5 minute read
Interview with Lisa Lambe
Home. Identity. Belonging. The place where you live. It’s a simple but equally big concept. Especially during this pandemic where almost every human alive has been asked to ‘stay at home’.
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Where do we feel most at home? Is it with ourselves? Is it in company? And, where? Where do you truly feel at home? Where do you belong? Of course my answer may change depending who is asking me, and when I am being asked, but right now, I have to say, honestly, that it is Ireland. I don’t mean that in a grand way. I mean it is in Irish nature.
That is where I feel most at home. Most myself. In our ever-present Irish landscape. In 2018 and 2019 I spent a lot of time in Connemara writing an album, Juniper. I have talked during the process about how making and writing songs in those surroundings was like an ode to the landscape. My love letter to nature. It is a living and breathing connection and one that I carry with me, when I sing those songs. I feel and sense the memory of the place and try to let that sit alongside me when I’m on stage, or in these times, reimagining their reach to an audience. Although I am very much a Dubliner, Connemara and the West equally feels like home. I love the space, the wilderness, bog roads, the rugged sea, the pace, the quiet. One of my most favourite things was walking home from having a nightcap in Roundstone and stepping out into a symphony of stars over the harbour. I used to walk past this old Juniper tree on a bog road. It simply captured me.
They say it is a tree of nourishment, constancy, shelter, love and community. It stopped me in my tracks every time is saw it, this ancient magical living thing, reaching out across the skyline of Connemara, alone. Confidently alone. Defiantly alone. The Juniper tree - the first tree to place
its roots in Irish soil after the Ice Age. It wanted to belong and still does. During the last couple of months of lockdown, my connection to Galway started to make sense as I revisited some of my family’s stories. I begin to see my great, great granny in her wedding dress on the streets of Galway. In this picture-perfect postcard, her hand holding her headdress, her lace dress dancing around her in the wind, a wish in her heart. That old romance. I wonder maybe did I get it from her? The romance of place. The romance of the heart. The romance of the landscape is what brought my favourite painter to Inishlacken, Connemara in 1951. Gerard Dillon took a currach across from Roundstone and spent a year painting the landscape with two friends but pretty much in isolation. For me, his work captures the most beautiful sense of place. The stone walls, the cottages, the Connemara lovers.
Lisa Lambe
Connemara
Expression, freedom, an unravelling of the mind to harvest the inner world reflected in the outer.
We all yearn for that maybe. To pack up with our loved ones and take an adventure. I think as an artist the greatest gift is the ability to be at home in a new place, to live and breathe that atmosphere and turn it into an artistic expression, and to leave that expression behind, like a tiny devotion of thanks. Painting has always affected me that way.
I felt completely at home as a teenager walking the collection of Jack B Yeats at the National Gallery of Ireland. That’s when I first fell in love with a painting. It just caught my imagination. It stopped me in the same way the Juniper tree did years later. It was the colour this time, the title of it and the colours.
About to write a letter (1935) - a figure standing by a letter on a scarlet table cover. I always wanted to know, did he write the letter? Did he consider writing the letter and walk past it? Or if he did write it, what did it say? Was it a letter to the nation, to his mother, to a lost love, to himself. Art has always allowed me to leave home behind without ever truly going away. I think we always want to take a piece of home with us as we live and breathe each new landscape, each new sunrise. When I close my eyes, I see very clearly the Aran Islands last summer, sitting on a warm flagstone.
A book of JM Synge. Bare feet. It reminds me too of being a kid on a boat to Inisboffin with my mam and dad. The same rush of sea breeze and that glorious forward motion and movement to some new adventure. An island in the Atlantic. Nothing more perfect than sharing it with those you love. May we have it again, may we
keep bending like oak trees to keep showing up and doing our best. Keep adapting to the changes around us without losing who we are and where we belong. May we survive this time, and come through it stronger.
Lisa Lambe
Very recently I wrote a song called One Drop of Rain, the word tumbled out if it. “’Where to go from here? Where do we go? How can I find my way home?’ A connection to my home, to my family and to myself always bring me back to this:
