Artist In Residence at National Women’s Council
Writing from a women’s council member as part of one of the workshops
The below is a speech I gave at the conference of NWC in its 50th year, I actually caught COVID and I had to do it from Zoom in a hotel room!
Heyis
My name is Grace Dyas. I am named after Grainne Mhaol, the pirate queen, Grace Gifford, of the song, oh grace… and after Grace Kelly, the princess, and the hymn… Amazing Grace because my ma refuses to make up her mind and why should she.
I’m an artist and an activist, and for the last 12 months I have been Artist in Residency with the National Women’s Council.
This residency was designed to celebrate the women’s council’s 50th anniversary. They could have a slideshow, make a new logo, but the women’s council chose something deeper, a deeper analysis, a deeper reflection on their work and that’s the intention I hope to be of service to. Dusty pat on the back
I have been making art for nearly 20 years, and I’m only young! How did I find myself here, addressing the NWC AGM. Picture me now as a four year old child. Standing between two adults, who I was genuinely afraid might kill each other, trying to get them, not to stop fighting, but to stand back far enough so they could see each other, to see that the other still existed. Now see me making a play about the sex trade in Ireland, working with two groups of women, one who had exited prostitution and one who believed ‘sex work’ should be decriminalised, wanting them and the audience to step back enough, to see each other, to a third way. See me in my early 20s getting my hair pulled. I am allergic to polemics, I am allergic to us and them, but I do believe in right and wrong. Picture me getting out of bed at 5am because I have been hearing my phone buzzing and I have to check. Reading out tweets from all over the world as pro-decrim activists cancelled me. For an article I wrote no woman has to sleep with a man to buy communion dress an experience unique to working class women that i had heard time and time again. for doing that play. I have been cancelled. I know the feeling. Now if you want to get to know me, you can picture me sitting with two styrofoam cups between me countless drug users, as I heard over and over again the connection between heroin and sexual abuse.
I hear people call me a shadow caller, a shapeshifter, someone who speaks truth to power, and an arrogant weapon, with a small a.
It’s important to me to name myself in the group as working-class artist.
I don’t use the term lightly, or without thinking about it a lot. Economic To me, the idea of a tribe, is the one that makes the most sense to me. It's about the tribe I belong to. My people on this island were traditionally the ones who worked with their hands. I am proud of their labour, their skill, their customs and traditions. The values that that instilled in me. The culture, the poetry, the music that that lifestyle inspired. And because we worked with our hands, it didn’t mean we didn’t work with our hearts and minds too. I’m proud of working class artists, the ones who dreamed as they shovelled coal and wrote world famous plays, the philosophers, the union organisers, the revolutionaries.
We are the ones who worked to survive yes, but I feel in my gut, in my roots, we also worked because we fucking love working. Label When working class people make enough money to stop working, they don’t stop working. They didn’t like that I said that. Because we love to build, to create, to share. To break legacy, to set precedent. Because We are different then to people who don’t value work in the same way. For them they might dream of a time when they don’t have to work, when they can golf, just accumulate wealth. Many of my people are now becoming, the never worked class.
There are different tribes on this island. Not everyone from the same tribe thinks alike, and no one should be held accountable for the actions of the rest of the tribe, I am also from the artist tribe, which I share with many middle and upper class people. Addict Tribes can move and shift, we know when we found them. Nwc is a tribe of sorts, a herd, women who have chosen to walk together.
As I have been meeting with members, class was a big issue that people raised, in terms of representation of working class women, in terms of the leadership of the women’s council down through the years, in terms of the decision making structure, so thats why i wanted to give it time in this presentation so its interesting to me that at this 50 year mark, I as a someone who identifies so strongly as a and all my work is about class am the first Artist in Residence, and I am working class.
This is a special day, an auspicious occasion, the fiftieth anniversary of NWC. In numerology, When we are blessed with the presence of the number 50, it signals growth and progress – both physical and spiritual. We should be open to listening for these messages as they could contain valuable information about where our journey will take us next.
