Evening Echo – December 14th 2023 Shalom Park

14 December 2023

                                      Sunset - Thursday 14th December 2023                                         

Shalom Park Gas Works Rd & Albert Rd Cork, 

Ireland

Lighting Sequence

9th Lamp on: 4:14pm

Sunset: 4:24pm

9th Lamp off: 4:54pm

Evening Echo is a public artwork by New Zealand artist Maddie Leach. It is sited on old gasometer land gifted by Bord Gáis to Cork City Council in the late 1980s. This site was subsequently re-dedicated as Shalom Park in 1989. The park sits in the centre of the old Cork neighbourhood known locally as ‘Jewtown’. This neighbourhood is also home to the National Sculpture Factory.

Evening Echo is an art project generated as an artist’s response to the particularities of place and locality. Now in its Thirteenth year, the project continues to gather support from the Cork Hebrew Congregation, Cork City Council, Bord Gáis and its local community. 

The project is manifested in a sequence of custom-built lamps, a remote timing system, a highly controlled sense of duration, a list of future dates, an annual announcement in Cork’s Evening Echo newspaper and a promissory agreement. Evening Echo is fleetingly activated on an annual cycle, maintaining a delicate but persistent visibility in the park and re-activating its connection to Cork’s Jewish history. Intended to exist in perpetuity, the project maintains a delicate position between optimism for its future existence and the possibility of its own discontinuance.

This year the last night of Hanukkah is Thursday 14 December and offers the only opportunity to see the tall ‘ninth lamp’ alights until next year. The cycle begins 10 minutes before sunset, which occurs this year at 4.24pm, and continues for 30 minutes after sunset when the ninth lamp is extinguished.

Lord Mayor of Cork Cllr Kieran McCarthy, stated “the Evening Echo artwork and lamp project is an important annual marker that acknowledges the significant impact that the Jewish Community had in Cork. Moreover this artwork, reflects upon the creation of Jewtown and its heritage and memory and the lasting legacy of the Jewish community in Cork over many years and decades. It also stands in one of the city’s historical areas with looming stories from South Docks and the docker heritage and industrial heritage ranging from old gasworks, to old tram depots to former electricity plant and railway yards. The cultural heritage of the area of Albert Road and Hibernian Buildings is important to champion and reflect upon in an ever changing Cork City”.

Cork City Council wishes to acknowledge the essential role played by the Rosehill family of Cork in support of this artwork.

Maddie Leach’s work is largely project-based, site responsive and conceptually driven and addresses new thinking on art, sociality and place-based practices.  She seeks viable ways of making artworks in order to interpret and respond to unique place-determined content and she is recognised for innovatively investigating ideas of audience spectatorship, expectation and participation in relation to art works. Leach’s recent projects include commissions for Jakarta Biennale (Indonesia, 2015) and spaced 2: future recall (Perth, Australia, 2014-15). She was shortlisted for New Zealand’s premier Walters Prize in 2014 for her project ‘If you find the good oil let us know’. Leach was born in Auckland, New Zealand in 1970 and currently lives and works in Gothenburg, Sweden.