Abstract:
This three-person exhibition was curated by Nuala Gregory (and included her own collages that were collaborations with artists Sarah Treadwell, John Pusateri and Mandy Bonnell). The other two invited artists were Diane Henshaw and Deirdre Mackel. The exhibition consisted of a series of artworks of varying scale, in mixed media on paper, including lithography, gouache paintings, charcoal drawings, and all with elements of collage. The works were arranged to form a themed installation featuring new bodies of work produced in response to the theme of dinnseanchas or ‘poetry of place’. Drawing upon their experiences of very different environments (Auckland, Mayo, Belfast), the artists sought to define a set of relations to place that goes beyond the familiar and the functional. Instead, they attempted to recover a poetic or imagistic way of navigating public and private space, in a co-creation of the lived environment that has roots deep in ancient Irish culture. A modern Irish-English dictionary translates the word dinnseanchas as ‘topography’ (the science of place), but its etymology is quite revealing. The term originally referred to an ancient genre of mythological geography that gave a poetic account of place names. Dinn means place (an eminent site or locale); sean means old, and is strongly associated with the figure of the seanchaí or local storyteller, the keeper of lore and memory; and cas means to twist, as in the twisting of an ankle, but also of a rope. Poetically, the word suggests the twisting together of strands of collective memory of place. Perhaps forming a single narrative core, or (in a more visual idiom) a tapestry weaving together place and people, memory and experience, history and present desire. This tradition, this mnemonic and cognitive practice, was gradually extinguished in Ireland along with the native language, but has been ‘reclaimed’ in recent years particularly by the work of poets such as Seamus Heaney, Paul Muldoon and Ciaran Carson. In this exhibition, the artists have expressed the spirit of dinnseanchas in a modern idiom, as a ‘cognitive-imaginative mapping’ of the environment through forms of artistic engagement. Not so much by naming or storytelling, or acts of linguistic commemoration, but by marking and investing, revealing or creating new ways of seeing the landscape or cityscape – ways that can help overcome our habitual blindness, born of the pressures of time and work and commercial imperatives.