I’m going to take you through the last year from my perspective, what I learned and what I hope to do next.
I will say that this is the official end of the residency, but I’m not finished with yous by any means! I want to complete the artwork that was conceived during the residency, which I’ll go into more later, but I also want to offer to continue to bring artistic processes into how NWC works and organises. We doing some of that too. I feel like the time has flown by, and I’ve only scratched the surface of what is possible. I’m excited by that potential, I’m excited and inspired and in awe of all of you, and I’m so humbled to be here today and to be given this space to address you.
So by way of a kind of formal report of what happened;
The residency began in May last year and is officially ending today however there is a project which has emerged from the residency that I will present to you today and the hope would be to see do we have a mandate from members to continue with it because like I said - I’m not finished!
So while I did meet and work with the staff of NWC, I was given a very clear direction from Orla and Catherine, that this was to be about the membership. We also decided that where members had women who used their service we would mostly be looking to work with the staff members of the member organisation, which is what we did with the exception of SAOL project and Women’s Collective Limerick. Because of class. So over the course of one to one meetings, video calls and six workshops in Galway, Limerick, Cork, Dublin, Belfast and with SAOL women’s project, I met around 35 organisations translating to about 60 people. At the outset of the residency Orla asked me how many members I thought I would be able to meet and I said ‘All of them’ and she laughed and now I can see why! This was a part time residency and it was my great ambition to meet and hear from everyone, and crucially we all wanted to make sure that no one felt left out - so we organised workshops around the country that people could attend and we send out lots of emails inviting people to engage, and there were some groups that I proactively engaged with. Despite all of that, there were some meetings that didn’t come together and groups I missed. So all in all I engaged with 20% of the membership and most of the staff of NWC. So what I will share next is based on my engagement with that group of people and what happened in the spaces we created together.
I’m an outsider here.
These are my reflections both as an outsider, but also as an artist, and as an activist. There are things I will get wrong. I could spend all my time telling you all how great you are, repeating sound bites, presencing the reality of the issues for women today, but I would be preaching to the converted and I don’t want to waste your time. My intention is to reflect back to you what might be useful, so take it as read that I know that each and every one of you is a hero, that you have devoted your life to a safer world for women, that you are rarely appreciated or thanked for it, and that its hard, and that your scared sometimes, and that you have sisterhood and bonds with others, and that there are women who wreck your head, but you do it anyway and you would do it all over again. So give me the right to be wrong as you listen. Bear with me, humour me.
I’m outside of Dublin, in someones car, we have finished our meeting and she’s giving me a lift to where I’m getting the train, we turn around the corner onto a beautiful river, and I say wow, when I see the sunset, and just then she has a thought about the National Women’s Council, about how women organise and make decisions, about the AGM which we had talked about earlier. She says - it’s not very feminist is it?
On the train I think about this. This is my first time at a NWC AGM so I don’t know if its like this here but, there is a certainly a teleological dimension to the format of an AGM for most NGOs. The positions are outlined and then voted upon.tiny space. There’s an emphasis on efficiency. I often think there’s an emphasis too on containment. We need to have some structure or it would all just be chaos. But the result of this is that I did hear once or twice that the women’s council hasn’t always brought the members along on some issues, and that there hasn’t been enough space for discussion. In an effort to demonstrate strong support maybe some nuance was missed, and maybe people don’t disagree, they just feel its happening very fast for them. I wonder how would decisions on positions etc be reached in Community Development? We’d get the flipchart out and we just wouldn’t stop until we built consensus. And I wonder, maybe we’d arrive at a third option, not to vote yes or no, but a third option? Its one of those conversations I’ll remember for the rest of my life, and why I love this work.
From the Tyranny of Structurelessness by Jo Freeman, first published in 1970.
