Regional Focus – Donegal

Regional Focus

Visual Artists' News Sheet | July – August 2021

Donegal

Glebe House and Gallery

Jean KearneyHead Guide

The Winds are Wilder

Paul HallahanVisual Artist

THE WINDS ARE ferocious, the rains are heavier, and the cold can get inside your bones, but when the sun appears in the north west, it all becomes clearer to me why I made the move to south Donegal in mid-2020. For a number of years, I dreamed of moving out of Dublin to a more relaxed, rural community. The north west was always on my radar as somewhere I would love to live and work. Moving back to Dublin in 2015 after a brief period in land-locked Berlin (I need the ocean), the city gave me a lot and helped me refocus on my practice while taking in the energy of the city. I had slightly side-lined my practice and spent the years after college curating and running a gallery in Waterford. While at times I enjoyed thinking about art through exhibition-making, I also knew I stumbled into curation without a formal decision. Between 2014 and 2015, I decided to be an artist.

Over a five-year period, I worked all sorts of day jobs to support my practice and, like many artists, after working a full day, I would go to the studio in the evenings and weekends. After a period of working intensely in my studio, and in Independent Studios Dublin, I was able to start showing my works to the world. That studio space, above any other spaces, helped me refocus and direct all of my energy into my work. I owe that studio a lot.

It was a surprise to me that my practice moved towards painting from primarily video, but within the medium I felt I could control time better and explore ideas in-depth. It also allowed me to portray ideas better than I could in moving image, text or installation.

Living and working in Dublin for a time was energetic, but many different aspects of living and working there were making life harder for me. There is a great artistic community, but I did feel the city as a lifestyle choice offered me less and less. Getting engulfed by bus diesel fumes while cycling to the studio every morning was

Paul Hallahan, studio view; photograph courtesy the artist.

getting tiresome.

Then an opportunity came up in mid-2020. My housemates were also looking to move; we all knew the north west area and especially Bundoran and south Donegal. So we began looking for somewhere to rent and we luckily found a house and made the move in late summer. It’s still all new to me here, and the difference of knowing somewhere you have visited compared to living there is vast. It has been above and beyond the best decision for me and it’s funny to think I had reservations last year. The winter was hard with very short days, intense storms and bitter cold, but there is no better way to get to know a place than to live through its winter.

As I arrived, I was working on a solo exhibition, ‘Running, returning, running’, for Roscommon Arts Centre and a two-person exhibition, ‘Everybody knows’, for The Complex, so I initially finalised that work when I moved here. I did know a few people in the area before moving, and with the help of local artist Celina Muldoon, I was able to privately rent a new studio locally. This new studio has invigorated my practice. I feel the mental space of living by the sea and in the countryside has affected my work positively. I have started several new series of paintings and while I don’t directly expect the landscape of this beautiful place to be part of new works right now, I know it will eventually enter the work somehow.

It has been an odd time to make such a move with all normal businesses closed since I arrived, but even so, it has been great for me. There is an energy of creative people in the north west I did not expect to be so strong, and I look forward to things opening back up again fully so I can meet and engage with more artists. So far, I have met a number of artists based up here in the north west and the place has won over my heart. Bring on the wild winds, the heavy rain, bitter cold and sunny days! paulhallahan.com

James Dixon, HMS ‘Wasp’ Gunboat Wrecked off Tory Island, Ireland, undated, c. 1960s, mixed media on paper; image courtesy Glebe House and Gallery.

SITUATED 14KM OFF the northwest coast of Donegal and surrounded by the Atlantic Ocean, Tory Island is the most remote of Ireland’s inhabited islands. It is a place that people have called home for over 4,500 years. The island is steeped in history with pre-historic and early Christian remains. It is an island of music, song and stories, where the incredible spirit of the people shines through.

It was on Tory Island that James Dixon ( Jimmy Dhonnchaidh Eoin) was born on 2 June 1887. He had one sister, Grainne, and three brothers Johnnie, Dennis and Hughie. They were a seafaring family and their skills as fishermen and boat-builders were well-known throughout the community.

Aside from the occasional visit to the mainland, Dixon remained on Tory Island his entire life. He was a wonderful character, whose gentle unassuming nature belied his intelligence and skill. He always had a pipe in hand and the top of his index finger was scorched from tapping the tobacco in his pipe.

It was on a sunny Sunday morning in the summer of 1956, that Dixon first encountered Derek Hill – an artist who subsequently lived for nearly thirty years in Glebe House, later bequeathing it to the Irish state, along with his extensive private art collection. Hill was painting down by the foreshore on the island, looking out across the sea to the beautiful mountains on the mainland. He became aware of someone watching him paint. That someone was Dixon, who was seventy years old at the time. Little did they know that this chance meeting would change and enrich both of their lives and indeed inspire many people throughout the world.

