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W B Yeats, a landscape exhibition.
Conor Gallagher
Brian McDonagh
John O'Connor
Mar 5th, 2015 To Mar 28th, 2015
The early summers of W.B Yeats’ life were spent in County Sligo. Memories of those times informed his poetry throughout his life.
As part of the Yeats 2015 celebrations, Hamilton Gallery invited three artists to explore the same idea of memory and the Sligo landscape, but from three differing life perspectives. Conor Gallagher is an artist born and raised in Sligo but currently lives in Dublin. Brian MacDonagh was raised in Dublin but moved to Sligo as a young man to Study fine art at Sligo IT and has lived here since. John O’Connor, most like Yeats, grew up in Dublin but spent his summer holidays in Sligo.
The resulting exhibition is informed in the first instance by the distinct voice of each artist. But it is also an intriguing diffracted response to the subject Sligo landscape, which flows from the differing entry point each artist has had into Sligo as a backdrop to their lives and imaginations.
Peripheral Vision
Bernadette Kiely
Apr 2nd, 2015 To May 2nd, 2015
Peripheral vision : all that is visible to the eye outside the central area of focus.
Bernadette's large scale atmospheric paintings and drawings are rooted in prolonged observation of little explored, peripheral areas of the county where she lives and also in the wider countryside. She is known for her rich imagery, focusing on the transformations that occur within the landscape as a result of the elemental forces of water, air and fire. Through her exploration of the seasonal and organic life patterns of the natural world she chronicles the passage of time and the ageless quality of the landscape. From this engagement with place she makes work with a deep metaphoric resonance relating to our experience of time, possibility and mortality
Dreams of Landscape
Mary Lohan
May 7th, 2015 To Jun 6th, 2015
"In W.B. Yeats’ poetry, the landscape is just there. He conjures it up with barely a word or two, often pinning it down with a sound as much as with an image or a place-name. ‘The humming sea’, the ‘bee-loud glade’ the ‘inarticulate moan’, ‘the wailing hounds’: all are as crisp and vivid as ‘wintry strands’, yellow leaves ‘like faint meteors in the gloom’, cormorants who ‘shiver on their rocks’, the ‘shadowy hazel grove’, or the ‘rocky shore and rushy fen.’ The words open up meaning rather than closing it down. Equally, paintings can create spaces that we are able to inhabit, imaginatively. They are not constrained by the details of any one story. Yet it can seem as if we know these spaces well, that they are our own spaces, evoking our personal and communal histories." - Mary Lohan
Of this Place - contemporary visual reflections from Yeats country
Nuala Clarke
Conor Gallagher
Kate MacDonagh
Brian McDonagh
Leonora Neary
Cormac O'Leary
Bettina Seitz
Michael Wann
Jul 2nd, 2015 To Aug 31st, 2015
Acknowledging the wealth of inspiration afforded to William Butler Yeats by the landscape of County Sligo, each member of this collective of eight Sligo-based artists individually explores the nature of the relationship between their own work and these same environs. The exhibition makes for an interesting exploration of the many planes of landscape, from the geographical to the emotional to the metaphysical. The group bring together their own findings to mark a collective appreciation of these many geographies, presenting a homage of sorts to the landscape of Sligo. With each artist's experience as individual as their own practice, this body of work is a visual meditation upon the manifold ways that our surrounding landscape is absorbed, seeping into our creative consciousness. Writer Brian Leyden has liaised with the artists, stimulating a dialogue and locating the work in its imaginative terrain for the exhibitions accompanying catalogue.
Impressions and Portraits of W.B. Yeats
Invited Artists
Jul 3rd, 2015 To Aug 29th, 2015
'Impressions and Portraits of W.B. Yeats' is an exhibition by Invited Artists, which celebrates the 150th anniversary of the birth of W.B. Yeats. Hamilton Gallery approached over 100 of Ireland's leading and emerging contemporary artists with an invitation to create a 20 X 20 cm canvas inspired by the work of the poet and his work. Accordingly “Impressions and Portraits of W.B. Yeats” exhibition is a prescient comprehensive artistic response to the work of one of our literary giants in the 75 years since his death. Through the works contributed the vibrant legacy and resonance Yeats evinces at the cutting edge of contemporary Irish culture, has been captured. “Impressions and Portraits of W.B. Yeats” is a fascinating insight into how the work of a great radical artist can influence and inform the undercurrents of subsequent generations.
Mr. Yeats and Us
Graham Gingles
Lisa Gingles
Sep 3rd, 2015 To Sep 26th, 2015
"We both admire the work of W.B. Yeats, his use of language, his eloquence and the imagery in his poems. While one should not underestimate the importance of this imagery, however, and the many ways that one might use or respond to it, we have both found ourselves intrigued by other aspects of the man; his relationship with his family, his more esoteric pursuits and his extraordinary interest in spiritualism and the occult. We are also curious as to how, given his nationalist inclination, he rationalised his romantic, 'Celtic Twilight' view of Ireland with the reality of the country at that time. We hope that we can tease out an alternative dimension to the life of Mr Yeats, thereby complementing the more traditional view." Lisa & Graham Gingles
TONN
Gwen O'Dowd
Oct 1st, 2015 To Oct 31st, 2015
Tonn, the Irish word for wave.
"These paintings describe a moment. A moment suspended in time. TONN describes that moment forcefully, fiercely, fleetingly." -Gwen O'Dowd.
Icons and Inscapes
John Behan
Ger Sweeney
Nov 5th, 2015 To Nov 28th, 2015
As the sculptor in this show I exhibit Famine Ships and boats with Voyage as the theme – they symbolize the journey of life in the human collective sense, as I view life as a journey from birth to death – the impulse is engendered by a dialogue within myself, the internal inscape from where my creativity flows – the sculpture emanating from these thoughts and are allied to my sense of The Famine in Ireland, (1845 – 1852), as the most important episode in Ireland.s history – I try to address it through bronze sculpture using symbolism and expressionism to achieve my final effects as statements of art. John Behan - 2015
Painting for me is a sort of dialogue, an enquiry, themes recur, evolve and become points of departure.
A recurring narrative in my work is a sense of landscape, or rather a distilled memory or echo, to be explored through the process of painting. More recently an abstracted form/figure motif has become apparent. The balancing of strategy and chance is a key element as the work evolves. The referents can become metaphors for an expression through colour and gesture, allowing the painting to be realized in abstract terms, and invoking the internal realm of the inscape. Ger Sweeney - 2015
Invited Artists Exhibition
Invited Artists
Dec 10th, 2015 To Jan 30th, 2016
