarios and contingency plans. 

And we challenge ourselves to lean into the moment. For this, as ever, we rely on the artists. 

To that end, we have commissioned more than two dozen artists reflecting a range of perspectives across our artistic community, to create short works that respond to the idea of finding grace in uncertainty, to find meaning in the chaos, and perhaps even some redemption, as we recognize the fear and sadness we feel. 

In his work On the Transmigration of Souls, commissioned by the New York Philharmonic just weeks after 9/11, John Adams sought to create a “memory space” for those who suffered loss of life, of loved ones, of innocence, and to evoke the feeling “that we are all united by a common bond of humanity.” 

In a similar spirit, we wish to inspire a volume of artistic responses that might form a kind of tapestry of emotion, a chronicle of the moment, work that can be appreciated now and for the long-term.

The common bond of humanity unites these artists—and will carry us all through this moment.