sue cleary -
photographer
writer
bi le culture researcher / enthusiast
who is she?
SC lives in the beautiful city of Copenhagen. Originally hailing from the land of Saints and Scholars, she fell in love with this Scandinavian harbour and made herself a hyggelig home here.
Chief among her interests is writing (incl. travel writing), photography, and the magnificent bicycle.
In 2013 SC wrote a pretty long paper on the adoption of bicylce culture - or rather - the difficulties in attitudes and general impediments to a seachange in a city's transportational modes.
Inspired by Copenhagen's world renowned bicycle culture, its strong and proud depth of feeling towards the cherished bicycle; this only served to highlight the poor current standing of the bicycle in Irish society. But she knew this wasn't always the case. Once upon a time, bicycles were ubiquitous on Irish roads. Where better to start the investigation, SC thought, than in Ireland's legendary trove of literature for inspiration and cultural history? What she found here were gems such as The Third Policeman - Flann O'Brien's brilliantly dark comic novel about the nature of time, death, and existence. Featuring a love affair between a policeman and his bicycle. As does happen. It was in Dervla Murphy's enthralling story of her life, her struggles, her writings and her adventures travelling the world on a bicycle at a time when a woman's place was in the home. It was in Nobel Prize laureate Seamus Heaney's bicycle imagery in some of his most captivating and well known poems. It's found in James Joyce's Ulysses, G.B.Shaw's famous bicycle collision with Bertrand Russel. Ireland's affair with the bike is not so deeply buried.
It became clear that the bicycle was as much a part of Irish cultural history as anywhere. But somehow it got lost, buried in modernity amidst the jilts and tumbles to Irish identity during the tumultuous 20th century.
Might a historical connection to the bicycle be a potential for the reimagining and rebirth of bicycle culture on roads and minds?
SC the dreamer, the optimist, the imaginer, researcher and photographer certainly hopes so.
To read the full text and conclusions, click here
“The gross and net result of it is that people who spent most of their natural lives riding iron bicycles over the rocky roadsteads of this parish get their personalities mixed up with the personalities of their bicycle as a result of the interchanging of the atoms of each of them and you would be surprised at the number of people in these parts who are nearly half people and half bicycles...when a man lets things go so far that he is more than half a bicycle, you will not see him so much because he spends a lot of his time leaning with one elbow on walls or standing propped by one foot at kerbstones.”
― Flann O'Brien, The Third Policeman
Follow me on Twitter
Follow me on Flicker