Pearse Museum at St Enda's Park

Early June seems a long time ago now, especially as the promise of summer then has been superseded by the chilly, rainy days of July. When I visited The Pearse Museum and St Enda's Park in early June the timing was perfect. The day was glorious!

After walking around the park and spending some time in the musem, I walked over to the central fountain again to view the encircling walkway. This path, conceived by sculptor, Stephen Burke, consist of the words to  Patrick Pearse’s poem,  The Wayfarer, carved into stones surrounding the fountain.

From an upstairs window of the museum I had viewed this sculpture and wanted to take a closer look while I was in the park. I was amazed to find the two pieces that I had thought were ceramic, were in fact entirely carved from wood!

 Two Brothers  ia a sculpture by Liam O’Neill and is a wonderful reflection of Patrick Pearse and his brother William, who founded the Gaelic League school at St Enda's in the early twentieth century.

 

poetry

I was delighted to finally be able to pick up my copy of Stride, the latest book of poetry by Jim Trainer, whose poetry, prose and music I have been following for a number of years. Though the book was published before xmas last year, I had it posted to Canada, knowing that I'd be visiting this summer, as a protest against An Post's practice of double taxarion, which Revenue Ireland turns a blind eye to. In the end Revenue gets the tax income so they are happy enough to ignore any methods used by other government bodies. Not sure what An Post's reason is for deciding to tax on the postage from another country that already charges tax (and hence that is included with delivery costs of any item from anywhere!) but the excuse of "Brexit" doesn't hold water.

I was also happy to get the gorgeous black & silver broadside of the poem Recurrent.

While I was away my own poem, Theft, was published in Remington Review and I was delighted to be included in this online journal among other talented writers and artists.

Here is the poem Theft:

In Trust. In Gratitude. In Hope. Group exhibition at Arthouse, Stradbally

 I did a road trip recently to check out the exhibition In Trust. In Gratitude. In Hope. in Stradbally, Co Laois. The exhibition was organised by Laois Arts Office and curated by Monica Flynn to commemorate the tenth anniversary of Stradbally's Arthouse Gallery. Over sixty artists were asked to respond to Pat Boran's commissioned poem The Window Seat. As my husband, James Hayes, had been commissioned ten years ago to create the sculptural wall piece, Growth, when the gallery was being built, he was invited to take part in the exhibition. Growth, a stainless steel work, can be seen to the left in the picture below; it is in the courtyard entrance to the gallery.

Within the small, but very elegant, gallery James's bronze sculpture, Faith, can be seen with Growth outside the window.

The artists were asked to respond in any way to Pat Boran's poem but there was a size limit on both 2D & 3D works. Artists working in 2D were provided with a square canvas. There is a screening room within the complex (which also includes studio spaces and units to accommodate a live-in artist-in-residency programme) and there were also two video pieces included in the exhibition.

The other artists who were invited to take part had all been involved with Arthouse over the ten years of its existence, most through the residency programme.

The works were as diverse as the individual artists, but the show was cohesive through the ideas of response to the poem and through the size constraints.

The main gallery is quite small but the space is augmented by the running wall immediately outside it, which leads to the screening room. This corridor is very bright and in no way secondary, with full length windows opposite the running wall. The exhibition continues till March 25th 2022.

writing & publishing

Along with numerous writers world wide, I spent the month of April partipating in Na/GloPoWriMo (National/Global Poetry Writing Month) as I have done for the past five years. The premise is to write a poem daily based on a specific (optinal) prompt. In addition, there are links to both live and pre-recorded poetry readings, which are amazing to follow; not all live events work with the differences in time zones, but some do. These are great introductions to the work of other poets that may have been previously unknown to you, or even reminders to listen to known poets. Following the prompts has led to writing unexpected poems and learning about other poem forms. Some of the poems written during NaPoWriMo I have continued to work on, revising and tweaking, and eventually publishing. Although I began taking part in 2017, during several non-April months, I have looked back at the archive and worked on prompts for several previous years (working backwards I have one more year, 2013, to finish, which I plan to complete by the end of this year).

Last week an email interview that I undertook with Elizabeth Challinor of Orbit Magazine was published. I thought it was very appropriate to the month that was in it, as the focus of the interview was the founding of Precariat Press last year, which I blogged about here. The full interview can be read here.