“For everyone to have the opportunity to be involved in a given group and to participate in its activities the structure must be explicit, not implicit. The rules of decision-making must be open and available to everyone, and this can only happen if they are formalised. This is not to say that normalisation of a group structure will destroy the informal structure. It usually doesn’t. But it does hinder the informal structure from having predominant control and makes available some means of attacking it. ‘Structurelessness’ is organisationally impossible. We cannot decide whether to have a structured or structureless group; only whether or not to have a formally structured one
Unstructured groups may be very effective in getting women to talk about their lives; they aren’t very good for getting things done. Unless their mode of operation changes, groups flounder at the point where people tire of ‘just talking’ and want to do something more.”
She tells me that the National Women’s Council is a crucible for the women’s movement in Ireland. Its a container for pressure. Its women who didn’t want to talk anymore. Do something. We talk about how remarkable it is that they have stayed the course for fifty years. And how in todays organising culture, we have 162 organisations who are willing to agree (or at least not disagree) on some fundamental principles that can be very contentious. To be pro-choice without exception, to be trans inclusive without copitulation, to see the sex trade as violence against women.all of this is contested space and NWC has managed to stay united. Huge. Clap on the back. All of that unity is what creates the weight the NWC holds. How they can negotiate. And unity is what delivers change in women’s lives.
Before we start back after the break, she has some questions, it’s her first day as a participant in a trauma informed drugs project for women. What exactly is the National Women’s Council anyway? I look at the NWC staff before giving my own kinda explanation. Her response reveals her interpretation of my answer and paints the picture of a triangle, with the women’s council staff at the top and the 162 member organisations at the bottom. I say yeah it is kinda like that but flip it on its head the members should be at the top, and the staff are at the bottom, supporting and working in service to the members. The members decide the positions NWC campaigns on etc.
I’m referring to the formal structure as I know it. I wonder from my conversations if there’s an informal structure, and if the members feel like they are in charge, and equally if they take charge and own it. I have noticed that in other orgs that triangle often flips, leaving the members impotent to the staff and the staff frustrated at lack of engagement from the members, This usually happens when an organisation formalises or receives funding. And I wonder is collective decision making possible. Every conversation I have with members is unequivocally positive. People speak about co-designing campaigns, and having their voices heard. Triangle in place, what do you think about that.
White, middle class, dublin centric is a criticism I hear over and over. Within all of the diversity at our workshops, we had women of colour and women from the travelling community, (the real indigenous people of Ireland, she tells us) but I only heard one working class accent beyond my own, in Belfast.
As the workshops happened during the genocide in palestine at every workshop we had been taking photos in solidarity with Palestine, so at the end of the workshop in Belfast I tried to get everyone together with a Palestinian flag. The atmosphere was thick with fear I didn’t understand- proxy reliving troubles or conflict “Do you just want to take a picture” she said “just a picture with all of us” - “No flags” she mouthed.
White, middle-class, Dublin centric. In 1973, a group of women were tired of talking and decided to form a structure. That become the council for the economic status of women, and that became a crucible for the women’s movement in Ireland. Or did it?
I wasn’t out marching anywhere in the 1970s, I was minding children while my brothers were out working in the fields. Did I want to be marching? I wanted to have a choice but I didn’t. I wanted Freedom.
I wanted freedom not to get pregnant, thats all, just the freedom not to have a child, I suppose we all wanted freedom.
What you have to remember is - we were marching in the 1960s, the 1970s, travellers were holding protests about assimilation, about the final solution, and youse where invited and yis didn’t come. Because, people don’t care, unless its happening to them they don’t care, and that’s not feminism.
We made a mistake in Repeal by sacrificing our intersectionality in order to appeal to a broader audience, we did it to get the thing over the line, women had waited so long, but we didn’t know the impact that would have.
You would be at one of them meetings, the AGM, I went once or twice, and I addressed it once, and it wouldn’t at the meeting ye know, but it would be at the tea break or something, you’d be having a conversation, and one of them would make fun of the water charges movement say, and you’d respond, with your own words in your own accent, and they’d just go “Yes well” and walk away. They wouldn’t even do you the courtesy of engaging with you.
