Theatre & Events

The Foundling Crib

Annemarie Ní Churreáin

The Foundling Crib was commissioned by Solstice Arts Centre in the Spring of 2020. It draws inspiration from the Dublin 08 landscape in which poet Annemarie Ní Churreáin found herself during the weeks of the Irish Covid-19 Lockdown. It references various histories attached to the current site of St James’s Hospital, specifically that of The City Workhouse established in 1703, which later evolved into the Foundling Hospital and Workhouse of the City of Dublin in 1730, and eventually became the Foundling Hospital in 1772. In 1730 a foundling crib inside a revolving wheel was installed on the site and it is estimated that by 1829, when the Foundling Hospital closed to new admissions, as many as 200,000 infants had passed through.

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Annemarie Ní Churreáin is a poet, writer and educator from Donegal, Ireland. Her debut collection Bloodroot (Doire Press, 2017) was shortlisted for the Shine Strong Award for best first collection in Ireland and for the 2018 Julie Suk Award in the U.S.A. She is the recipient of literary fellowships from Jack Kerouac House Orlando, Akademie Schloss Solitude and Hawthornden Castle Scotland. In 2016 Ní Churreáin was the recipient of a Next Generation Artists Award from the Arts Council of Ireland. She is the 2019 Commissioned Writer at Templebar Gallery + Studios and a 2019 co-recipient of the Markievcz Award Ireland. Ní Churreáin is the 2019-2020 Writer in Residence at National University of Ireland, Maynooth.

Solstice commissioned Annemarie to reflect on our national state and new internal lives through COVID 19.

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