A conversation struck-up between the two men; Hill asked Dixon what he thought of his painting. Dixon looked at the painting and then looked at Hill and said that he thought that he could do a lot better if he tried! Hill was intrigued and later that evening he made his way to Dixon’s house, where he encouraged him to paint, giving him tubes of paint and some paper. However, Dixon declined the use of a paintbrush and instead insisted on making his own paintbrush from the hair cut from his donkey’s tail. Hill did

not teach Dixon to paint but encouraged him to develop his own style.

Dixon set to work. He drew inspiration from his island home and the wild Atlantic storms that frequently battered Tory and the ships that were lost, interspersed with myth and legends passed down through the generations by the island’s storytellers. He painted events he had heard about, such as the sinking of the Titanic. He depicted them looking down upon the event from the sky – a bird’s eye view. He often wrote an inscription in a small rectangle in the corner of each of his paintings, providing details of the work with his name and the date. His paintings provide a unique record of his life on his beloved island.

Hill was impressed with his work and said that he knew that he was in the presence of a genius. Hill likened Dixon’s work to that of the Cornish artist, Alfred Wallis. Hill introduced Dixon’s artworks to the world, helping Dixon to become an important figure in the history of twentieth-century Irish art. Dixon had his first solo exhibition in 1966 at the New Gallery in Belfast, containing 21 paintings. This was followed shortly afterwards by another exhibition of his work at the Portal Gallery in London. He also exhibited at the Dawson Gallery in Dublin and the Autodidakt Gallery in Vienna. In the years following his death, Dixon’s paintings were included in numerous exhibitions both nationally and internationally including Queen’s University Belfast, The Irish Museum of Modern Art, the Glebe Gallery in Donegal and in galleries in Vienna, London and New York.

Dixon continued to paint in his own unique style and his friendship with Hill lasted up until Dixon’s death in 1970. Through his example, and with encouragement from Hill, the school of Tory Island Artists was born. We’ll leave the last word to Dixon, who once said: “Painting has got me to places I never could have gone.”

glebegallery.ie

Visual Artists’ News Sheet | July – August 2021

Regional Focus11

On the Edge

Martha McCullochCoordinator, Artlink

WE COULD BE anywhere, but we chose here on the edge in the wind and the wild, in the heathery hills and the damp, away from the centre, away from train stations.

The space we occupy at Fort Dunree is modest; a multi-function room in a former military hospital building, where unannounced visitors are welcomed, meetings are held, funding applications are sweated over and art and tea are made, and where the internet is what we euphemistically call ‘intermittent’. We do however have access to an elegant gallery, a rich history and inspirational vistas over land and sea, which are unique to this beautiful, remote site.

Fort Dunree is the best preserved of six forts, built by the British on Lough Swilly when fears of a French invasion were high. The original fort, built in 1813, houses a military museum, while the surrounding headland is littered with WWI remains, gradually melting into the heather covered hillside. Lough Swilly, one of Ireland’s great natural harbours, may seem like a backwater, but it has played its part in significant historical events from the Viking invasions and the Flight of the Earls to the 1798 Rising and WWI.

Artlink was celebrating 10 years of success shortly after I arrived in Buncrana in 2001, one of a host of people moving ‘home’ around that time. I wasn’t raised here but my mother is from the area and these roots give me license to call it home; so I’m not exactly a ‘blow-in’. I was drawn here to be with family, to pursue my art practice, to step out of academia, to get space. But Artlink was also the draw. I couldn’t have imagined moving from Glasgow, with it’s vital and connected arts community, to small town Buncrana, without the possibility of becoming part of a community of artists. At this point Artlink, with substantial resources, was based in a restored nineteenth-century corn mill at the edge of the Crana River and was held together by its three founding artists, Lisa Spillane-Doherty, Marie Barrett and Eileen Barr; but the organisation soon reached a turning point.

By 2003, the founding artists had moved on and the management structure changed. Mhairi Sutherland, who was appointed as Creative Director, initiated the connection with Fort Dunree, establishing a satellite exhibition space, where pilot projects such as Edge Centring, an international residency, took place in 2007. The origins of Edge Centring began in 2006 when representatives from Norway and East Iceland visited Donegal to locate a west European partner for the Gulf Stream Project which used the gulf stream as an actual and metaphorical link between the regions of Norway, East Iceland and the north-west coast of Ireland. This was the basis of a hugely successful partnership whereby each year we welcome an artist from either Norway or Iceland to take part in our residency programme. We recently extended this North Atlantic connection to Newfoundland, our closest neighbour across the ocean.

