Tag: Dublin Castle

Artist Focus: Eimear Molony

Artist Eimear Molony found inspiration in three poems from Jane Clarke’s collection. Being of a similar age as the poet, Eimear found she had experienced many of the life events that are documented so poignantly in the poems. At first this made interacting with the poetry quite difficult and it required longer than usual for Eimear to channel her emotions into ideas and designs for the artworks. She used a commonplace journal and sketchbooks to build and develop a narrative. By joining her own experiences to those of the poet, Eimear created the foundation with which to build on.

Since 2020, Eimear has included a character in all her artwork which represents us all in our interaction with our environments – in the three pieces for the ROOTS exhibition the characters are present with open hands expressing an openness to all experiences, both good and bad. The squares are pixels which represent memories or experiences in our past, both positive and negative, which we carry with us.

‘Perspective’, based on the poem ‘Against the Flow‘, is a reflection on the different elements retained from the past which we carry with us as we set out to forge our own paths in life. It takes time and distance to find the language to articulate these past experiences and recognise the impact they have on us.

Eimear uses a sewing machine to draw the design on the ground fabric – a technique known as free machine embroidery – where the ‘feed dogs’ on the sewing machine are disengaged and the user has control of the direction the cloth is fed to the needle.

‘The Gift’ was inspired by the poem ‘all I will need‘ where the poet describes her mother’s fading days and her wish to gift some of her belongings to her daughter. The character in Eimear’s artwork is excavating memories, represented by the pixels, some of which are accepted and are seen as a gift. The magenta asemic writing signifies the memories that are best forgotten.

The tools stitched into the piece are ones that are used by both the artist and the poet, and the tuning fork represents resonating memories. The colour palette of the ground and the threads used reflect the colours found in the landscape of the places where both Eimear and the poet have lived in the past.

Eimear’s third artwork, ‘Resonance’ was inspired by the poem ‘The Finest Specimen‘. The background is composed of numerous layers of different materials and coloured threads representing the complexity and richness of our past. In this instance the pixels are those stories passed down to us by our ancestors, which are precious and therefore, outlined in gold.

...he showed me a Bible with miniature print
on gossamer paper which he touched as if it were
pure gold.  This was your great-grandmother's ...

Each individual has their own unique history and memories, represented in ‘Resonance’ by different coloured pixels, which contribute to the rich tapestry of our lives and our interactions with each other. Eimear asks us to think about a piece of family history or folklore that resonates or has had an impact on our lives?

Thank you Eimear for sharing the background to her pieces. Thank you to Jane Clarke for her collaboration and to her publisher, Bloodaxe Books, for permission to use her poems. Thanks also to the OPW for the opportunity to exhibit and Kildare County Council for funding through the Arts Act Grant.

To see these works up close and personal, visit the exhibition ROOTS, a dialogue in textile and poetry, in the Coach House Gallery, Dublin Castle. Open 7 days a week, 10 am – 5 pm, closed for lunch 1.15 – 1.45 pm. The Coach House will close from lunchtime Christmas Eve and reopen on 28th December.

Some of Jane’s books are now available in the gift shop in Chester Beatty Library next to the Coach House

Artist Focus: Caroline Fitzgerald

It is estimated that Ireland has over 400,000 km of dry stone walls, many standing today were built during the famine. The earliest examples are the Ceide Fields in Co. Mayo which were built approximately 5,800 years ago. Built to clear fertile fields of stone, the walls form barriers but also protections, safe enclosures offering security. Dry stone walls feature twice in element15’s exhibition, ROOTS, inspired by two separate poems by Jane Clarke. Artist, Caroline Fitzgerald has a long standing love of these iconic symbols of rural Ireland and is constantly photographing them, the different sized stone, the shapes and patterns they make, the spaces in between. Hence it is not a surprise that she was drawn to respond to ‘Spalls‘, a poem which weaves many threads of family love into the building of a garden and a dry stone wall.

The poem speaks to the practical love that the poet’s parents demonstrated by driving from Roscommon to help her form a garden in her new home in Wicklow, even though they would have preferred that her relationship was with a man, and not a woman. Armed with tools, seedlings and buckets of compost they would set to work, sharing their knowledge and experience.

…My father took off on his own
to spud ragwort or clip a hedge.
One day he spent hours gathering
stones of different shapes and sizes.
By evening he’d built us a wall
under the holly, held together
by gravity and friction,
hearted with handfuls of spalls.

Spalls, Jane Clarke

Spalls is not a word we hear very often. The definition is ‘a fragment broken off the edge or face of stone, and having at least one thin edge’. These fragments, not much use on first appearance, form an integral part of the wall building process. Caroline sees the construction of the wall in the poem as a metaphor for the work we must put into relationships to make them strong and sustainable. Family relationships are built on a solid foundation of love, acceptance, trust and respect. The wall is ‘hearted’ with the small acts of love that tie the family together.

That unconditional love reminds Caroline of her own parents when they would come to visit her new family home. Her father would set about fixing or mending something – he was a doer, he loved nothing more than to be given a challenge, an amateur carpenter, plumber or painter. He showed his love in practical ways. The poem is all the more poignant for Caroline since her father was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease four years ago and she is loosing him bit by bit. It is a disease that steals a person’s essential sense of self, robbing them and their loved ones of their connections to one another. The poem “Spalls” connected Caroline to her father and his love for her and her family.

Caroline’s artwork, titled ‘Families’, consists of two pieces. A wall mounted, framed image of a stone wall digitally printed on georgette fabric and a floating panel of georgette, printed with an enlarged section of the same wall. The panel has been stitched with silk and cotton thread, highlighting the spaces between the stones, the spaces ‘hearted with handfuls of spalls‘.

