Introduction
Who are we as a Gaeltacht community? That depends on who you ask.
We, the people of the Gaeltacht, will tell you that we are an energetic, global, creative community, rooted in our heritage while also having roots abroad.
Creative, global, multilingual.
Others might have a different view, their opinion being based on their own negative experience of the language. Those clueless folk of the west, they may declare, their Irish reeks of poverty and their English is tainted by the bog.
Who is correct? More often than not, it does not matter. Those who have the most credibility is what really matters.
As a community, it often happens that no matter how vocal or how determined we are, others will only see what they want to see. The facts are not acknowledged even though they are just that, facts. Facts such as the survival of our traditional singing and dancing in the Gaeltacht. The survival of our traditional sailboat and currach in the Gaeltacht. The ‘lúibín’ and the’ agallamh beirte’. The fact is that they survived because they were nourished by the Irish language spoken in the Gaeltacht.
Our language was also the source that caused the Gaeltacht community to rise up and demand an authority of its own, a radio station of its own, a television station of its own.
But what happens if all of that is ignored? What happens if the majority opt for what is convenient for them to believe in or for them to see?
That is the reason this art exhibition is so important. There is nothing as subjective as art, nor, at the same time, as exposed or as honest. Contemporary Gaeltacht art is a reflection of the Gaeltacht community in itself. Bold, cutting-edge and open to the world.
No matter what the majority think. We as a community feature in this art.
As a Gaeltacht community, we are deeply indebted to our artists. Imagine a life without their vision, without their dreams. They make the world aware of who we, as a Gaeltacht community, are and they also make us aware of who we are as a community. They nurture us as a community and, as a community, we are grateful for that.
This exhibition provides, not only an insight into forty years of Gaeltacht art, but also an insight into forty years of Údarás na Gaeltachta and forty years of the community spirit which demanded the establishment of Údarás na Gaeltachta. Much of that spirit still remains.
Rónán Mac Con Iomaire
Director of Regional, Community & Language Development
May 2021
Dath an Dóchais
Moving on from Balor’s Eye
Following a holiday in Donegal in the mid-1990s Caroline McCarthy (from Dundalk and now based in London), fresh out of art college and wondering where her future might lie, made Greetings, a video work in two parts in which she repeatedly jumps into a mountainous landscape only to fall out again so fast that a blink could mean you missed her. The questions posed by this work concerned how she could possibly fit into the tradition of Irish art, given that it was so dominated by the west of Ireland folk scenes and landscapes of Jack Yeats, Paul Henry and Charles Lamb. That tradition was so pervasive that as recently as 2005, when Sean Scully decided to re-establish his Irishness after years of living in London and New York, it was to the stone walls of the Aran Islands that he came rather than Dublin and Inchicore where he was born.
In her new book Art and the Nation State; The Reception of Modern Art in Ireland (2021), Roisin Kennedy points out that modern Ireland opens new perspectives on issues of migration and translation as well as new questions about colonisation. She argues, further, that Irish art for much of the twentieth century was burdened with the pressure to express national identity in some way, usually identified with the west of Ireland. Dath an Dóchais, an exhibition of work by artists living in Gaeltacht areas along the northern, southern and western seaboards, supported by Udarás and Éalaín na Gaeltachta, has shown that that pressure is no longer evident and that these artists either feel no such obligation or else dispatch it in a far more inclusive and nuanced way. It suggests, too, that the west might be the best possible place to resolve those issues that Roisin Kennedy refers to.