I ask her, what do you do when you wake up in the morning? I check my phone and look at lawsuits from gender critical women and threats from the far right
What do you think about when you to bed? Lawsuits.
You can’t get a barring order, if the guards don’t see you crying that goes against you. With the way the courts are set up its the woman the victim whose on trial.
Where are those women, where are they organising, how can we meet them? Where were they when we were protesting in the 60s, in the 70s. Where were they for the water charges? Where are they on housing?
Its impossible for a trans person to be housed. I told the landlord on the phone I had a months rent and deposit in cash. He said I could take it if I liked the place. Me and my Mum went to the viewing and he said no the place had been filled.
I thought it was very impressive that they ask you what your views are on trans rights and the sex trade at the interview. It shows they have integrity. It shows that we are all in this together.
SLIDES
One of the exercises that we did in the workshop was to ask and discuss division and unity over the last 50 years we did reeling in the years. As we spoke about issues of division within womens groups around the sex trade, she just leaned back and said “Well where women are divided on one thing, there united on another. We pay to much attention to the division, look at the power in the unity”
Michelangelo said he didn’t carve David out of the marble, he was already in there, and he found him.
Picture a piece of old-school film, developing in a dark room, that's what is happening now as we are here sharing space. Our film is already being made…
Here’s what I see so far. This is me pitching this idea to you now, in the formal structure. I’m offering you a collection of images. You can close your eyes and imagine if you want.
I see two women at the Garden of Remembrance gates. They walk down Parnell Square.
“We have to start somewhere”
These are not actors, but women who have been cast because they are significant to the women’s movement over the past 50 years in Ireland. Some are well known, some will have a significance when you learn their name afterwards, and some are women we know, the heroes who live outside of traditional spaces, the woman from Moyross who got all six of her children back from state care, the woman who has funded secret abortions her whole life.
In Beckettian dialogue written by the artist as a prompt, and interspersed with their own words and they have made their own, they talk to each other about the journey they are on.
Our women walking can hold it all for the viewer. As we watch we project the different issues they may be talking about but they never name one.
It causes us to reflect on what it takes to come together as one.
Their journey starts in 1973.
When they get to the end of the street, as they turn the corner, suddenly we see two different women walking, holding the same banner, on a country road. As they walk, we see symbols and emblems of the 1970s.
Blood is splattered on our white banner from just outside the frame, and now we’re walking on a street in Derry.
We go back to Shop Street, more women march down Clonakilty Pier…
They continue the journey, and we see visual cues and symbols that relate to the 1980s, they start to discuss fracture, dissent, identity. From now on we’ll see women come into the frame and leave the picture, we’ll see them walking in the foreground or the background, we’ll see them come back and walk with us again, and leave us again.
“The first item on the agenda at any women’s activism gathering - is the split” - Bernadette McAliskey
Women of all shapes and sizes, people who identify as women, women of all pigments of skin colour, women of all classes and backgrounds. They’ll speak in different accents, in Irish and English, in different languages.
We’ll show them all walking, maybe not together all the time but, in relation to each other.
What they talk about is so laden with meaning, to them, to us. They talk about division, without getting into details, they talk about unity, their feelings, what it does to them, what they want, their anger, and all the while they tell the story of the decades, the years, the minutes of the last 50 years.
Its about about what it takes to come together as one. It’s about the women’s movement as a constellation of energies, voices and views that the women’s council tries to unite and hold.
“I think we’ve come to a fork in the road”
We speed up the pace, into the 1990s, the 2000s, different streets, small towns, housing estates. We move around the country, North, South, East West. Over an over again, like a clock counting down the decades. We track what it takes to stay together, and why sometimes its okay to move apart.
The fork becomes the crossroads, so many different directions, different issues.
We have come to a dead end
We are in muddy waters
We’ve really turned it around
We’ve come to the end of the line
We need feet on the street
We’re coming back in the other direction up Parnell Square.
