Em

Research

[emilyconnell]

Tom Berry

Tom Berry is a visual artist based in south London, Whos work utilises different print disciplines, Drawing and painting.

“Painting, drawing and printmaking constitutes most of my work. Like many other artists I find it continually interesting to experiment with colour and depict the human form in different ways. Growing up I was pretty obsessed with MAUS, Manga and 80’s graphic novels about Hindu Mythology. Also hugely into graffiti. I think all of this influence is pretty obvious if you are looking for it. I work quite a bit in education which is important to me, and is a valuable counterpoint to my studio practice.”

[emilyconnell]

Irish Neolithic beliefs centered on a connection to the natural world and the afterlife, featuring animism, reverence for ancestors, and worship of a powerful Earth Goddess. These beliefs were expressed through the construction of monumental tombs, like passage tombs and megalithic structures, which served as burial grounds, ceremonial centers, and expressions of both a belief in the afterlife and the social structure of the time. Astronomical alignments and imagery found in these structures suggest sophisticated knowledge of the cosmos.

[emilyconnell]

Arturo Kameya

The central figure portrayed in this work is San Martín de Porres, a Peruvian saint who lived during the time of the Spanish colony between the end of the 16th century and the beginning of the 17th century. He was the first mulatto saint of America and the gift of bilocation was attributed to him, in which a person can appear in two different places simultaneously; other attributed miracles include levitation and healing. Within popular culture, he is known for making dogs, cats and mice eat from the same plate in harmony. The name of this work comes from the main record label of chicha music in Peru called Discos Horóscopo (Horoscope records). The image is both sacred and pagan; a combination of colonial beliefs and popular culture references.

[emilyconnell]

Kent Monkman

Monkman turns this genre on its head in the most disturbing ways, like in "The Scoop," his painting from 2018. The colours and the arrangement of figures mimic the huge paintings we're used to seeing. But what's actually happening on the canvas is something much more terrible: the kidnapping of Indigenous children from their parents and their homes to be taken to residential school where they were cut off from their language, culture and families.

By making this work, Kent Monkman uses a form of painting that's usually state-sanctioned and that usually celebrates colonial triumph to expose the evil reality of colonialism.

[emilyconnell]

Romantic Ireland - Eimear Walshe

ROMANTIC IRELAND is a multilayered piece that utilizes contemporary storytelling to address the bargains we make through the traditional Irish practice of earth-building. Their work centers on Ireland's late 19th-century land contestation and its relation to private property, sexual conservatism, and the built environment. The piece consists of three primary storytelling elements — the earth-built sculpture of the physical exhibition space, the five-voice operatic soundtrack written by Walshe describing an eviction, and the video consisting of seven dancers, including Walshe, dressed as 19th-century to 21st-century Irish archetypes, sporting green, wide-eyed latex fetish masks.

The layering of symbols and the use of atypical languages, specifically a physical and movement-based language, create a multilayered and complex piece that deals with the dualities of living in modern society and reckoning with the past where, as Walshe says, there are no 'goodies or baddies.'

[emilyconnell]

Harry Clarke

[emilyconnell]

Catholicism was introduced to Ireland in the 5th century, through a gradual process of infiltration before the arrival of St. Patrick. While St. Patrick is famously credited with converting the entire island, Christian worship had already reached Ireland around the year 400 AD through interactions with Britain and the Continent. The missionary work of St. Patrick helped to establish Christianity more firmly and convert the rest of the population, leading to a Christianized Ireland by the end of the 5th century.

[emilyconnell]

Andrew Pledger

[emilyconnell]

[emilyconnell]

Patricia Hurl

Irish gothic (living room) 1984

Hurl’s work references her experience of growing up in a religious household, where the sacraments and ritual of communion, marriage and death were revered and firmly abided by. Irish Gothic, the painting which lends its title to Hurl’s current retrospective exhibition at IMMA, presents a newly married couple standing solemnly in front of a quintessential suburban house surrounded by a picket fence, their faces obscured as they are faced with a lifetime mortgage. In her early works Hurl exposed the suburban home as less than perfect.

[emilyconnell]

Irish Neolithic symbols are ancient engravings, primarily found in monuments like Newgrange and Loughcrew, that served as a mysterious symbolic language. Key examples include the tri-spiral (triskele), which symbolizes movement, progress, and cyclical energy like birth, death, and rebirth, and other geometric patterns like circles, arcs, and chevrons. These symbols predate the Celts and likely held astronomical, spiritual, or cosmological meanings for the first farmers of Ireland.

[emilyconnell]

For the people who built Newgrange, the winter solstice marked the start of the new year, and symbolized fertility and rebirth. Newgrange was not just a place of burial but an important ceremonial place for the people of the area.

Entrance stone at newgrange

[emilyconnell]

Some work from EVA, Limerick

[emilyconnell]

Alison Lowry

Addressing our hidden truths

Northern Irish glass artist Alison Lowry has mounted an exhibition that addresses well over 200 years of crimes against women and children perpetrated by the Catholic Church, in collaboration with the Irish state. It is a devastating exhibition.

[emilyconnell]

Mapping the Magdalene

Alice Maher and Rachel Fallon

The Map’ is a cartography of the known and the unknown worlds of Irish history, an uncompromising tour of pain and shame, shot through with humour and icons of resistance. The latter brings to mind the philosopher Rosi Braidotti’s idea of ‘nomadic ethics’. She writes of a ‘nomadic, non-linear philosophy of time’ involving a ‘creative reading of memory’ that is particularly significant in cases of negative or traumatic memories of pain or abuse. She writes that while ‘acknowledging this particular location – as a wounded memory of pain as well as a historically grounded space’, it is also possible to create a political act in the gesture of transcending, in the creating of ‘transformative alternatives’. In many ways, this feels like a helpful key to Maher and Fallon’s ‘The Map’, which calls a reckoning, and in its worked material expression, insists on those transformative alternatives.

[emilyconnell]

History of St Kevin's: A mental health institution that incarcerated innocent people in filthy conditions

Photographer and historian Tarquin Blake of Abandoned Ireland has described how St Kevin’s was built as an annex at the eastern end of Our Lady’s Hospital complex in 1893 and originally accommodated 490 patients.

The people who ended up in it were often victims of misfortune, illness and abandonment.

Reports from the Inspector of Mental Hospitals reveal that the institution was a vermin-infested, dirty, dark confinement where people who were guilty of nothing were incarcerated.

Discussions about the reports in the Seanad from the 1930s paint a damning picture.

In 1934, the Seanad heard that no soap or towels were available and there were no curtains on the windows or seats in the toilets. Senators were also told that the lavatories were dirty. Patients’ own money was used to buy six washing machines for use by 21 female patients in one ward.

In 1935, many patients were in bed when inspectors called at 5.30pm. There were no curtains in the dormitories and sheets of plywood were being used to cover all the broken windows in the bathroom of one male ward which housed 22 patients.

Some people were incarcerated in units that were roofed like a stall and doors were closed by three farmyard bolts.

In 1936, it was reported that there was no activities during the day and patients just sat around waiting for bedtime, which was somewhere between 5.30pm and 6.30pm.

[emilyconnell]

The Keening Tradition

Keening was a vocal ritual artform, performed at the wake or graveside in mourning of the dead. Keens are said to have contained raw unearthly emotion, spontaneous word, repeated motifs, crying and elements of song.

The word keening originates from the Gaelic caoineadh meaning “crying”. The keening women (mnàthan-tuirim), paid respects to the deceased and expressed grief on behalf of the bereaved family.