The former hatchery where art meets science

Lifestyle – A building on the shoreline of a North Connemara lake, which was designed in the 1980s as a commercial salmon enterprise and was unsuitable for that purpose, has been given new life as a centre for scientific research. It’s also home to Interface, a visionary artists’ studio and residency scheme. Its founder, artist Alannah Robins tells JUDY MURPHY how it evolved.

Driving down the long boreen that leads to the shoreline of Derryclare Lough in north Connemara, even knowing what to expect doesn’t prepare you for the futuristic building that lies beside the lake, or a series of raised green tanks, embedded in concrete.

This massive place was built in the late 1980s by the cigarette company, PJ Carroll’s as a salmon hatchery at a time when cigarettes were going out of fashion and farmed salmon seemed to offer a solution to feeding the world.

They employed leading architects Scott Tallon Walker to design a fully automated, computer-controlled hatchery that would supply juvenile fish (smolt) to offshore salmon farms.

Although the £40 million facility operated for a while, the hatchery was too high up from the lake to be commercially viable, explain Alannah Robins as we walk around the grounds, hopping up on the cement bases to peer into the tanks which once housed smolt at various stages of development. These were ferried by helicopter to fish farms elsewhere on the continent.

The tanks have lain idle for years but next Friday night, storyteller Órla McGovern will take up residence in one, making her contribution to Culture Night at this extraordinary place, which now houses both a science research facility and an artists’ studio, Interface.

The not-for-profit Interface is run by Alannah who has her own studio here as well as running an artists’ residency programme. Originally from Dublin where she studied art at the National College of Art and Design, her family holidayed in the area since she was a child and she has strong bonds with the place.  After a period in Scotland following college, she settled locally. Then, in 2011, she her husband and three children moved to Sweden before returning here in 2015.

In Sweden, Alannah had become involved with artist-led groups where artists created and showed their work, rather than waiting for agents or galleries to represent them.

“I was really happy, having found that dynamic community, and wanted to create a similar artist-led initiative here when I came home,” she explains as we sit in the enormous shared studio space that’s been made cosy by the installation of a large wood-burning stove – it also heats the radiators that provide warmth to individual studio spaces.

For more, read this week’s Connacht Tribune.

Get the Connacht Tribune Live app

The Connacht Tribune Live app is the home of everything that is happening in Galway City and county. It’s completely FREE and features all the latest news, sport and information on what’s on in your area. Click HERE to download it for iPhone and iPad from Apple’s App Store, or HERE to get the Android Version from Google Play.