25 December 2022, Christmas Day
By Mary Bermingham
mary@TheCork.ie
Photo of artist Maddie Leach by Darragh Kane, 2016
What: ‘Evening Echo’ by Artist Maddie Leach
When: Sunset – Sunday 25th December 2022
Lighting Sequence: 4:19pm to 4:59pm
Where: Shalom Park, Gas Works Rd & Albert Rd, Cork City,
Evening Echo is a public artwork by artist Maddie Leach. It is sited on old gasometer land gifted by Bord Gáis to Cork City Council in the late 1980s. This site was subsequently re-dedicated as Shalom Park in 1989. The park sits in the centre of the old Cork neighbourhood known locally as ‘Jewtown’. This neighbourhood is also home to the National Sculpture Factory.
Evening Echo is an art project generated as an artist’s response to the particularities of place and locality. The project is manifested in a sequence of custom-built lamps, a remote timing system, a highly controlled sense of duration, a list of future dates, an annual announcement in Cork’s Evening Echo newspaper and a promissory agreement. Evening Echo is fleetingly activated on an annual cycle, maintaining a delicate but persistent visibility in the park and re-activating its connection to Cork’s Jewish history. Intended to exist in perpetuity, the project maintains a delicate position between optimism for its future existence and the possibility of its own discontinuance.
This year the last night of Hanukkah is Sunday December 25th and offers the only opportunity to see the tall ninth lamp alight until next year. The cycle begins 10 minutes before sunset, which this year occurs at 4.19pm, and continues for 30 minutes after sunset when the ninth lamp will be extinguished.
Maddie Leach was born in Auckland, New Zealand in 1970 and currently lives and works in Gothenburg, Sweden. Her work is largely project-based, site responsive and conceptually driven and addresses new thinking on art, sociality and place-based practices. Leach’s projects include public commissions for Contemporary Art Gallery (Vancouver, Canada, 2019); Gothenburg Biennale for Contemporary Art (GIBCA 2017); Jakarta Biennale (Indonesia, 2015) and spaced 2: future recall (Perth, Australia, 2014-15).
A catalogue with essays by Mick Wilson (artist, writer, educator, former Head of Valand Academy at University of Gothenburg,) and Matt Packer (Director of the CCA Derry-Londonderry and previously curator of Exhibitions & Projects, Lewis Glucksman Gallery, Cork) has been published by the National Sculpture Factory.