Home Sweet Home Goodbye published

I founded Precariat Press in the spring of this year with the publication of my first chapbook of poems in mind; My husband, James Hayes, designed the logo for me after an evening of brainstorming. The cover design is based upon my earliest existing piece of "art" - a goodbye card I made for my grandparents when they were returning to Ireland from a visit to Toronto in 1967. I talk about that in a previous blog, here. This was the first time I met them, and the card was found in my grandmother's handbag after she (my Oma) died in 1980 and it was returned to me.

I have spent the months in lockdown (the first one!) designing and printing up the cover, which I have blogged about here and here, and choosing the final poems to be included. The chapbook contains a mix of poems previously published in other journals (which I acknowledge) and work that I think are deserving of publication! They are a mix of oldish poems (probably revised somewhat) and newish poems - spanning 40 years of writing poetry.

I have bound Home Sweet Home Goodbye in the traditional chapbook binding style, i.e., three-hole bind, with cotton thread. It contains 17 poems over 25 pages of poetry, and the cover is a monochrome linoprint. It is approx A5 in size, a standard chapbook size. I have blogged about the book mockup and binding here, here, and here. This is a limited edition publication, with 50 copies only. 

binding the chapbook

 

In my previous blog, here, I discussed the preparation for binding and gave links to all my blog posts relating to this chapbook. With everything ready, the next step is simply to bind the books!

In creating a traditional poetry chapbook (less than 40 pages) I also decided to bind the book with thread (as opposed to stapling) and use a very simple saddle stitch with three holes in the spine. I have made a diagram of the thread journey below, where A, B and C represent the spine holes. The solid lines with arrows represent the direction of the thread on the exterior, and the broken lines with arrows represent the direction of the thread on the interior. Just as a reminder, the pages should be placed inside each other, as per the right side of my diagram.

This image shows the start, the first threads going into the centre hole. Please note, that though a large-eyed, fairly strong needle is necessary to hold 6-strand cotton (embroidery) thread, the needle should not be a fat needle, as used in leather binding as this will expand the binding holes and there is more risk of tearing the paper. Leave a few inches of thread outside the spine hole in order to tie a knot when the thread finishes its binding journey.

The thread appears in the centre of the chapbook.

The thread then follows the interior route to the bottom hole B (in fact it does not matter whether it goes to the top hole or the bottom, but just choose one consistently).

On the outside spine, the thread takes a long journey to the top hole C and goes to the interior back to A and out again to the exterior spine. Here one ensure that the long spine thread is in between the entry and exit threads before tying a simple knot or two. This will ensure that there is no floppy long thread on the spine: the exterior binding will appear the same as the interior except for the loose threads at entrance and exit points. 

On my books I decided to leave these threads at about 6 cm as a design feature, first tying knots in the thread ends to prevent separation of the strands.

Preparing to bind the chapbook

By request, my husband (artist James Hayes) made me a beautiful (all-powerful, almighty, awesome) awl for my birthday this year. He even made a holder for it to protect the sharp point -

and to protect me from the sharp point! I used to have an awl but it went AWOL some years ago, and last year when I did a lot of bookbinding I resolved to get another because I was fed up using pushpins! With the founding of Precariat Press in the spring of this year, I knew I'd be doing more bookbinding, so getting a new awl was mandatory. So when this gorgeous tool was made specially for me, I swooned!

Once I had decided on the concept, design, cover image & printing, the poems to be included and the layout (all of which I discussed here, here and here) the final step was to collate and bind. Collating all the pages together into booklets also required a lot of folding with my trusty bone folder.

I had a second mock-up book (from which I made corrections) and I measured out where the 3 binding holes would be placed and, after punching these holes used the individual pages as templates for the final books. I had decided early on that I would be doing a traditional 3-hole chapbook bind.

Once binding holes had been punched in all the chapbooks (it is an edition of 50), I was ready to start binding. I had picked up 6-strand cotton thread in a colour to match the cover some weeks ago. In next week's blog I will discuss the journey of the thread to bind the chapbooks.

life during lockdown part 4

For the month of August, I have been synopsising what I have been up to during lockdown. I have posted three other "life during lockdown" blogs here, here and here. I will return to more singularly themed blogs in September.

