Dursey Island Discs a highlight of this year's Beara Arts Festival

FORGET about BBC's Desert Island Discs, it's all about Dursey Island Discs as part of this year's Beara Arts Festival. 

Running from August 4th to 12th the week long festival features a range of original events including audio project Dursey Island Discs, which will feature interviews with eight people from or associated with Dursey, the only island in Ireland connected to the mainland by cable car. 

It will be broadcast at Lehanmore Community Centre at 8pm on Tuesday, August 8th, and on bearaartsfestival.com, for the duration of the festival.

The festival itself opens with the launch of the 25th anniversary Artists in Beara exhibition at Beara Community School at 6pm on August 4th. 

The exhibition features the work of more than 20 artists resident on the Beara peninsula, including Tim Goulding, Charles Tyrrell, Cormac Boydell, Rachel Parry and Pat Fitzgerald.

Over the following week, the festival features a host of musical, literary and visual arts events, as well as readings and workshops and two especially  commissioned two projects, in music and the visual arts. 

David Harmax's ‘On the Edge of Darkness', a 30-minute composition for piano, strings and electronics, will have its world premiere at The High Tide Club at the Sarah Walker Gallery in Castletownbere at 6pm, Saturday August 5th. 

The piece is inspired by the various shipwrecks scattered on the seabed around the coast of the Beara peninsula.

Meanwhile, local artist Bénédicte Coleman, a graduate of Crawford College of Art and Design, will work throughout the festival on her ‘Beaches Storage Project'. Coleman will direct parties of volunteers in collecting man-made debris along the shore, which will then be sorted into specially constructed metal units at Pallas Strand, Eyeries; Ballydonegan Beach, Allihies; Cahermore Beach; the grounds of the Beara Coast Hotel, Castletownbere; and Rerrin Pier, Bere Island.

This year, Beara Arts Festival has selected Sara Baume as its first ever writer-in-residence. 

She will stay at Dinny's Place artists' retreat in North Allihies for the duration of the festival.