Two more directors followed – Elaine Ford and Declan Sheehan – then in 2013, contracted funding saw Artlink relocate to Fort Dunree entirely, with scant resources but the determination to keep going, which we have, and we changed in the process.

Artlink has in some ways returned to its roots. It is once again non-hierarchical in its staff structure. Decisions are made by Team Artlink – Patricia Spokes, Rebecca Strain and myself, supported by the board. We now have

a membership, financial support from The Arts Council and Donegal County Council, and a commitment to caring for and sustaining artists and celebrating what is unique about this place.

No one could have foreseen the circumstances of the past 16 months. Entire continents disrupted by COVID-19, almost unimaginable changes in the daily patterns of life and suddenly ‘working remotely’ – a concept once seen as aspirational, when city-bound people dreamed of working from home without the drudgery of the commute or cubicle life – which became the enforced reality for many. As it turned out, for Artlink, the concept of isolation and remoteness was perhaps less strange than might have been presumed. Operating and collaborating at a distance had long been an element in our working methods. Despite the shortcomings of infrastructure, temperamental Wi-Fi and occasional power outages, we were able to meet regularly with other organisations, albeit ‘virtually’, developing much stronger connections than before. Internationally, we were able to host events with artists from anywhere on the planet, attended by an international audience.

Michael Flaherty, for instance, sounds like he runs the pub on the main street (yes, there is a Flaherty’s Bar here), but he’s actually from Port Union, Newfoundland, and invents devices that slow processes down and make them visible. He’s our first Resident Artist from Newfoundland, as part of our newly established partnership with Eastern Edge Gallery and is coming to Donegal to make a tidal weaving device as soon as restrictions allow. Anais Tonduer came here from France and showed us the magic of the wind, while Matthew de Kersaint Giradeau made an animation from a face he saw in the land at Malin Head. Christine Mackey initiated a living herbarium that has since morphed into a thriving community garden, where this year we are growing oats to make straw hats.

These are our people. They are drawn to us, to Donegal, to the creative people here, who take their talent with a pinch of salt (probably from the sea). We are a lot of people spread far and wide and we also are the handful of people who are the day-to-day email answerers, meeting attenders, floor moppers and non-hierarchical hot air balloon idea flyers. Being on the edge allows us a bit of spontaneity, to embrace indeterminacy and allow artists to take risks with their practice in this inspiring place.

artlink.ie

Fort Dunree; photograph by Martha McCulloch.

Catherine Ellis, ‘Elephants in the Room’, installation view, Fort Dunree, April 2018; photograph by Martha McCulloch.

Artist-in-residence Anaïs Tondeur making drawings with the wind, Fort Dunree, 2018; photograph by Martha McCulloch.

12 Regional Focus

Visual Artists' News Sheet | July – August 2021

Shape of The Place

Laura McCaffertyVisual Artist

Cé as tú?

Myrid CartenVisual Artist

THIS PLACE PULLED hard. My body ached to lie down and plug into the dark peaty earth. “You’re in the wrong place,” came the voice as each footstep hit the pavements of Nottingham, where I’d lived for twenty years. I ignored this, convincing myself it was normal. In 2019 it boomed loud, and Donegal called. “There are people dreaming of the hills of Donegal” played on repeat; my young family watched on. Eyes closed, rocking, crooning. Those words spoke to me. I’d become a cliché.

“Where is home?” he asked. “Is it Dublin, Belfast, Derry or Shroove?” With flushed faces, we scrolled through houses and jobs to figure out how to swap Nottingham for Inishowen. Seven months later, as the news of the pandemic broke, we boarded the ferry to Dublin, making our way to Donegal. Arriving on Saturday 14 March 2020 at 9:30pm. I was now a Donegal artist.

I left Derry in 1999 to start the Art Foundation in Belfast’s University of Ulster, telling my parents there was no such course in town. They would later find out that this had been a lie. I had the time of my life, but the division of the city was hard-edged. “Where are you from?” they would ask, and with my answer, nod and pigeonhole me. Ringing the right taxi firms or walking in the right area was perplexing. In 2000, I moved to Nottingham where no one knew much about all that or cared. In 2003 graduating from a Decorative Arts BA, I became a self-employed artist, set up my studio and lectured at Nottingham Trent University – continuing to live and work there until the move to Donegal last year.

