Continued

The Families Engage - Ennistymon 2009

The Families Engage - Galway 2009
Two private family viewings of Lived Lives artworks in progress were held. The first, Ennistymon '09, was a small selection of six families for a pilot viewing. Building on that experience, Galway '09 a viewing for all forty-six families who donated items to the Lived Lives Archive- was then held. From these donations, a series of artworks in progress were made, which were initially presented back to the families for private engagement, reflection and feedback (Ennistymon '09; Galway '09). The works are as follows: Informed Consent, Archive Rooms, Lost Portrait Gallery, Not A Statistic, Worn Worlds, and Lived Lives Archive Print. All engagements and conversations were documented with video and still image. Mechanisms were put in place to receive considered, reflective feedback.
As a result of the Lived Lives process an archive came into being. This archive was “living” and open-ended, and remained open to new materials up until the end of the donating phase of the Lived Lives project (April '10). It can be viewed as the architecture for building the Lived Lives works and can also be seen as an innate temporary memorial to the deceased. It also contains very fragile contributions to our understanding of society and human experience around suicide. It is important to preserve these traces of Lived Lives – these stories, this "small memory". Stories are what we use to make sense of the world.

College of Psychiatry in Ireland 2009

Reclaiming 2010
This event arose from an invitation to give one of the keynote presentations and exhibit the Lost Portraits gallery at the first Annual Meeting of the newly formed College of Psychiatry of Ireland, in Croke Park, Dublin, 2009. The subsequent installation entailed the designing, building and installation of a round room in the Hogan Stand in Croke Park. Having received permission from the Lived Lives family members in Galway to bring these works into the public, we symbolically invited the President of Ireland, Mary McAleese to be the first member of the Irish public to engage with the physical art works and she agreed to do so.
During the PhD process (2006-2010) the Lived Lives families frequently requested a copy of the Jacquard weave of their deceased loved one. McGuinness could not do during the PhD process as it may have been viewed as coercion of Research Participants. When the formal process was completed in November 2010, this was addressed. In May 2011, The Royal College of Physicians facilitated the install all the Jacquards tapestries in their premises in Kildare Street, as part of a Lived Lives family meeting. At this the families were invited to approach the wall on which the tapestries where installed and to physically reclaim the portrait of their deceased. These were given on one condition, that they would not be framed behind glass. It is intended to revisit the families in their own homes in the future to record what they have done with the portraits.

Video Documentation

Lived Lives is a process, a journey, not simply a collection of objects. The act of experiencing these art works is as much a part of them as their physical properties. From early on in this journey, feedback, reflection and documentation have been constant elements of the project in its different iterations, elements which are crucially important from an ethical as well as an artistic perspective. All video documentation on this site is here with the express permission of the subjects. Please click here to view the video documentation, and be aware that some viewers may find it upsetting.
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