What is refreshing, instead, about Dath an Dóchais, is the degree to which contemporary artists, native to, or migrants to the west of Ireland from all over the world, see it as their base but are neither confined by it or defined by the tradition that had so depended upon it. Nowhere is the new ‘west of Ireland’ more apparent than in the work of Maria Simonds-Gooding, who put down roots in Dún Chaoin in the 1960s, and although she has traversed the known world since then from Mexico to Bhutan and Mali, what she finds in those remote places is what she already knew and constantly returned to in West Kerry. It’s what she did with the essence of that landscape that makes it so special. That deceptively simple but telling line, gouged out of plaster, or as here, cut into aluminium or steel with an electric drill or a kitchen scouring pad, is about the earliest and most basic mark-making in the landscape, those ancestral traces of historic farming that connect marginalised communities everywhere. Her work, while embedded in Dún Chaoin, has nothing to do with nationalist statements. Instead of distinguishing Ireland from other places, she picks the most ‘Irish’ of landmarks and connects them to places and communities with a universal, shared, rural experience. While managing to remain representational her work appears abstract and unequivocally modern. Other incomers, Caoimhghín Ó Fraithile and Andrew Duggan have also travelled beyond the island, Ó Fraithile drawn to Buddhist practices in Japan and Duggan to New York, yet both are pulled back to Dún Chaoin, both tapping into social rituals, a fire celebration in Japan (Ó Fraithile) or a video performance in Dingle (Duggan), combining the most modern of media and traditional rituals to comment on cultural exchange or loss and diaspora. Like Bob Quinn they look beyond the local to ancient connections across continents and cultures. Geographic identifiers are deliberately fudged in Clare Cashman’s photographic grids, which force the viewer to find roots in unstable grids of water and air. Alannah Robins, creates an environment that could be forest or urban jungle, possibly located anywhere between Sweden where she also works and her home in Connemara, made mysterious through the power of darkness and the music of Arvo Pärt, while the only thing that identifies place in Aoife Casby’s delicate, abstract installation Bóin Dé is the intermittent use of the Irish language and whispered references to roads travelled in County Mayo. Lelia Ní Chathmhaoil’s Leaba le Canopy calls attention to universal poverty, perhaps caused by the demise of traditional industries.
Some of the artists, notably Brian Bourke, Niall Naessens, Ian Joyce, Clare Langan and Una Quigley, have settled in the Gaeltacht from other parts of Ireland. Audaciously but with great sensitivity, Clare Langan turns one of the most historically-loaded landmarks in the country, Skellig Micheal, into a floating world, adrift in an ocean of climate change. Undaunted by its ancient history of religious settlement and more recently apocalyptic popular cinema, in her film, The Floating World, it becomes a symbol of mystery and survival that we neglect at our peril. In Broken Spectre, Una Quigley uses the Connemara landscape very differently to think about how seeing our own behaviours mirrored by others shapes identity.
Several of the artists come from much further afield; Sandra Landers, long settled near Dingle, uses her beautiful book-making practice, honed and developed in rural Oregon, USA, to enrich texts in the Irish language, enriching them with fragments of the Kerry landscape that nurtures them now; English artist Sarah Lewtas, imports hints of Robert Motherwell’s New York into textile installations in Donegal; Heidi Nguyen from France via Vietnam offer widely different approaches to painting.
The biggest group are, of course, artists who are native to the Gaeltacht, like Ceara Conway, Nuala Ni Fhlathúin, Donnacha Quilty, Padraic Reaney, Bernadette Cotter, Cathal McGinley, the Tory islanders, - Patsy Dan and Ruairi Rogers to mention just some of them. While neglecting nothing of the pride of place that informed the work of Patsy Dan Rogers and the Tory Island School, a new generation of artists is celebrating the folktales, lifestyle and achievements of their own place but drawing on highly informed, contemporary practices to do so. Ceara Conway combines all that is best in the music and folk traditions of Connemara. Through her performance and video work, she adopts the role of the healing woman in the community, using all her ancestral understanding of the power of nature and song to soothe and relieve pain, anxiety, loneliness. Something of that pain is hinted at in Séan Cathal Ó Coileáin’s double-sided exploration of mother and baby homes, through paintings on acetate. Cathal McGinley remarks that he came to art late in life but there is no hesitancy in his approach to his work. Stating proudly that his father and grandfather were artists too (although they worked as fishermen and never made what is described to be art), McGinley creates paintings, assemblages and installations that are as much of the island of Inisboffin as they are about it. Bernadette Cotter uses all the materials within her reach, in this instance organza and her own hair, to conjure iconic female figures that can be read ambiguously as saintly or witchlike. Nuala Ní Fhlathúin, connects to the rhythms and speech patterns as well as the content of local story-telling traditions in her modernist installation, Idir an Dhá Linn, while Sean O’Flaithearta’s, one-off, floor installation, Geansai Iascaire, painstakingly forms ancestral patterns in rosary beads and periwinkles to remind us that narratives around hunger did not disappear with the Great Famine, evoking the religious asceticism of a Buddhist mandala. The ambiguous, anthropomorphic nature of Kevin Magee’s Untitled, 2008 defies definitions of painting, sculpture, even craft, while managing to also evoke the worlds of nature and culture.