My exhibition, Liminal, opened at Tiny Cat Gallery earlier this week. I have to admit that the virtual launch was more fun than any of my previous "live" exhibitions. The cardboard box gallery is manned by tiny plastic cats and artist designer Lisa Cole, who is the curator of the gallery, creates elaborate and humorous narratives to go along with each of the pictures she posts.

At the beginning of the month, I attended the first of four Zoom workshops on felting. The workshops, held each Friday morning this month, are sponsored by the University of Atypical in Northern Ireland, and facilitated by artist felter, Niki Collier. I have been working in my kitchen, with my laptop perched on the cold stove. This is my set-up for the first workshop.

This month Angel City Review published two of my poems in Issue 9. This literary journal is freely downloadable from their website. Below is one of the poems, which is relevant as I type this on the eve of the fourth anniversary of my Mum's death.

Grief
I felt it in my body
Months before I knew
My mother's fatal diagnosis.
Something was wrong.

The pain grew in my foot.
From heel to ball
It would not move forward
Into the oncoming grief.
Knowing what lay ahead,
Both feet rebelled
And refused to take me there.

After the funeral
The pain in my chest grew -
A series of respiratory malfunctions,
Brochitis, tracheitis, sinusitis,
The common cold.
A plague on my house.
Constant coughing,
Chest tight, heart palpitating -
A permanent heart ache.

This grief is cellular.
Pain moves in and out,
Osmotic, changing density
Till every pore weeps.
The sadness of my body
Cannot recover that
Which is forever lost,
Yet stumbles on.

My feet still hurt.
Often I am numb.
My limp is barely perceptible
To unaware strangers
These days as I
Wheeze forward slowly
One tiny step at a time.

I was pleased to find out, at the beginning of the month, that my proposal for the Aos Dara/Umha Aois combined symposium had been accepted. For this year's symposium, due to lockdown, the organisers required that participating artists spend some time in Tomnafinnoge Wood, an old oak forest, then create work in their own studios. Culture Night in September, will see the launch of an exhibition to include some of this year's work, as well as last year's work, at the Courthouse Arts Centre in Tinahely, which is near Tomnafinnoge Wood.

The day I spent at Tomnafinnoge was perfect! It was a dry, summer day and the woods were greenly gorgeous. I found this tree, which had obviously survived a lightning strike, to be of immense inspiration.

I loved the way the tangle of branches created a net-like canopy - some shade from a very hot sun that day!

One of the main points of my proposal was to create drawings where the paper is covered by graphite and one removes the graphite with an eraser. I have always thought this was a very sculptural way of drawing.

I also prepared some pages with black acrylic as I thought I would draw with white paint on them - kind of opposite to what I planned to do with the graphite as this would be an additive method rather than subtractive.

I also did not want to ignore colour and imagined doing some collages. Normally I create collages with scraps of paper for the purpose of occasion cards, as I blogged about here, here, here and here, but I realised these scraps of paper were not exactly artist quality. To rectify this, I decided to paint, with acrylics, a number of pages with colours that I expected to use in Tomnafinnoge collages. I will dedicate a future blog to some of the results of my work!

life during lockdown... Part 1

My teenager keeps saying to me "nothing has really changed for you" as I have generally continued with my my work in"business as usual" mode during this entire period of lockdown. Although I have missed the more social aspects of my life especially friends and my time at the weekly ceramics workshop at Signal Arts Centre, I have found myself to be continuously busy with my art & writing, keeping in touch with people by telephone, Zoom, letter, email, Whatsapp and Skype. Perhaps I could even be accused of being more diligent at maintaining social contacts!

But shortly after lockdown started in March, I finally decided it was a good time to self-publish my first chapbook of poems. The first step to doing this was the founding of Precariat Press. After a brainstorming session, my husband, artist James Hayes designed a logo for me. And so it began! I have blogged about this previously here.

In April, I was inspired by Austin Kleon's Instagram account; he was making daily zines and I wanted to know how to make them. Kleon and a number of other bookbinders who have posted on YouTube have given really simple instructions for zines that can be made, with folding and tearing (or cutting) from a standard page. I did my own experiments with larger pages and heavier materials and blogged about it here. For a zine with more pages, simply glue two or more together!

