Tag: Irish mixed media artists

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.

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

Artist Focus: Pauline Kiernan

Pauline Kiernan has created a body of work inspired by Jane Clarke’s evocative imagery in “The Rod”.

He's waiting for you,
the cardiac nurse hands me
a basin of water, washcloth, towel.

The Rod, Jane Clarke

The seven pieces in this collection explore the delicate balance of life and death, highlighting the simple yet profound gestures that define our humanity. In ‘Weight of Time‘, Pauline captures the quintessential gesture of security in childhood – being able to slip a tiny hand into the big, warm and reassuring grasp of a father figure. The piece was screen printed and the background image densely machine embroidered to bring the figures in the foreground to life. Pauline is an expert with free machine embroidery and employs it with ease to make dense backgrounds or delicate line drawings.

A similar motif is repeated in ‘Final Moments‘ a triptych of screen printed and patched textiles, overworked with machine embroidery and kantha style hand stitching. A stitched image of Pauline’s father wearing jacket and tie recalls his once strong frame whilst the text hints at a different story. In the quiet stillness of a Sunday morning, Pauline found herself doing something she never expected, shaving her father’s face. His illness had left him frail and his skin had become delicate and paper thin. For her this simple act wasn’t just an act of care; it was a ritual of love, full of tenderness, each movement careful and deliberate, almost sacred.

Pauline has always been drawn to themes of family, memory and place in her work as a textile artist. Cloth is particularly suitable for creating artworks that have deep connections to our personal histories and it becomes even more relevant when the fabric we use has been part of our family story. In ‘Fragments‘ Pauline used pieces of vintage clothing as the substrate on which to stitch images of her father, his glasses and the shaving ritual. In the exhibition these cloth fragments hang on specimen pins casting shadows on the surrounding space and seemingly poised to fall away at any time.

Pauline’s final piece in this collection “Fragments II” further develops the child/parent motif in a beautifully crafted man’s shirt and child’s dress. The organdie fabric has been screen printed, white on white, with personal motifs barely visible on the garments, which recall her father’s life and his illness. The two pieces are hung free from the wall, connected but floating apart.

Perhaps because textile as an art medium has often been disregarded by the art world, women have, for centuries, quietly used cloth and stitch as a vehicle for expressing political resistance, calls to action as well as recording personal stories, moments of trauma and everyday life. Pauline runs workshops in her studio where she aims to create a space for people to connect with their own experiences and memories and translate them onto fabric. Pauline says, “In the end, this isn’t just about creating a piece of art, it’s about capturing those simple powerful moments of connection that remind us of what it means to care for each other. This is what I want my art to represent.”

Thank you to Pauline for sharing her work, 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.

Artist Focus: Catherine Dowling

This week we look at the work of Catherine Dowling who has three pieces in our current exhibition, ROOTS, a dialogue in textile and poetry. Catherine is a versatile artist, moving with ease between felting, embroidery, collage and painting. The poems Catherine chose as inspiration for her work are all explorations of relationships with nature, with grandparents and with living in and among nature’s abundance.

Jane Clarke’s poem “Nettles” brings Catherine back to a time when she was learning to ride a bicycle and visiting every clump of nettles along the roadside of her childhood home and she questions whether dock leaves really do cure nettle stings!

We thrashed ashplants 
through chest-high clumps, 

daring them to sting bare knees. 
By evening our legs were dotted 

with swellings like hives, 
rubbed dock leaf green.

Grandpa flattened the patch in minutes 
with the swishing sweep of his scythe ...
                                                                    
Nettles, Jane Clarke

Nettles and Dock Leaves, Catherine Dowling

The second poem Catherine chose is called “Eggs” and describes the daily task of tending the hens and collecting eggs with a beloved grandmother. The poem captures the lovely moment when reaching into the nest boxes her hand wraps around a warm egg. There is something very grounded and comforting about that act. When Catherine thought about visually representing the poem, a repetitive image of eggs and hen feathers came to mind.