Maybe I’m not here long enough to know this place. I think about connections. Mum is from here, granda’s family stretches back generations. On the morning that he died at home, my aunt pointed to the headland, saying, “Remember this. Hold it with you.” I took in its shape. This place is full of childhood memories. Sunday lunches squeezed into nana’s kitchen, running wild on summer evenings, falling off walls, breaking bones. One summer night in 1988, our

babysitter let the gang of children run in the rainstorm. The wind caught the large parasol I was holding, blowing me backwards up the garden. Laughing. Beach days, digging to Australia, blue lips from the cold Atlantic Sea, nettle stings on my rear-hind with my nana singing, “Dockin in, Nettle out, Dockin in, Nettle out,” as she rubbed the leaves against my skin. I think of nana and granda looking after six-week-old me, when mum returned to work. I think of being in this place from those early days. The key in the door (no need to knock) and the welcome hug.

Is there a way to find something new in a place full of memories? In April 2020 this place gave me new things to think about. At first it was a ‘log’ about the view from the window, written each morning in the one minute I had. The logs then grew into On The Other Side, a publication featured in The Dublin Artist Book Fair that November. New shapes, colours and patterns appeared during walks. Followed soon by the need to make. Lacking materials and a studio, in the midst of the first lockdown, I ordered the basics and The Shape of The Place emerged. With paper, scissors and glue, I turned the finds into collages. This new body of work slowly grows on borrowed kitchen tables and makeshift work surfaces. In the same month, I received a Donegal County Council Artist Bursary to develop textile works. Once these large cloth panels are made, I will continue to experiment and figure out what happens next. My role as Public Programmes Curator at CCA Derry~Londonderry connects me to artists and writers nationally and internationally. I am also part of N I N E, an artist collective interested in the exploration of materiality and visual art processes.

Maybe I’m still getting used to the idea that I am now an artist in the place where I once soothed nettle stings with shreds of dock leaf. My connection to this place runs deep; its shapes and patterns are still revealing themselves to me.

lauramccafferty.com nine-artists.com

Plugging into Donegal. Laura McCafferty plugged into the peat bog. Two arms, with the edges of purple cardigan sleeves showing, with two hands, fingers stretched wide, inserted into the green moss and heather of the peat bog in the hills of Donegal. Photograph by Matthew Graham, courtesy the artist.

Myrid Carten, The Divide, 2014, installation view; image courtesy of the artist.

How did I get involved? As a young man I chanced to flirt with it and it possessed me. – Brian Friel

DÚN NA NGALL literally means ‘Fort of the Foreigners’. I confess that I’m a foreigner here. Not a blow-in but a blow back – elevated above the former because of my local family. My childhood life was split between Donegal and Derry. But Donegal was home; distant and unknowable – we see what we are.

When I think of Donegal’s relation to my work, I hear Austrian poet, Rainer Maria Rilke. In Letters to a Young Poet, Rilke urges solitude, patience and humility. Each wisdom pushes me to go deeper into the foreignness within, into Donegal.

I make films because I grew up here. It’s cinematic – it confronts us with our aloneness in time. Kierkegaard advocated standing on your own before God, and one stands alone before Donegal’s barren beauty. It’s an uneasy beauty, but isn’t all truth? Rilke said, “For beauty is nothing but the beginning of terror which we are barely able to endure, and it amazes us so, because it serenely disdains to destroy us.” There’s a quietness – reassuring and insistent like death. But also, an alive wildness that shows how small and desolate we are. You have to struggle to remain human in it and confront what being human is.

We are all visitors in this old landscape, if not by space, then by time. And time here is not measurable by us. The mountains can disappear under cloud or fog in an instant. They mutate – both unwavering, solid and an ever-changing mirage. Perhaps this is why visual art was not big in school, the singular image not enough. Writing was encouraged because it explored atmosphere, subjectivity and change. And then I found film. Russian poet, Boris Pasternak, remarked: “cinema ... is called upon to express what is true in drama, its surrounding plasma. Let it photograph not tales, but the atmospheres of tales.” This statement was echoed in 1928 by critic Viktor Shklovsky, who commented that filmmakers “film the air around their subject”.

Poet Annemarie Ní Churreáin wrote: “In rural Donegal, you develop a sixth sense for what might be buried in darkness, for what came before you and will survive after.” Ahead

of my BA degree show at Goldsmiths, I dream of myself digging in the bog at Earagail, my mother then doing the same, cutting back and forth between us. Before and after. I fly back home to film. “Is that near the Grand Canyon?” viewers ask about the work in London. This free epic scale and ambition have been useful for my career.

Repeatably I find myself drawn to barren sites, to my childhood – the early dark solitude and later play – for films. Donegal enables the intimacy that comes from taking risks alone. The solitude gives the freedom to explore existential themes. I feel a kinship with other Donegal artists like Cara Donaghey and Cliodhna Timoney, whose work shows traces of this dark adventure.

