Arts Week with Judy Murphy

“I’ll keep working for as long as I can stand on my two feet,” says sculptor John Behan who is in his mid-80s and as productive as ever.  John who was born in Dublin’s Sheriff Street in 1938 and has lived in Galway for more than 40 years, is the subject of Odyssey, a new documentary being premiered next Thursday, July 13, at the Galway Film Fleadh.

Shot between 2020 and 2023, with Covid interruptions, Odyssey is the work of director Donald Taylor Black. It explores John’s long and distinguished career, and travels with him to Athens where, in pre-Covid times, he volunteered at Camp Eleonas, a state-run centre for migrants, and gave art workshops to adults.

John is a proud Dubliner, whose father came from a farming family in Laois and whose mother was from the Donegal Gaeltacht, both places he has happy memories of.

They had a shop in Sheriff Street in John’s younger years, before the family moved to Marino when he was about seven. It was on Sheriff Street that he developed the fascination with bulls that has stayed with him through his life – these animals are synonymous with his art.

Sheriff Street was beside the North Wall Quay, an industrial area of Dublin and John remembers the sounds, sights and smells of mills and coal yards, and recalls cattle being brought to market. Bulls too, the older ones being herded towards the ferry to Fishguard and a Welsh slaughterhouse

The Behans’ shop did well during World War II, “as businesses often do, during war”, John remarks. That was mostly because John’s father could source tea, which had been rationed and was like gold dust. He drank in a pub at the North Wall frequented by sailors and they supplied him.

For more, read this week’s Connacht Tribune.

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