Ingrid Lyons

The Irish author Ingrid Lyons is developing a form of writing directly engaged with art. During her residency, she wrote a series of texts about art and culture intended for various contexts: book, website, exhibition. Sensitive to creating spaces of dialogue with artists, she adapts her practice to the realities and relationships that she fosters with them, and she contributes to certain art projects, for example, by integrating texts with music and dance pieces. Working from narratives in the Irish imagination and popular culture, Ingrid updates our interpretations of them. Her writing flows from research anchored in her experience of the territory. A process of collecting objects and forgotten melodies leads her to create situated stories. As she is also a musician, she is particularly interested in pieces from southwest Ireland in the Donegal style, which she plays on the violin. This musical style – related to jigs and reels, inscribed in the territory and the cultural practices linked to it – carries memories that feed into her writings, reviving neglected stories that she redeploys in critical and contemporary perspectives. Her approach to writing is defined through a process that brings fiction and the art essay together. Throughout her residency, she therefore pursued explorations that could be manifested in both fictional works and critical essays.