New documentary looks at how Balbriggan has been shaped by artists 

Aidan Whelan had wanted to make a short film about the arts in Balbriggan.

Something like three to five minutes, the filmmaker said on Friday afternoon. “This was just to symbolise what was happening here, and capture a sense of what had happened before.”

He had a list of 20 or so artists and people connected to the local scene, he says. “I thought, let’s see if I can get two or three interviews out of that.”

But they all got back in touch, he says with a small laugh.

In front of him, as he sits at a table in the Bracken Court Hotel bar, is a cup of coffee and a small stack of flyers, announcing the release of A Destination for the Arts.

Clocking in at 68 minutes, Whelan’s debut feature-length documentary delves into the story of how, over three decades, Balbriggan shaped and was shaped by painters, writers, sculptors and creative collectives.

This was a journey he embarked on blindly, he says. “It was a case of saying, could we make something that showcases the existence of a previous arts movement and the current potential movement now?”

Becoming a filmmaker

As Whelan reflected on the process of capturing this recent history on camera, A Destination was one week out from its premiere around the corner in The Lark Theatre, a venue opened late last year.

Whelan was always fascinated by movies, he says.

He had long wanted to be a director, but he didn’t spend his childhood making movies or art, he says. “I think in some ways, on a personal level, it was suppressed in me.”

When he was 19, in the late nineties, he enrolled in a two-year film production course in Galway, he says. “But when I came back to Dublin, I realised the harsh realities of cost, and I didn’t have the life skills to allow that to happen.”

He worked in finance, procurement and IT, he says. “That was a 20-year career.”

In 2015, he founded Wildflower Pictures, a film production company. In 2017, he produced the short film, Inside I’m Racing, which tells the story of a young boy with autism who is fascinated by race cars.

A Destination for the Arts was mostly funded by Wildflower, says Whelan, with a small placemaking grant from the Fingal County Council’s Our Balbriggan programme.

It was shot over a year with local musician, cinematographer and editor Richard Geraghty, he says. “It was May to May, one calendar year.”

Getting to know a familiar place

A Destination loosely spans 28 years in the seaside town’s history.

It is introduced to viewers through the eyes of the artist Jerry Keogh. Balbriggan was rundown in the mid-90s, Keogh tells Whelan in the opening scene, and he was in need of studio space.

The town was in a serious state of dereliction at the time, Whelan says. “It was a complete vacuum.”

Keogh, upon stepping off the train, immediately spotted the old hosiery factory on Railway Street. Over six months, he went about transforming part of it into a studio for artists.

That was Sunlight Studios, Whelan says, as he treks down Railway Street, looking up at the red-brick warehouse where Keogh and other artists worked.

It’s closed now. But Whelan shows its heyday through a trove of raw, grainy archival footage from 1999 to 2000.

These stories about earlier Balbriggan were all relatively new ground for Whelan. Although he was born and raised here, he didn’t have any involvement in the local arts scene.

It was something that was happening in parallel to his own life, he says. “I didn’t know much of it. I only knew of one member, and I didn’t realise how creative or involved he was.”

That was the sculptor Darren Rogers, he says, one of the film’s main subjects. “And I didn’t even realise that he was part of the origins of Sunlight Studios and what that meant.”

Reflecting back the reality

In the film, Whelan draws a line between Sunlight Studios and Scéal, a contemporary artists collective based around Balbriggan, which organises local exhibitions, workshops and live events.

He looked at how the former naturally grew into and informed the latter, he says, strolling through the town as the sun shines overhead.

“The simple remit was to say a movement existed way back then, but some of the people within that are still together, and forming a melting pot of creatives,” he says.

Now, they congregate around The Warehouse on Vauxhall Street, a back lane between Bridge Street and Millpond Park, he says.

Each of his subjects touches on a different facet of life in contemporary Balbriggan.

Mosaic artist Akvile Simanskiene reflects on pollution in the town’s harbour. Painter David Ryan looks at dereliction and homelessness.

Kevin Curran, the author of the novel Youth, among others, discusses the everyday reality of its diverse youth culture.

As much as it is a portrait of the town’s arts, Whelan wants to show a raw and authentic version of how this place actually is, he says.

“We’re going down layers and layers down past all the negative tropes that you get when you have articles talking about racial divisions,” he says.

Pride of place

Whelan climbs into what he refers as “the largest guitar in the world, unofficially”.

It is a large guitar-shaped hole dug into the lawn of the, gardens behind the Lark Theatre and the Institute of Music and Song on Church Street.

It resembles an empty swimming pool, with the walls inside the hole built from red bricks. The pathway into this garden feature was designed to imitate the neck and head of the instrument, including the fretboard.

Dublin has the Spire, but Balbriggan has this guitar, he says. “It’s a landmark for this campus.”

Maybe, there’s a case to be made to bring the Guinness World Records people out here to have a look, he says, before proceeding into the 400-seater venue, the Lark Theatre.

It took five years to bring the theatre and school of music to life, says Michael P. Dawson, the institute’s CEO, whose son, Michael T. Dawson is the CEO of the Lark.

The opportunity came when an old Georgian house was put up for sale, he says. “And we were looking for somewhere to bring all of the classes under one roof.”

More recently, the theatre was shortlisted for the Public Choice Award’s architectural building of the year, he says.

From the reception area, Whelan entered the quiet concert hall.

He had been in here for a pantomime over Christmas, he says. “It was phenomenal.”

The room was warmly lit and there was only the sound of a single pair of footsteps up in its balcony seating.

He climbed up on the stage, because he wanted to familiarise himself with it before the documentary premiered the next week, he said. “If I have to give a speech, I don’t want to be going: ‘Oh wow, it’s very big.’”

“I’m slightly dreading it,” he said, looking out across the room with a small grin.