Cork In 50 Artworks, No 26: Anthony Ruby’s Pana Shuffle mural, at Mutton Lane
Anthony Ruby beside a section of his mural, The Pana Shuffle, on Mutton Lane in Cork in December 2004. Picture: Denis Scannell
Anthony Ruby’s Pana Shuffle mural in Mutton Lane dates to Cork’s tenure as European City of Culture in 2005, and is arguably the first example of street art supported by Cork City Council.
Ruby, a Fine Art graduate of Crawford College of Art & Design, proposed the 90' x 10’ artwork to City Council the previous year, when there were plans to spruce up the various lanes off Patrick St as part of the Catalan architect Beth Gali’s €13 million redesign of the city centre.
“I met with City Council representatives a few times to show them my drawings,” says Ruby. “They liked what I’d done, and were very happy for the project to go ahead.”
With the Council’s backing, Ruby began work on the mural in June 2004. “My friend Joe O’Leary helped with the preparations,” he says. “We power-hosed the wall, and painted it white. And after that, I worked away at it solidly for six or seven months.”
Ruby was fortunate in that Benny McCabe, who owns the Mutton Lane Inn, gave him a room above the bar to store his materials in. “There was a window, and a pulley system I used to lift my masonry paints and brushes up and down on every day. There was a fair bit of doing and froing, but at least I had everything in one place.”
Many of the characters Ruby depicted were based on those he’d seen around Patrick’s St or in the English Market. “The Market was always a great melting pot, so I painted different people who worked there. One day, one of the butchers came out and gave me a pig’s head, so I used that as well, as a primary source.”
He points to different characters. “There’s the Spoons Man, who used to beat the spoons with a radio, and Mick O’Regan, who used to sell the Echo on Patrick’s Street. And there’s Benny McCabe, dealing out cards and watching over everything happening in the lane.”
He included members of his own family as well. “My father is in there, playing the tin whistle, with my niece Sive on his shoulders. And there’s my grandmother Margaret.”
The only damage the mural has ever sustained was the theft of an old key he embedded in the small mosaic at the entrance to the lane. “I got that from Willie Crowley of Callaghan’s Bar on George’s Quay. It was gone the next day, and I’d still really like to get it back!”
The mural has a legend, dedicating it to “everyone except George Bush.”
“I guess that was a sign of the times as well,” says Ruby. “Bush was president of America when they invaded Afghanistan, so it set the project in the context of those times.”
Ruby remembers the great social element to working on the mural. “I had people coming down the lane every day, there was great interest in what I was doing. The one idea I wanted to emanate from the project was that essentially people would see there was a mentality of openness in Cork, an acceptance of diversity. I thought that diversity was something that should be embraced, it was such a positive thing.”
One day, Beth Gali was brought along to meet him. “They were still paving Patrick St at the time, but her streetlights were already up, and I’d put them in the mural. It must have been incredible for her to see all this activity come to fruition.”
Ruby completed the project early in 2005, when all eyes were on Cork as City of Culture. “The exposure was amazing. There was lots of interest from newspapers, and my mural inspired a film by Peter Gleeson that was shown at the 2006 Cork Film Festival.”
Ruby began work on another project straight away, a cycle of paintings he called Fall of the Rebel Angels. “I showed them at the Launderette Gallery on McCurtain St, I think that was in October 2005. Those few years were very, very busy. In terms of the creative arts, there was obviously a lot happening, and there was funding from Europe. It just goes to show, if funding is put into things, it has a knock-on effect. There’s a kind of chain reaction. People bounce off each other. That definitely fed into the whole exhibition at the Launderette. So many people came along to that, and it was a great event for me.”
Ruby stayed on in Cork, painting and teaching part-time for the VEC, until 2008. When the recession hit, he moved to London, completing an MA in Painting at Wimbledon College of Art and working at various jobs until he decided to return to Cork in 2013. He now teaches Art at the North Mon secondary school, but continues to paint and play the uilleann pipes, his other great passion. He completed another mural, The Third Wave, in Ballydehob this year, and he plans to release his first album, provisionally titled Blackwater Rising, in the spring of 2022.
He is, he says, delighted with how well his Pana Shuffle mural is holding up, considering how much human traffic passes it each day, and looks forward to celebrating its twentieth anniversary a few years hence.
“I’m planning on doing some touch-ups to the mural itself, and maybe producing some prints to commemorate it. And I hope we can have an evening in the Mutton Lane Inn to mark the occasion.”
- Further information: anthonyrubyartist.com
