Spencer Tunick Announced

Spencer Tunick was announced to the press yesterday morning. The response was beyond my wildest expectations. Spencer Tunick is the American artist who takes photographs of masses of ordinary people posing naked. Sometimes with 1000s of volunteers. When I first moved over to Cork in early 2007 Spencer was one of the first people I contacted about coming to make a piece of work for the Midsummer. I’d seen the BBC film of the making of his installation in Newcastle-Gateshead in 2005 and was just stunned by what Spencer was achieving with ordinary people. Spencer emailed me in December of 2007 to ask me if we were still on for making this happen in Ireland this year. At this stage I had just seen the amazing image of 18,000 people in one of the main squares in Mexico City as well as the installation Spencer made for Greenpeace on the Aletscht glacier. Myself and Mary McCarthy, the arts manager for Dublin Docklands (the Midsummer’s co-commissioner on this project) invited Spencer and his project manager Jonathan over to scout locations in Dublin and Cork just after Christmas. It was a great few days and I think Spencer and Jonathan probably had a better tour of Dublin and Cork than any tourist ever gets. The problem seemed to be there were just so many possible locations. After two days scouting in and around Dublin the four of us got the train back down to Cork to start the second part of this epic scout. In the taxi on the way from Kent station to the Hayfield where they were staying I asked the taxi driver to take a detour up to St. Luke’s and down Patrick’s Hill to see the magnificent view of the city at night.