Local artist Colin Darke was resident at the Centre from April and has in this time created a new permanent site-specific work. This piece consists of transcribing James Joyce’s Ulysses onto three of the Centre's walls.

Darke has been using text in work since the early nineties, initially appropriating the format of “comms” – political prisoners’ letters, written in tiny writing onto cigarette papers. Wishing at that time to explore the difficult relationship between republicanism and socialism (from Darke’s Marxist perspective), he created a dialogue through the transcription of socialist texts onto cigarette papers, in the form of large-scale comms.

This led to his writing texts (again, Marxist books) directly onto the walls of galleries. This work shifted away from exploring external political issues and looked inwards to the relationship between artist and art market, on political and economic levels.

This, in turn, led to making drawings directly onto gallery walls. These, made in charcoal, are historical images from revolutions but are distorted according to the dimensions of the wall space provided by the gallery. In this way, Darke looks at the level of autonomy of artistic production, in the face of the determinism of the market/gallery system.

All previous wall pieces, whether text or image, have been destroyed. At the end of exhibitions, the walls used are painted back to their original white. This, in terms of Darke’s work, signifies the ultimate victory of the “art world” over the ideological “attack” of the artist.

His Ulysses installation draws together both these approaches, using as it does the text of Joyce’s masterwork, along with drawn, and distorted, portraits of the author. This piece, however, was made as a celebration of the novel, which played such an important role in the development of modernism in the twentieth century, impacting on, and drawing from, all forms of contemporary art forms.