Public Art & Art Collections
New sound artworks at Ballyogan Library, celebrating community, memory and place
Dún Laoghaire-Rathdown County Council (dlr) is delighted to announce the launch of two new sound artworks at Ballyogan Library, created in collaboration with local communities. The commissions mark the first projects of dlr’s Public Art Programme, The Story We Tell Tomorrow.
Image credit: Artist Patrick Mulvihill with Ballyogan residents, photo by Peter Varga, Coalesce.
Located near the foothills of the Dublin Mountains, Ballyogan is one of the fastest-growing areas in the county. These artworks capture the layered history, evolving identity and everyday rhythms of Ballyogan through immersive listening experiences.
Visitors are invited to encounter and listen to both artworks at Ballyogan Library, where they will be exhibited until the end of August 2026. The artworks will be added to the Library’s audio catalogue for long-term access.
Fragments: Memories of Place, a site-specific sound sculpture by Living Rhythms, brings together spoken memories from across three generations of Ballyogan residents. The work weaves stories from those who remember the area as countryside in the 1940s, those who settled in the newly built estates of the 1980s and 1990s and helped establish vital community services, and those who have grown up in the locality more recently. Together, these voices reflect on remembering, making, and inheriting a place that has undergone profound transformation.
Image credit: Artist Heather Griffin, photo by Peter Varga, Coalesce.
The second artwork, Factory Reset, is a collaborative project led by artists Karl Burke and David Beattie with Leaving Cert Applied students from Stepaside Educate Together Secondary School. Through a series of creative workshops exploring sound and psychoacoustics, students investigated how sound shapes our perception of place. The resulting work is a limited-edition sound composition, produced on audio tape, which will be available to borrow and experience at Ballyogan Library. You can also listen to the five tracks on Soundcloud.
Image credit: Artists Karl Burke and David Beattie with Leaving Cert Applied students from Stepaside Educate Together Secondary School, photo by Peter Varga, Coalesce.
The Story We Tell Tomorrow, dlr’s Public Art Programme, is funded through the Per Cent for Art Scheme and invites all people to engage with art as part of their daily lives.
Learn more about the artists
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