The theme for this year’s International Day of Persons with Disabilities is Inclusion Matters: access and empowerment for people of all abilities. The Arts Council is proud to use this celebration to present three powerful commissions by artists with disabilities, which were supported under our Ignite initiative. This is the single largest public investment in arts and disability practice in Ireland to date.
Ignite was a unique commissioning partnership of the Arts Council, Arts and Disability Ireland and four local authorities. It was designed to commission ambitious, high quality work from people with disabilities, facilitated by leading international and Irish artists with disabilities. Ignite projects took place in 2014 and 2015 in Cork, Galway and Mayo. In these three short films each of the leading artists talks about the making of the work – if you weren’t fortunate enough to see any of these ambitious new commissions you will get a great sense of the essence of the work from clicking on each link.
Of course when something looks as effortless as this, you invariably know that it has been preceded by years of developmental work. There will be an opportunity to hear more about this project and all the other exciting initiatives taking place in the field of arts and disability at Creative Connections a major arts and disability conference being supported by the Arts Council and presented by Arts & Disability Ireland in January 2016 in Galway.
We want to take this opportunity to congratulate all the artists involved in these works, who stunningly demonstrated their creative abilities.