“Sometimes I feel like we’re just going around in fucking circles”
Our walkers stop and see a group of women laying paving stones. Some names are written on the stones. They stand in appreciation.
“They paved the way”
Then they keep walking.
How do we stay the course?
We have seen women who are different, women who disagree, chronicling the journey of the women’s movement over the past 50 years, with the National Women’s Council, the crucible where all the womens individual voices come together as one at the centre. The white banner is a symbol of the wear and tear of 50 years activism.
Where do we go from here?
We finish on a single shot of an eleven year old girl, with the banner wrapped around her, delivering a speech to camera that tells us, the viewer, what our call to action is. What she needs us to do next.
Let’s take a breath and sit with you that for a moment.
These women in these images already exist but they haven’t spoken. Haven’t used their voice. In the lead-up to the referendum, I travelled around Ireland speaking the anonymous words of women who have travelled to access safe abortion services in another country, out loud in public, on the street in towns and cities. I wasn’t ‘giving’ these women a voice. We all have a voice and no one can give it to us. I was lending them mine so that they could be anonymous because the pain they had already experienced was enough.
The work we are here to do today is to give these women words to speak. Not these clever sayings about roads and journeys. What needs to be said? This celebration of the last fifty years isn’t a dusty slideshow. This film is a real, living, breathing action to celebrate by causing chaos, because women still need to move. In protests. Between hotel rooms. Away from certain death at the hands of a partner. What brings us together, what drives us apart. Not just what we work on but who does the work and how we work together. RELATIONAL.
In the same way, as David was found in the marble, these women's words are already at the back of all our throats. They’re in sentences that have been screaming between our ears since I started talking. It's a single word you wrote in your notebook when you responded to the invitation. We are now all in a collective dream state, we are still in winter solstice. We are dreaming. Anything we say has meaning, everything we offer is gold, and in this room, there are no mistakes, only errors.
SLIDES
I’m inviting you to go here with me. To say what needs to be said. To me and to each other. My instinct is that its something to do with telling the truth, when so much of what has oppressed women has been the lie. The fundamental lie that we are lesser to men that has spread around most of the world. We are all in our different work opposed to that lie. So I think we need to focus on truth…
I learned a lot about truth telling when I wrote a blog post about my experience with Michael Colgan. I told the truth, it was checked by multiple lawyers and I learned on a deeper level what the truth is. The truth is not what you can prove, its actually what is true. Many people came to me and felt they should do what I did. I did not encourage that.
There is a difference between what we need to tell the truth and what we need to do safely. The truth doesn’t need our sacrifice, but I have witnessed in my time making art that a safe container for the most revolutionary healing truths can be created with a few simple things. They are different for everyone.
What I need to tell the truth, is that if my words are repeated, my name won’t be used.
What I need to tell the truth, is reciprocity, that people nod their heads, they get me.
What I need to tell the truth, is to take a risk with telling the truth before I even know if its safe, to test the waters. I told you some of my early childhood, and now I may feel safer having done that.
I used to fear conflict in telling the truth in art. I grew up where people were screaming and roaring all the time, everywhere, so I’m used to a good row, but in the inter tribal worlds of art making I learned that for some, conflict makes them want to die, any hint of dissidence. Diane Musho Hamilton says “There is always wisdom in conflict, everything is workable” for me if we find the way to sit with conflict and work through it, we are spinning gold..
Because the universe is channelling here through your voice which is connected to you as a person, in your body and in your professional self, before you all speak I’d like us to create a few shared agreements for how we are going to work, and we will honor them. We’re going to do it anonymously at first as a level playing field but of course if you want to claim what you said thats fine once we get to that stage. We did this in each and every workshop too.
I was very well looked after during the residency, and I just want to thank Catherine Lane, and I hope you will join me in a round of applause, for all the work she did to support my work behind the scenes, I felt so looked after and understood. My impression of working in NWC is that is a really healthy space for collaboration, where staff truly have a voice, and the vibe is very allowing and special, everyone works hard, and cares really hard and goes over and above.
