Echo’s Bones: a parallel play

Fingal County Council is delighted to announce news of a new publication to mark the culmination of Echo’s Bones is an ambitious two-year collaborative filmmaking project, led by artist Sarah Browne, with a group of autistic young people in north county Dublin, commissioned by Fingal County Council under the Infrastructure 2017 – 2021 Public Art Programme.

Echo’s Bones: a parallel play is now available for order from The Library Project, Dublin, and Kenny’s Bookshop, Galway, for a price of €12
The project borrows its title from an unpublished story by Samuel Beckett set in the north County Dublin landscape of the 1930s, populated by unusual characters and creatures, where an old asylum building meets the coastline. Situated in the same geography and borrowing from a Beckett sensibility, autism is not the topic of the film but a way of sensing the world and speculating about a shared future.

Echo’s Bones: a parallel play is a new book that presents the collaborative play devised and filmed with the young people in the same setting as the original Beckett story, nearly a century later. This book also features original artwork, a rich collection of research material from the film production, and newly-commissioned fiction and non-fiction essays by neurodivergent writers Blindboyboatclub, Hamja Ahsan and Roy Claire Potter. The book is designed by Peter Maybury.

The Echo’s Bones film was premiered in autumn 2022 and has since been screened at Aberdeen Art Gallery, Scotland, at the Middletown Centre for Autism’s bi-annual international conference in Belfast, and at the University of Galway’s Centre for Disability Law and Policy annual summer school, this year focused on the rights of children and young people with disabilities. At the latter screening events, the young people who co-created the film with Browne presented their insights into the collaborative process and their views on autistic representation in media and culture, with theatremaker and autistic advocate Eleanor Walsh. The Echo’s Bones project has also been profiled in the May / June 2023 edition of the Visual Artists Newssheet and in the spring 2023 issue of The Beckett Circle.

Fingal County Council will host a book launch on the 14th of October at Swords Castle.

For further information contact:

Caroline Cowley, Public Art Co-ordinator, E: caroline.cowley@fingal.ie