Jane Clarke’s poems have the ability to reach into our hearts, to jolt the connections and memories back to life as they reference the everyday tasks of living, loving and dying.

Thanks to Caroline for sharing her very personal thoughts on ‘Families’. Thank you to Jane Clarke for her collaboration and to her publisher, Bloodaxe Books, for permission to use her poems. Thanks also to the OPW for the opportunity to exhibit and Kildare County Council for funding through the Arts Act Grant.

Some of Jane’s books are now available in the gift shop in Chester Beatty Library next to the Coach House

Artist Focus: Elaine Peden

One of Elaine’s artworks, ‘willowherb’ is displayed on the title wall as you enter the exhibition, ROOTS, a dialogue in textile and poetry. It is subtle yet impactful in its dyptich form, elongated shape and colour tones. It is the perfect piece to halt the viewer in their tracks, realise on closer inspection that it is a textile artwork, and then move to read about the exhibition which is writ large on either side in Irish and in English.

‘willowherb’ is inspired by Jane Clarke’s poem of the same name. It explores the harsh reality of exiting a hospital leaving a loved one behind and facing the grey, bleak hospital car park. This is a space that Elaine has inhabited many times in the past as a nurse and more recently when her father passed away.

while you were leaving
the wind picked up

and tossed lithe stems
purple-pink flower heads

by the breeze block wall
of the hospital car park ...

willowherb, Jane Clarke

Elaine uses deadstock fabrics, in this instance an old cotton and linen tablecloth which was dyed with Procion dye and Brusho powder mixed with inks, then embroidered flowers were added. It was originally one large piece but Elaine wished to reference the two sides of the story; the person exiting the hospital and the one left behind, so she was brave enough to cut it up and form it into two pieces.

Elaine says she dreams in colour and cobalt blue is her favourite. As she read Jane’s poem ‘Stepping In’ the colour came to the forefront ‘alert, electric, alive‘ to become the base colour of her piece of the same name. As a child Elaine hated the cold water but in the past few years she has returned to the water. This poem perfectly captures the experience of river swimming, awkwardly undressing and clambering down a bank to the ‘bone-cold awakening of skin‘. Elaine believes that on land we thread in shallow waters, exposing little of ourselves to the harsh world but in cold water we can plunge deeper to connect body and inner self.

This hanging was made with wet felt technique using an array of materials: merino wool, Icelandic fibre, mulberry silk, bamboo fibre, dyed wool neps, sari silk and yarn threads. Its colours are indeed electric, alert and alive.

Placed on a low pedestal beneath, is a companion piece ‘Stepping In II‘, inspired by the line ‘lemon-mossed pebbles‘ in the same poem. Elaine believes stones have a grounding effect, their weight in her hand, no hard edges, their stillness bearing witness to their surroundings.

Elaine’s third contribution to the exhibition also references the water. Jane Clarke’s poem ‘Against the Flow’ speaks of the salmon’s journey full of perils and obstacles as it moves upstream to spawn ‘…through riffles and deeps, millraces that churn in spate…’. While creating her piece of the same name, Elaine reflects on her own past life journeys when she began ‘to swim against the current‘, forge her own path, to break free.

‘One day you knew you must turn,

begin to swim against the current,

leave the estuary waters, brackish

with sediment …’

‘Against the flow‘, Jane Clarke

This wall hanging was made using the wet felting technique, Herdwick wool fibre, dyed merino wool, Tussah silk and mulberry silk. A rivulet of text from the poem runs through it.

Thank you to Elaine for sharing her thoughts, to Jane Clarke for her collaboration and to her publisher, Bloodaxe Books, for permission to use her poems. Thanks also to the OPW for the opportunity to exhibit and Kildare County Council for funding through the Arts Act Grant.

To see these works up close and personal, visit the exhibition ROOTS, a dialogue in textile and poetry, in the Coach House Gallery, Dublin Castle. Open 7 days a week, 10 am – 5 pm, closed for lunch 1.15 – 1.45 pm. Some of Jane’s books are now available in the gift shop in Chester Beatty Library next to the Coach House.

ROOTS, a dialogue in textile and poetry

The countdown is on. Sixteen months of work is coming to fruition. From 23rd September 2024 we will start to hang an exhibition of artworks created in response to the poetry of Irish poet, Jane Clarke, in The Coach House, Dublin Castle. The exhibition will be open to the public from 26th September and our official launch will be in early October.

This is such an exciting time for us as a collective. We have lived with the emotions and memories evoked by Jane’s poems for many months and we have taken them to our hearts. We each chose a poem, or a number of poems to respond to, creating unique artworks using different techniques, which reflect her words and the personal memories those words brought to the surface in each artist. Confronting the personal memories that were dredged up for each artist was not always an easy process, but we feel privileged to be able to have the ability to express the personal in artworks that may speak to us all.

Thank you to the OPW for granting us an exhibition space as wonderful as The Coach House, Dublin Castle and the staff at Dublin Castle for their help and cooperation. We especially thank, Jane Clarke for trusting us to give visual expression to her quiet, powerful words.

Thanks also to Kildare County Council for grant funding under the Arts Act and to Niamh in Inniscara Bespoke Framing, Co. Kildare who has worked with us in devising a cohesive framing plan for our diverse artworks.

More images and information will follow as we put the products of our emotions and Jane Clarke’s words on the white walls of the Kane Room, Dublin Castle.

Credit: Image used in our poster: ‘Final Moments‘ Pauline Kiernan.