The world of nature is also revealed in craftwork of a very high order in the delicate hands of Helen Ni Chuill. Using bone, feather and porcelain she competes with the fragility and purity of the natural world in the objects she makes, while cast glass and its capacity to attract and enhance natural light and reflection forms the basis of Róisín Ní Chionnfhaolaidh’s Cosánín na Farraige.
What is abundantly clear from all of this is that there is no one way to be an Irish artist, certainly not a West-of-Ireland artist. The range of practices and attitudes to art, informed by the most up-to-date global approaches, is evident at every turn, and the ‘let’s paint the West in order to sell ourselves to tourists’ or to flaunt a sense of pure Irishness that belongs only within the Gaeltacht is nowhere to be found. So what is it about the west that lures these artists? Couldn’t Brian Bourke paint his symbols of death and resurrection, and Niall Naessens and Ian Joyce pursue their careers more easily in closer proximity to the buzz of museums and city galleries, where they wouldn’t have to beg critics and curators from Dublin to come and see their work? They are here for the best reason of all, because they want to be, because the west nourishes them in all the nuanced ways that are expressed through their art, and Úadarás and Éalaín na Gaeltachta have been helping that to happen for four decades now.
Declan McGonagle, as founding director of IMMA in 1991, at that optimistic moment when the Celtic Tiger was just beginning to sharpen its teeth, spoke of the clash between the centre and the periphery in which power, innovation and creativity were always seen to run in one direction, from the centre out. McGonagle saw Ireland’s potential as an international hub, on the edge of Europe, but with a burgeoning culture attuned to new technologies and welcoming new communities. Ireland’s peripheral location, he believed, could be the source from which to re-fresh and invigorate the jaded centre. Sadly, greedy developers and investment bankers dented that vision, but artists have finer instincts. Perhaps the Gaeltacht, as the artists here seem to suggest, offers a better, more sustainable model for renewal, one not in denial of its past, but embracing it along with its new communities, new technologies, new arts practices, above all new tolerances. For them, as for Peadar O’Donnell in the 1930s, to live on the islands (or the periphery) is to be outward-looking, open the world. In his novel, The Big Windows, Brigid, married away from her island home, pines for the open-mindedness she knew there. In rejecting the narrow superstitions of the people she has come to live amongst, she argues; “An island is not like a glen. There is more sky over an island. The sea itself is like a mirror of the sky…. The island knows of Balor’s eye, but it is a story, and that is all the heed they put to it” 1. The art in Dath an Dóchais, too, puts past superstition aside and asserts its contemporaneity by stressing commonality and creativity, while embracing difference, – a perfect model for a globalised future.
1 Peadar O’Donnell, The Big Wiindows, 1983, pp 30–32
Catherine Marshall
April 2021
Special Thanks
Dath an Dóchais will be exhibited in An Gailearaí, Donegal this November 2021.
This project has been funded by Údarás na Gaeltachta and Ealaín na Gaeltachta.
The An Gailearaí team would like to thank all the artists who have participated in this project. We would also like to thank Catherine Marshall, Rónán Mac Con Iomaire, Micheál, Danielle, Rachel, Muireann, Brendan, Caitlín, Anna, Cathal, Jeremy, Ali, Lorg Media, Aoife, Marjorie, Cathal.
