Hamilton Gallery Update - May 2022

It’s great to be back to normal after a long couple of years of unprecedented disruption. However, despite the pandemic, we were as busy as ever, keeping the show on the road, with new exhibitions in the gallery and online, as well as creating new relationships with other artistic, literary, and diplomatic institutions both here in Ireland and abroad. We catch-up on all that’s happened over the past two years.

Every year, we welcome the opportunity to contribute to St. Brigid’s Day & International Woman’s Day celebrations in February, and to commemorate Yeats Day in June, by curating our signature group exhibitions for invited artists. We continued with our signature group exhibitions for invited artists throughout the pandemic. If you missed them, all our past exhibitions are archived on our website.

The Eva Gore-Booth exhibition was opened at the Museum of Literature Ireland (MoLI) by Sabina Higgins in February 2020, but due to the pandemic the exhibition was cut short, and we were unable to show it here at Hamilton Gallery until February 2021.

“I walk through the long schoolroom questioning…” W B Yeats

Amongst School Children, opened at Hamilton Gallery in June 2020, timed to coincide with Ireland’s Decade of Commemoration. As with each of the group exhibitions, the 115 artists were asked to respond to the paralleled social, cultural, and political hopes and aspirations embodied in W B Yeats’ great works, with a contemporary visual interpretation.

Mac Donagh, Kate - 'How can you tell the dancer from the dance’ watercolour on Kozo (From the exhibition “Among School Children”)

“SURELY among a rich man’s flowering lawns…” W B Yeats

Meditation in the time of Civil War, a poignant choice of poem to mark 100 years of Ireland’s Independence, opened here in Hamilton Gallery in June 2021, to coincide with Yeats Day.

Cormac O’Leary - The heart's grown brutal from the fare oil on board . From the exhibition “Meditations in Time of Civil War”

In February this year, a specially commissioned poem entitled St. Brigid’s Well by the award-winning poet Eilean Ni Chuilleanain, was the subject of our group exhibition, running over St. Brigid’s day and beyond. To complement the exhibition, a short film was commissioned by the Department of Foreign Affairs and produced by Hamilton Gallery, featuring Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin being interviewed by author and journalist Susan MacKay about her life and work. It was streamed on ToBeIrish.ie as part of Lá Fhéile Bríde celebration by the Department of Foreign Affairs.

Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin reading poetry by her friend Leland Bardwell during our very first at our Lá Fhéile Bríde exhibition at Twelve Star Gallery in London.

Running alongside the group shows, we were delighted to present solo exhibitions by:

Bram Stoker, Angela Hackett, Heidi Wickham, Ian Calder, Carolyn Mulholland and Martina Hamilton.

Opening 21 May: Lapis Lazuli | 17 Invited Artists | respond to W B Yeats iconic poem

“I have heard that hysterical women say…” W B Yeats

The Lapis Lazuli exhibition will be part of the Yeats Day celebrations in Sligo on June 13th and will run throughout the summer. Participating artists include Daniel Chester, Tom Climent, Gerry Davis, Diarmuid Delargy, Susan Dubsky, Joe Dunne, Graham Gingles, Bríd Higgins Ní Chinnéide, Brian Mc Donagh, Nick Miller, Gwen O’Dowd, Sorca O’Farrell, Geraldine O’Reilly, Janet Pierce, Sarah Quick, Emma Stroude and Tracy Sweeney.

Lapis Lazuli

Photo: Heidi Wickham, Marlin North, Lorna Watkins, and Cormac O'Leary (Cairde Visual organisers) with Martina Hamilton (Hamilton Gallery)

We are thrilled and delighted Hamilton Gallery is the host venue for Cairde Visual throughout July 2022. Now in its 7th edition, this open exhibition will again feature a compelling and dynamic range of work from both Irish and international artists across all media. Cairde Visual is an artist-led initiative which has been founded and facilitated by Sligo based artists. Significant awards associated with Cairde Visual include Cosgrove’s Delicatessen (€1,000 cash award), The Model Arts Centre (Artist Residency Award) and Hamilton Gallery (Solo or duo exhibition)

‘Crystals of Time’ - Michelle McKeown

A personal reflection on the experience of durée and still-life in the paintings of Angela Hackett

‘What guides poetic thinking is the conviction that although the living is subject to the ruin of time, the process of decay is at the same time a process of crystallisation’ - Hannah Arendt, ‘The Pearl Diver’

In this exhibition of recent paintings spanning 2019 to 2021, Angela Hackett admits the viewer into the sequestered space of the artist’s studio where, following the tradition of the painted still-life, she observes scenes of contemplative affect encountered at its very edges.