Having recently completed an online course with Fibre Arts Take Two which explored the medium of paper collage, it became the obvious medium for producing the representations for both poems. Using three rectangular, deep base canvasses as the substrate, Catherine worked with papers whose names are not familiar to most of us – Lokta and Himalaya paper and Wenzhou rice paper – and some more familiar such as embossed wallpaper. The wallpaper proved a very strong substrate from which to cut out leaf and egg shapes and kept its’ form through painting, gluing and drying and sealing. The Lokta paper wasn’t so tolerant of Catherine using a hairdryer to speed up the drying process! A felted and embroidered band was added to all three pieces introducing another texture to the work. The colours are subdued, faded like memory, the colour of fresh eggs perhaps?

Catherine’s third piece uses completely different mediums to respond to the poem ‘Among the Cows’. This beautiful poem tells us about a young girl getting much comfort from the gentleness of the cows who ‘let her lean into their warm bellies’ after her own mother died. Catherine grew up on a farm and cows, having always occupied the landscape of her life, drew her to recreate that childhood experience in the form of a child’s dress.

The bodice is made using wet felt technique and the skirt of tissue silk overlaid with cobweb felt, as light and ethereal as a child’s thoughts. Peeping through the gossamer layers are drawings on tissue of benign, placid cows.

The poem captures a young girl’s grief and an awareness that her feelings are mirrored in the sense of loss a calf experiences when it is weaned…

Her father knew where to find her;
she liked to stand among the cows ....

She would listen to the calves
calling for days when weaned,

until their voices, exhausted,
faded like mist from the fields.

Among the Cows, Jane Clarke

Thank you to Catherine for sharing her techniques and thoughts behind these works. Thanks also to Jane Clarke for her collaboration, her publisher, Bloodaxe Books, for allowing us to use her poetry, Kildare County Council Arts Office for grant funding and the OPW for offering us an exhibition space.

To see Catherine’s work visit Roots, a dialogue in textile and poetry at The Coach House Gallery, Dublin Castle, Monday to Sunday, 10 am – 5 pm (closed for lunch 1.15 – 1.45 pm).

Artist Focus: Sally Hewetson

Sally has created an assemblage of three artist books as her contribution to ROOTS, a dialogue in textile and poetry. An Artist Book is, quite simply, a work of art in book form. Many hours of printing, cutting and stitching went into the creation of Testament 1, 2 and 3. Sally’s attention to detail and focus on her final vision ensured that as many printed pages were discarded on the studio floor as made it into the final artworks.

These works on paper are in response to two of Jane Clarke’s poems, Family Bible and Flight which deal with sectarianism and displacement in Ireland:

Shove over the bolt, douse the lamps,
lie down on the kitchen floor,
her quiet father shouted
when he saw five men march
through the farmyard to the door...
They don't want to harm us,
only to warn us ...
                                                                           Flight, Jane Clarke

This was the story of many families in Northern Ireland forced, by people they knew, to flee to the South taking with them the essentials of mattresses and cooking utensils and, of course, the family bible. Creating her own book forms to emphasis how the bible was at the heart of these families’ journeys through the ups and downs of life, was an important aspect in Sally’s creative response to the poems.

Sally had a good reason for choosing these two poems for inspiration as she is the safe keeper of a bible, dating from 1794, which has stayed within her family despite religious divides, family schisms and the passage of some 230 years. Having something so precious and personal as a touchstone in the creation of these artworks must have been a blessing. That religion can provide much solace and comfort and yet also be the site of dissent and strife is the premise on which the poems are based. As we see the wars around the world and listen to the stories of those who are displaced, it is apparent that religion still plays a part in setting people against each other, in generating a fear of ‘the other’.

The imagery used by Sally reflects the daily depictions of family life interspersed with spiritual imagery showing the solace of religion and prayer. A range of printing techniques were used including mono printing, embossing, transfer print and screen printing.

