‘This is my 8th year of teaching and I’ve lost 5 kids in that time’: street artist Joe Caslin talks to JOE

This video might not change your life, but it will get you thinking.

"We wanted to talk about suicide, we wanted to talk about emigration, we wanted to talk about disenfranchisement or apathy. And we did that by putting up a drawing." Joe Caslin is a 30-year-old teacher working in Tullamore who is also responsible for some of the most talked-about and thought-provoking street art seen throughout the cities of Ireland. "The main reason I came at this is that this is my eighth year of teaching and I've lost five kids in that time," he tells JOE. "That was my biggest impetus for getting into the work. When you see talent and you see amazing kids coming into this classroom and all of a sudden they're gone. If my drawing can have an influence and stop that from happening anymore, then that's everything." 'Our Nation's Sons' is a video that looks back on his 2014, which saw installations in both urban and rural settings throughout the country in the name of improving mental health among young men. Our Nation's Sons from Joe Caslin on Vimeo. "We had two installations in Galway, one of them down by the Spanish Arch, in Limerick we had three, the biggest one that we had was on a seven-storey building - on a disused grain site - down on the Dock Road," he tells JOE in between classes on Friday morning. "In Cork we had a dual portrait on the front of City Hall, and in Dublin we had Powerscourt. We had one on Trinity College, we had a piece in Rathmines and the first one we put up was on Harry Crosbie's house across from the Bord Gáis Energy Theatre. "Then, finally, we had a piece over in Achill Henge. The same lad that drove the cement lorry into Leinster House built this recreation of Stone Henge out of concrete out on Achill Island. And it's turned into a massive tourist attraction. I saw it as a canvas to put the work so we put 30 drawings on that and made a separate film for that also."

 Joe Caslin (right)

Joe told us about the importance of letting his images speak for themselves, of never using words in his drawings and allowing the artwork to speak for itself. "It's the power of a conversation. If you're walking down the street and you see this seven-storey drawing it takes you out of your daily drudge of things and gets you talking about things," he says. "If I have words on my pieces, it turns into a piece of advertising, and I put up a drawing and no matter what wording I use I'm shouting at people and telling them what to think. But if you put up an image and let people bring their association to it, and they might wonder about it and look it up online, then they're able to bring that knowledge on. "They become the carriers of that knowledge and the story becomes more genuine, rather than being shouted at, and that's important." Joe points to Niall Breslin as someone whose work, around the area of mental health, he greatly admires. "When I started this project five years ago mental health wasn't being spoken about, and thankfully in the last six months or 12 months it's going amazingly well. Fair play to Bressie, who's opened up the doors people have been knocking on for a long time."