Bristol has a rich heritage of creative and visually striking parades, from St Paul’s Carnival, to Bedminster Lantern Parade, Bristol Pride, and Church Road Parade. These parades have long traditions of processional arts which imagine visually striking, humorous, and complex ways of narrating the pasts and present of Bristol’s diverse communities. In the autumn of 2023, Paula O’Rourke, COO of West of England Irish (W.E. Irish), approached myself Lucy Wray to work with Dee Moxon and Amy Peck from Lamplighter Arts CIC to research, design, and build a new ambulatory sculpture for Bristol’s St Patrick’s Day.
Stories of the Irish in Britain have tended to coalesce around well-known narratives regarding struggle, resilience, and survival. Moreover, Irish migrants often find their self-fashioning trapped by the paradoxes of authenticity; the simultaneous need to prove they belong in their adopted country, alongside the desire to prove they still fit in when they return home. The aim of the project team was to move beyond these familiar boundaries and themes. We aimed to use arts methods to involve the whole diasporic community in a conversation about how we might tell stories about itself through St Patrick’s Day celebrations. We wanted to use collective making to open up a space to acknowledge the challenges of migration, but to simultaneously to explore a range of other stories. Moreover, we hoped that the ethics and the traditions of processional arts would allow us the chance to experiment with ideas of belonging and identity, to explore a myriad imagined pasts and futures, and to invent new myths and folklores to represent our present and future in the city.
Our search for inspiration started with a study afternoon at the archives of the Welfare State International (WSI), housed in the Theatre Collection of the University of Bristol. Founded in 1968 by John and Sue Fox, WSI was a pioneering experimental theatre group which created performances and spectacles in and with communities throughout Britain and Ireland during the latter years of the twentieth century. Their carnivaleque performances were characterised by a unity spectacle and social justice, often located in economically-deprived locations, and involving these communities within the performance. Between 1973 and 1981, for example, they produced Parliament in Flames five times (in Burnley, Ackworth, Tamworth, Milton Keynes, Catford), where a replica Houses of Parliament, including a 70ft Big Ben was detonated by an enormous Guy Fawkes. In 1991 they created the ‘science fiction mortality play’ the Last Ferry set in the docklands of Liverpool and Belfast, which they described as ‘a spectacular carnival, organised magical mayhem, a vision of better possible worlds, a love story, and above all, a statement of hope.’ Exploring the treasure trove of leaflets, art works, designs, and maps contained in the archive, provided us with a sense of WSI’s ethical, community-led research, inspired by folk histories and myth, which took on big topics, and developed its own influential amalgamation of humour, spectacle, and politics. Alongside this, Amy Peck also searched archives in Bristol for the history of the Irish community, discovering histories of trade of cattle and butter, emigrant home rule activism, and crisis and retreat during the Troubles. But she also found gaps and silences – in particular the almost total absence of women’s voices and experiences in these institutional spaces.
Following on from this initial research, we organised three arts workshops in community centres across Bristol (in Bishopston, Redfield, and Bedminster), open to the whole Irish and Irish-heritage community, to explore what our WSI-inspired processional arts piece might look like. We invited participants to bring along an object or document which reminded them of Ireland or represented their relationship with Ireland. The people who came brough a huge array of things, including photographs, letters, CDs, lace, Irish foods, and family heirlooms. We provided paper, pens, willow, and card, for people to make drawings, montages, and sculptures based on these things. Over tea and craft materials we exchanged difficult histories of family milestones we missed by being away, the simultaneous feeling of liberation and loss that distance brings, and feelings of dislocation or distance in both our original and our new homes. We swapped stories across generations from the migrants of the 1970s who experienced discrimination in the atmosphere of the Troubles, to those who moved more recently and campaigned for reproductive rights across jurisdictions. But we also laughed about shared experiences of encountering English table manners for first time, packages of crisps and socks from relatives, refills of holy water on visits to home, and kitchen discos to Maniac 2000.
Amy and Dee brought together these conversations and speculations, their archival research, stitched together by the ethics and inspiration from the Welfare State International, and through hours of designing, crafting stitching, and building, conjured a new processional art piece for the St Patrick’s Day parade, which pulled together the ideas and inspiration of Bristol’s Irish community. Mother Ireland, as she was named, was a 12 foot high figure of a woman, sculpted in willow. The decision to make the new processional piece a woman was an attempt to visualise the generations of Irish women who have come to Bristol, but whose experiences have not made it into the city’s archives. Her skirt was inspired by the first sight of Irish fields on Ryanair flights home, but the fields were populated by images of all the objects and stories we had collected in our workshops – photographs, jewellery, heirlooms, Mikado biscuits, and more.
We were lucky when St Patrick’s Day turned into a beautiful early spring day, and seven thousand people came out on to the streets of Bristol to celebrate their links to Ireland. Myself and Lucy, along with other community volunteers, wheeled Mother Ireland from the MShed (where the last ship to the built in Bristol, the Miranda Guinness, was built in 1976), through Queen’s Square (where in 1804 Irish-speaking navvies played hurling on breaks from digging the New Cut), past Marsh Street (the location of nineteenth-century lodging house for Irish cattle dealers and labourers), to St Nicholas’s market. Along the way people stopped us to find and touch the images they contributed, and to share their stories with their friends. It was joyful to witness the impact of our art work on the community, and the interest of those with no Irish heritage in our project and our history.
Guided by the ethos and practical handbooks of the WSI, the collaboration between historians and processional artists allowed us to do creative history in public along the whole process from the inception of the project, to creative workshops, to bringing the Irish history of Bristol into the streets. Working through the ludic and fabulous qualities of processional arts enabled us to simultaneously consider the challenges and joys of migration. Sadly, Bristol’s annual St Patrick’s day was cancelled in 2025, another victim of the well-documented financial struggles which have beset community arts in the last decade. While we wait for news of funding for future parades, Mother Ireland has not lain forgotten in storage. As befitting our WSI-ethos, she has been spotted moonlighting in different roles in festivals and parades across the south west, including Bristol Women’s Voice parade for carers and festivities for International Women’s Day at Sparks community space.
Migration and movement are a key part of what it means to be human in the 21st century, but Britain today can be a challenging environment for migrant communities. We hope that this project will form part of a broader project of celebrating migrant cultures in all their complexity and contribute to the Irish community’s longstanding commitment to standing in solidarity with other migrant communities in Bristol.