The Olivier Cornet Gallery has been involved in Bloomsday celebrations since moving to the Dublin 1 area in 2014. Last year Olivier came up with the idea of a live sketching event and exhibition after welcoming the Dublin Sketchers to his gallery on a Sunday afternoon: Dublin Sketchers (now part of the global Urban Sketchers community) get together every Sunday afternoon in Dublin to sketch. They go to a different place each week. The Olivier Cornet Gallery (and the building it is in) turned out to be the perfect place for one of these get-together-and-sketch events.

After checking the uniqueness of the concept with the James Joyce Centre, Olivier invited two members of Dublin Sketchers to co-curate the Bloomsday sketching event and exhibition with him: Marie-Hélène Brohan Delhaye and Jessica Peel-Yates. ‘There’s a touch of the artist about old Bloom’ sketching event and exhibition launched on 10th June 2017. It was included in the Bloomsday Fringe Programme of the James Joyce Centre, as part of that year’s Bloomsday Festival. Details of last year’s event can be found here.

We are delighted to announce that the 2018 edition of the project, titled ‘Drawing on Joyce’, has been included in the main programme of the James Joyce Centre’s Bloomsday Festival.

Drawing on Joyce is an exhibition of sketchbooks and artworks created live on the streets of Dublin. Led by Dublin Sketchers, participants have drawn on location in the places that appear in Ulysses. They’ve sketched in pubs, chemists and cafés. They’ve perched in parks, Martello towers and cemeteries. Taking inspiration from Ulysses – the stories, the characters, the rumour and humour – their sketches tell the story of our surroundings, the places we live and people we meet.

The sketchbooks are a record of time and place, now and then. They reveal Ulysses, one drawing at a time. The Joyce trail sketch crawl explored James Joyce’s city, real or imagined, through any kind of media and with an exciting range of results. You can see the sketchbooks at the James Joyce Cultural Centre throughout the festival.

An exhibition at the Olivier Cornet Gallery will take place during the Bloomsday Festival. It includes artworks by 5 professional artists whom the gallery invited to participate in the Joyce trail sketch crawl events alongside the Dublin Sketchers. The artists are drawn from various contemporary practices including abstract and non-figurative art. They have charted Dublin, mapping the fabric of the city, to seek traces of Joyce’s multi-layered novel.

The 5 artists are

– Nickie Hayden

– Eoin Mac Lochlainn (represented by the Olivier Cornet Gallery)

– Maser

– Paula Meehan

– Robert Russell

Both exhibitions open on Sunday 10th June at 3pm with further evening events at the Olivier Cornet Gallery throughout the festival.

If you want to join the Drawing on Joyce sketchbook project, here are the dates for the main Ulysses sketch crawls:
– Sunday 11th February 2pm – 4pm: Joyce Tower and Forty Foot in Sandycove exploring the opening chapter of Ulysses.
– Sunday 11th March noon – 4pm: Sketch crawl from O’Connell Street down Grafton Street, past Davy Byrne’s pub and onto the National Museum. This route follows the course of the Lestrygonians chapter of Ulysses and ends up in the National Library for a discussion of Shakespeare in the Scylla and Charybdis episode.
– Sunday 8th April noon – 4pm: Sketch crawl from Little Britain Street down to Ormond Quay and across to Merchant’s Arch in Temple Bar, taking in chapters Wandering Rocks, Sirens and Cyclops.
– Sunday 13th May 2pm – 4pm: Swenys Chemist, St Andrew’s Church and Westland Row for the Lotus Eaterschapter.
– Sunday 10th June 2pm – 4pm: Eccles Street and North Great George’s Street for a marathon of chapters (Calypso, Ithaca and Penelope).

From day to day, their molecules shuttled to and fro, so does the artist weave and unweave his image – Ulysses, James Joyce.