For me, Donegal holds the truth of both one’s aloneness and connection. Just as the landscape’s change is constant and beyond us, human life is finite and ongoing. We are tied to those before and after us; our families. Here they ask Cé as tú? – Who are you from? Not where. My Donegal family name is Gallagher, meaning ‘Foreign Aid’. Useless – sure, the place’s crawling with us. Instead, families are named after a recent significant ancestor. I am a ‘Mhanus’ after my greatgreat grandfather. Because this high recognition is only given after death, I recently had the uncanny experience of hearing my uncle called ‘Danny Mhaggie’ – my grandmother is now our forebearer. This constant identification with family fuels the desire to escape and be a standalone individual. Yet it rings of truth. We are both alone in the world and carriers of our kin; often subconsciously driven by repetition to initiate repair. Family dynamics get passed through generations – that name tells a lot. Then there is the gossip – frustrating as hell but it showed me how endlessly interesting people are to one another. I make films about people and relationships because, like Donegal, it fascinates me.

myridcarten.com

Visual Artists’ News Sheet | July – August 2021

Community in Donegal

Jeremy Fitz HowardActing Manager, Regional Cultural Centre

Ursula Burke, Embroidery Frieze - The Politicians, 2016-17, embroidery thread on cotton; photograph by Jeremy Howard, courtesy the artist and Regional Cultural Centre.

IT ALWAYS FASCINATES me to hear how people from other parts of Ireland describe Donegal. Most get lost in a sea of superlatives while attempting to describe the landscape or fall down the reminiscence rabbit-hole recounting childhood holidays involving beaches, friendly faces, dusty pint bottles, and of course, endless rain. One good friend relocated here for a decade or so and left with the conclusion that, ‘Donegal… is a state of mind’. That works well for me. It manages to say everything without really saying anything – a treasured skill in this business.

What really strikes me the most about Donegal is the inherent value we place on the communities we build around us. Large communities, small communities, communities every shape and size that often overlap where we least expect. Maybe this eagerness to connect is a symptom of living in such a diffusely populated county – we tend to seek each other out and although this tendency might not have helped with ‘keeping the numbers down’ in recent months, it can offer us a great insight into how to build sustainable audiences, both ‘in real life’ and online.

It’s this desire for shared experiences that we have always built arts events around. We can screen the critically acclaimed new film by a beloved director of world cinema but unless we serve tea afterwards and provide people with the opportunity to collectively dissect the evening, they simply won’t come. Social connections are central to the human experience and this is becoming increasingly evident online during the COVID-19 lockdowns. I’ve noticed new ‘regulars’ who ‘catch up’ during our online gigs. Most of these people have never met in real life but formed close bonds in the comments section. Parents in our Young Artists social media group throwing virtual birthday parties for their kids so they can celebrate with these new friends that they’ve never met. Our creative Zoom classes for older people have evolved into extended families where the art takes second place to the conversations; participants often ‘accidentally’ join our Zoom waiting room at random times, in the hope of finding someone inside ready for ‘a little

catch up’.

Online concerts have taught us to stop pushing the ‘hard sell’ and spend more time developing meaningful relationships with these new worldwide micro-communities. We recently hosted an online Irish music festival for North Texans and were delighted to introduce 23,000 of them to the music of Donegal. It’s an interesting switch but suddenly we have regional artists on a local stage playing to a global audience. This, alongside galleries making a concerted move away from ‘blockbuster’ type touring exhibitions and shifting focus to the development of local artists of promise, will set the scene for healthier and more sustainable professional visual arts communities across the country.

The Regional Cultural Centre’s forthcoming visual arts programme will continue to welcome major solo and group shows from international and leading Irish artists but with a renewed and increased focus on developing North Westbased contemporary artists over sustained periods of time. The recent exodus from major cities has afforded us the opportunity to make meaningful connections with young and emerging artists that ‘came home’ for the first time since leaving as teenagers. The age of Zoom will allow us to keep these conversations moving. Future RCC visual arts programmes will be presented over three dimensions: the physical gallery, online spaces, and projects and exhibitions that take place in shared spaces within our local communities – each one as vital as the other.

Donegal can feel like an outpost on the periphery at times, but these communities make us strong. Emerging technologies help us connect with the rest of the world. We have an uncertain economic landscape ahead with environmental issues around the corner that will make COVID-19 look like ‘the good old days’. However, I am confident that artists and arts organisations in Donegal will prevail. Our ingrained sense of community gives us a head start in navigating societal shifts and the local frameworks we build now will ensure that we stay dynamic and ready for change. regionalculturalcentre.com

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