The Seosamh Mac Coılle Collection
Mural-Image Collections
What
Name
Why
Some Minor Points Of Formatting And Usage
Please Consider Donating
Contact

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The Seosamh Mac Coılle Collection

Extramural Activity began life as a place to present images of wall-paintings taken by Seosamh Mac Coılle (X).

Seosamh Mac Coılle began photographing murals in earnest in 2011.

The primary camera used was (and is) a Canon EOS 400D, typically with an 18-55mm lens, though sometimes with a 55-250mm. Also used is a Canon EOS 5D Mark II with a 24-70mm Sigma lens. And from 2021 onwards, an iPhone X.

For editing, Photoshop and DxO Viewpoint are primarily used. Watermarking is a regrettable necessity of publishing photographs in the digital age; watermarks are applied manually – the goal is that the watermark should be invisible at a glance but obvious upon inspection.

Other photographers contributing to the X collection:

• Andy McDonagh/Eclipso Pictures (ig | Fb) is a professional photographer based in London-/Derry.
• Sabine Troendle (web) is a photojournalist hailing from Zurich, Switzerland. She has published Texas Reliable News (based on photo-essays based on stays in and around Austin, Texas 2006-2012) and Belfast Reliable News (based on time in Belfast 2018-2022).

Seosamh’s street photography (as distinct from his images of wall-paintings) can be seen at

• web: belfastviewfinder.wordpress.com
• Mastodon: @mastodon.ie/@belfastviewfinder
• Bluesky: @belfastviewfinder.bsky.social
• instagram: instagram.com/belfastviewfinder

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Mural-Image Collections

Later, the collections of Peter Moloney (M) and Paddy Duffy (T) became available, and these are being curated by Extramural Activity and hosted at their own sites.

If you just want a feed of the latest art, subscribe to or follow each of the three sites using one of the methods in the side-bar at each site; in general a new entry describing a contemporary artwork is added every day to either the Seosamh Mac Coılle or Paddy Duffy collections, and a new entry describing a historical artwork to the Peter Moloney – Murals collection.

The maps and Visual Histories draw on these and all of the other collections of images of murals.

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What

In addition to curating the collections of Seosamh, Peter, and Paddy, Extramural Activity produces a database/map of the murals and street art in Northern Ireland/north-east Ireland, along with a series of “Visual History” pages describing the history of muraling.

(1) The Maps

The database is accessed via the maps. There is one map showing all the wall-paintings ever, and another showing only those that are currently visible. (There is also a spreadsheet of the current murals – there are more now than ever before.)

The pins on the maps give basic information and (where possible) a small image for each mural that has been and/or is currently at that location.

The pins also provide links to informational entries in the collections of Peter Moloney (M), Seosamh Mac Coılle (X), and Paddy Duffy (T).

(2) The Visual Histories

The collections and the map provide information and images that are of use to scholars world-wide who write on the subject of murals – their imagery, their history, their production, their materiality, and so on. Why are there murals? Why paint in public? Who paints in public? Why aren’t murals signed and dated? How can Cú Chulaınn be both a republican and a loyalist icon? Why haven’t murals gone away, now that there is peace? Why does stenciling wax and wane in popularity? Why are a lot of pieces now done on boards and nailed to the wall? Where did the doves go in murals? When did Bobby Sands become an icon? Why are some paramilitaries bare-faced but others hooded? And so on.

You can read Extramural Activity’s own answers to these questions on this site in What Is A Mural?, the Guide To Categories, and especially the Visual History pages.

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The Name

As a name, “extramural activity” conveys the idea that murals are to some extent an “outsider” activity: there’s the official line, the mainstream news, the point of view that comes from the top down, and there are the murals and graffiti on the streets, which have different sources and different perspectives. The name suggests that other things are being said, out there on the streets, that are important to the people who produced them and the communities they live in. The funding and production of murals by state agencies (from 2006 onwards) shows that earlier murals were successful in broadening the conversation which the state now wishes to control or at least participate in.

The name also avoids having to refer to a town — ‘Belfast’, say — which might suggest that there aren’t murals in other places and allows us to include images from elsewhere, even though we are based in Belfast and the tag-line refers to Belfast. And if you wanted a name that grouped all of those places together, what would that be? Northern Ireland? The North-East Of Ireland? The Six Counties? Ulster Murals? Every such title sends the “right” message to some people and the “wrong” message to others.

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Why

The confusion over a name leads us to a point that might seem obviously true but is a controversial and fruitful line of thought: in the map and the Visual Histories all different types of public painting – republican, loyalist, state-sponsored, personal street art – are presented together. We presuppose that all of the wall paintings can be integrated into a single history and a single analysis.

But this presupposition might not be well-founded, as though muraling has been invented and/or developed independently by different groups who happen to live in the same place. As the Visual History pages make clear, the respective stories of republican and loyalist murals are distinct in a variety of important ways but they can nonetheless be combined into a single narrative of public expressions on the constitutional question of Northern Ireland.

If we separated the political murals into distinct sites, one dedicated to republican murals and another to loyalist murals, we would quintuple our (aggregate) viewership over night by satisfying the prejudices of each sect’s extremists. If there were a third site dedicated to street art, it would increase by an even greater fold. People love street art, perhaps more so around here because it’s not from one side or the other. But it’s by this very feature that street art can perhaps be included in the story of the constitutional question, as a rejection of the constitutional discussion (and a vote in favour of the status quo, at least in the short term). In theory, street art gives people another vision of the role that public art can play, though in practice it’s not clear that street art’s interaction with (political) murals is strong enough to make it part of the central narrative – see Visual Histories 10 and 11.

For the time being, however, all types of public visual art are presented together.

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Some Minor Points Of Formatting And Usage

The city on the Foyle is called “Derry” when a CNR area is under discussion and called “Londonderry” when a PUL area is under discussion; for unaffiliated areas or non-specific cases, “London-/Derry” is used.

In titles, the first letter of each word is capitalised, regardless of significance. Eclipsis/urú in Irish is an exception (e.g. “Cumann Na mBan”).

In Irish orthography, the letter “ı” lacks a tittle (dot). Traditional Irish orthography (which sometimes appears on memorial plaques and stones) in addition uses a dot/ponc séımhıthe over consonants to indicate lenition/séımhıú (e.g. “ponc séımhıthe” might itself be written “ponc séıṁıṫe”). Both dotless-ı and dotted consonants are included in Unicode and computer keyboarding software makes both possible as emendations to roman typefaces. Though dotless-ı is rarely observed due to the prevalence of roman typefaces (which use “i”), it is deployed in the X, M, and T collections and the Visual Histories, and dotted consonants – though not Gaelic typefaces – are used in transcribing a plaque/stone/etc that uses them (e.g. | e.g.).

Dates are given in the ISO format yyyy-mm-dd, rather than dd-mm-yyyy (as in Ireland and the UK) or mm-dd-yyyy (as in the United States).

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Please Consider Donating

There are hundreds of thousands of hours in the three collections, the maps, and the Visual Histories; explicit expenses include computers, software, site registration, ad-free presentation, and cloud storage. Please consider donating. (The same page also provides information about permissions of use.)

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Contact

E-mail is the best way to contact Seosamh, Peter, or Paddy. Please write to extramuralactivity at gmail dot com .

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