Maritime art and Dublin Bay, the photography of the late Pat Sweeney and mapping and recording shipwrecks are among the themes of a series of talks in Dublin Port as part of the Dublin Festival of History.
The first marine-related event takes place on Friday, October 3rd, entitled Voices of the Port: Oral History and the Dublin Port Memory Project. It starts at 2 pm and runs to 5 pm at the Substation, Dublin Port.
Next Tuesday, October 7th, Guilia Bernasconi will talk about the Irish Lights Archive at the Substation, Dublin Port, at 1 pm.
Bernasconi, an archive and heritage officer with Irish Lights, will introduce the archive and discuss what it reveals about Ireland’s lighthouse history.
She will present selected records and images, explaining how the archive documents lighthouse work and technology, and showing how these sources deepen our understanding of the maritime landscape connected to Dublin Port.
On Wednesday, October 8th, at 6 pm, Joe Varley and Esther Bartley Kane will discuss the photography of the late Pat Sweeney.
Sweeney bequeathed his collection to the National Maritime Museum of Ireland. Dublin Port Company has funded the scanning and indexing of 3,200 photographs, helping to preserve and open up this important legacy for research and public access.
Varley and Bartley Kane will look at the collections through two complementary lenses: first, from a photographic analysis perspective and second, by reading these images against the ever-changing industrial landscape of maritime Dublin , shipyards and quays, port infrastructure and logistics, vessels and workers , to trace how the city and port have evolved over time.
On Thursday, October 9th, Karl Brady of the National Monuments Service Underwater Archaeology unit will talk about current research that maps, documents and investigates wrecks lost off the Dublin coast, with a focus on discoveries made in recent years. His talk in the Substation takes place at 6pm.
The final event takes place on Saturday, October 11th, at 11.30am when maritime historian Cormac Lowth, himself an artist, will talk about maritime art and Dublin Bay.
Several artists from the 18th century onwards painted scenes of Dublin Bay. Many of these depicted the development of Dublin Port. These included Richard Brydges Beechey, Edwin Hayes, Alexander Williams, and Matthew Kendrick, among others. Cormac Lowth will discuss these artworks and showcase a wide range of rare and interesting images by various artists. His selection will feature works by William Ashford, James Arthur O’Connor, Joseph William Carey, the Brocas family, and William Sadler.
From the 18th century onward, artists captured Dublin Bay while charting the development of Dublin port. In his illustrated lecture, Lowth will discuss works by Richard Brydges Beechey, Edwin Hayes, Alexander Williams, Matthew Kendrick, William Ashford, James Arthur O’Connor, Joseph William Carey, the Brocas family, and William Sadler.
All events at Dublin Port’s Substation on Alexandra Road are free, and booking can be made on Eventbrite here