Every year I participate in the annual incognito fundraiser for the Jack & Jill Children's Foundation. Due to Covid19 this year, the fundraiser was solely online. Normally images are made available for perusal on the incognito website, and then they are shown over a 3 day period at a Dublin gallery in April. This year there was also going to be an exhibition at a Cork gallery in May. Instead, a way to both see and buy the work online was made available. The artworks are all postcard sized and cost the same amount (€50) with the name of the artist only being revealed to the buyer after payment is made. I think the Dublin offering sold out within 15 minutes. I had two pieces in the Dublin exhibition (a detail of one being on the farthest left row, second from top).

One of my pieces (I donated three) was in the Cork show, which I believe also sold out quite quickly. My collage is second from left, second row down. I have blogged about previous incognito fundraisers here, here, here, and here.

In May I did the compositional sketch, which I will have as a reference when working on another large painting, Knockeen, as part of my current series Memory Is My Homeland. I have blogged about the origins and previous work in this series here, here, here, here, here,  and here.

I was, of course, simultaneously working on the lino design for the cover of my poetry chapbook, which would be titled Home Sweet Home Goodbye. The design is based on a childhood farewell card I made for my grandparents when they were returning to Ireland after their first visit to Canada (where I was born and grew up). I did several blogs about the design origins and progress of the linoprint here, here and here.

While in lockdown, as well as making work, I continued to browse for "virtual" opportunities. I found it quite interesting that submitting images to exhibitions taking place on the likes of Instagram made it possible to submit internationally. I submitted an image of Room Mate, a recent work from the Memory Is My Homeland series to an Instagram exhibition open call for work created during lockdown which responded to certain words. I have blogged about this oilstick drawing here and here. It will be featured in the Do It Yourway Instagram exhibition on August 14. The words that I feel the work responds to are "hard", "soft", and "reflect". Certainly my reasons for those words are apparent when I blogged about the piece here.

I have also continued to submit written work in answer to specific calls or open reading periods. Dwell Time is a mental health organisation in the UK and they put out a call for written and/or visual work in response to the lockdown. As I had specifically written several poems on this theme, I fired them off and they were published both on the Dwell Time website and its FaceBook page. I subsequently posted them on my own social media pages. Here is one of the three.

In addition to writing, making artwork, virtually socialising and reading I have been totally enjoying virtual music gigs (John Otway, Josh Ritter, Lisa Hannigan), concert film streaming premieres (Iggy Pop, New Order, Nick Cave), poetry readings (Hollie McNish), theatre (The National Theatre UK, The Druid Theatre IRL, The Abbey IRL, and Stratford Festival Canada) and opera (The Met NYC). Early on in lockdown a friend sent me a link to someone who had posted links to education, sports, business resources, health and entertainment. This was extremely helpful and alerted me to many things which are being made available, at no charge, to help keep people sane during this trying time. That is how I was alerted to free streams of first-class theatre and opera. For me the most amazing event I was lucky to see was The Met's production of Philip Glass's opera Akhnaten. It was phenomenal and indescribable and for me, something that I never would have had the chance to experience if there hadn't been this lockdown!

printing chapbook covers

A lot of work went on before I was ready to print the chapbook covers, which you can see in previous blogs here (the initial sketch & press founding), here (the design origin story), here (design, lino-cutting & first test print), and here (creating the chapbook mock-up).

Last fall, I had mixed up a really nice colour using a bright pink ink and a blue ink from Speedball and tested the colour on another lino block, so I had a fair idea that I wanted to use this purply colour for my chapbook covers. Just as I was pulling out the inks and a jar to mix up a large batch, I found that I had already ordered a violet ink. When I looked at the ink I realised I did not have to do any mixing as this was indeed the colour I had in mind!

As I knew from last year's linoprinting, a heavy card "window" had to be custom made in order to facilitate relief printing on a regular flatbed press. In addition, the "window" was made to the size of the paper I was going to use for the covers so registration is automatic!

I was thrilled to start printing, and though my enthusiasm led to over-inking on the first print, everything else was going according to plan.

This is the first batch of prints drying on a blanket on the living room floor. I have borrowed an ancient book press from another artist friend and will flatten the covers when they have dried.

This is the third batch of prints, and I am quite happy with the results. My living room is fairly small, and the drying area takes up all the floor space, so with this in mind I have a schedule of printing in batches every couple of days.