“Stitch, and the variety of threads used throughout the pages, are a metaphor for the importance of family cohesion and community connections – the threading together of memories and events“. Sally

The colour palette chosen were subdued, neutral shades emphasising the reflective nature of the poems, the memories and events of the past. Coptic stitch was used to bind the books, an ancient method of binding that gives great flexibility to the shape of the book, allowing pages to be displayed effectively and giving a dynamic form to the exhibit.

Thank you to Sally for sharing her techniques and the thinking behind these works. Thanks also to Jane Clarke for her collaboration, her publisher, Bloodaxe Books, for allowing us to use her poetry, Kildare County Council Arts Office for grant funding and the OPW for saying yes to our proposal.

To see Sally’s work visit The Coach House Gallery, Dublin Castle, Monday to Sunday, 10 am – 5 pm (closed for lunch 1.15 – 1.45 pm).

Artist Focus : Fidelma Barton

Over the duration of the ROOTS exhibition in the Coach House Gallery in Dublin Castle, we will feature the work of one artist each week and the poetry that inspired it. Starting with Fidelma who has created five artworks for the exhibition.

Fidelma’s medium of choice is paint. Since joining element15 she has successfully expanded her practice to include textiles, paper, stitch and found objects. A case in point (excuse the pun) is ‘Stay’ partly crafted from a piece of old leather appliquéd onto distressed and painted fabric.

The work was inspired by Jane Clarke’s poem, The Suitcase, describing a woman’s packed suitcase stored permanently under the bed and her children’s apprehension at what that might mean…

"As children they didn't understand                                                                                                                        that despair was a neighbour                                                                                                                                              of love and if you were lucky                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                      it stayed beyond the garden gate just visiting from time to time ..."

The Suitcase, Jane Clarke

The suitcase was both her anchor and her possibility of escape.

Fidelma used a piece of leather from an old jacket to craft the main suitcase, making it ‘real’. The other suitcases, all different in design to show our individuality, were painted in the same colour tones to represent the idea that somehow we all have something to ground us. The background fabric was torn, the edges singed and painted in sepia tones to represent those moments of distress when we might just reach for the suitcase. In this work Fidelma asks if we all have our own ‘suitcase’ to offer a means of escape or a reassurance to stay?

The second featured artwork comprises two individual pieces, ‘In a Moment I and In a Moment II’, in response to Jane’s poem, Kintsugi. This poignant poem captures the moment when a dear friend is injured and subsequently dies. ‘When I heard you were knocked from your bike…I let the teapot slip from my hands’. The teapot shattering as it falls to the ground symbolizes the poet’s world falling apart in that moment when she received the heartbreaking news.

Fidelma used soft, fading colours to create an almost dreamy background aiming to capture the sense of absence and stillness that surrounds us during such moments. It’s as if everything around you blurs in that fleeting instant.

“Late in the evening I found the teapot could not hold”. Fidelma was moved by the depiction of the teapot, its pieces meticulously glued back together in an attempt to restore it, occupying the poet’s hours while she awaited news. In the tradition of kintsugi, Fidelma used gold to ‘repair’ the cracks in the teapot symbolising the hope that the repaired pot would be as good, if not better than before. Yet, like the life of the poet’s friend, the teapot was ultimately beyond saving.

In creating the base for ‘In a Moment II‘, Fidelma challenged herself to replicate the background effect achieved on board in “In A Moment I,” by using a mix of paint mediums on oil cloth. The loose threads not only symbolize the pot’s leakage but also the helplessness in such moments of tragedy. Small golden paint droplets were added to the ends of the hanging threads to symbolize tears.

Some small details of the works in progress as Fidelma created them and built up the layers of paint and stitch.

Thank you to Jane Clarke and her publisher, Bloodaxe Books for allowing us to work with her poetry, and to Fidelma for sharing her thoughts and processes with us.

The exhibition is open 7 days a week from 10 am until 5 pm (with a lunch break from 1.15-1.45) at the Coach House Gallery, Dublin Castle until 19th January 2025.