Sunny Morning Hours - Angela Hackett

While working within her inner-city studio on Bedford Street, Belfast, the subject of Hackett’s paintings return time and again to the same quiet corner of the room, overlooked by a towering, period window. While we enter these intimately scaled works through a narrow depth of field, demarcated by a sill adorned with a small spray of carnations and ornamental bust, the space in Hackett’s canvases appear nonetheless expansive, brimming with prismatic colour and mosaic-like form. It is at the point of this threshold, by the tall airy window looking onto the bustling city-street, that Hackett observes the advancing hours of the day as it prints its projections of sunlight and shade across exterior and interior alike.

A recurring motif in each of the studio scenes is also the window’s attendant tree. At times a dominating, anthropomorphic presence as in ‘Winter Daydream’, where its branches rise up, synapse-like, setting the frosted panes ablaze. At other times it figures as an indexical trace, a creaturely shadow lurching across the ledge in late evening sun, (‘Slow comes the hour’). It is hard to deny that what we perceive in each of Hackett’s still-life canvases is not so much a world arrested; fixed perpetually as nature morte, but rather shimmering realms of vibrant luminosity; tableaux vivants where air and space itself becomes invigorated with an irradiating materiality.

Winter Daydream - Angela Hackett

Throughout this current body of work Hackett engages explicitly with classical themes in painting, in particular the Albertian metaphor of painting as window onto the world, the implicit subject of her work might be thought of more accurately as la durée or duration. It was the French philosopher, Henri Bergson, who developed the concept of la durée to describe the internal, subjective experience of time’s passing. Bergson’s theory observes that no two successive moments in time are identical to one another, for each moment inheres within it the memory of the moment that has just gone before. This movement from moment to moment, according to Bergson, is not divisible in our external, objective reality and can only be accessed through qualitative, subjective experience of the world. Bergson concludes that it is specifically through our qualitative experience of time as la durée that free will is exercised.

Garden Bouquet Variation l - Angela Hackett

Hackett’s decision to position her gaze and her palette at the very boundary where studio and street intersect appears to emulate the dynamical condition of Bergson’s thinking subject, poised at the threshold between two distinct experiences of time. The world of the bustling street might be considered analogous to the experience of objective, external reality - determinate, measurable existence, following the rhythm of clock-time or Chronos.

The contemplative space of the studio on the other hand, denotes qualitative, subjective experience akin to Bergson’s durée. The studio is a realm of inward reflection and spontaneous action - an arena for the creative act that ultimately orientates us in the direction of free will and instinctual self-expression. And perhaps therein lies the radical function of Angela Hackett’s work, quietly imparted in her profoundly meditative canvases.

Glass Reflection - Angela Hackett

Like Hannah Arendt’s pearl diver who plumbs the depths of tradition in search of the “rich and the strange”, Hackett deep dives not only into the tradition of painting but also into the rich internal world of the self and her own duration, bringing to the surface pearls of creative truth for our delight and contemplation.

Michelle McKeown, July 2021

Michelle McKeown is an Irish Visual Artist currently undertaking doctoral study in painting and feminist theory at Ulster University, Belfast.

Meditations in time of Civil War | 125 Invited Artists

Sunday June 13th 2021 / Yeats Day

Susan O’Keeffe, Director of The Yeats Society, opens Hamilton Gallery’s seventh invited artists exhibition thematically drawing upon a major poem by W B Yeats as part of Sligo’s #YeatsDay celebrations.

Set in the context of Irelands Decade of Commemoration this series of exhibitions are in complement to the work of the Yeats Society who run the Yeats International Summer School, Yeats Day and #YeatsDay . The exhibition also forms part of Sligo’s Tread Softly… festival programme

“Meditations in Time of Civil War” comprises an individual work from each of 125 invited artists.

The full text of the poem, along with the foreword to the exhibition catalogue, written by the director of The Yeats Society, Susan O’Keeffe follows the images below.

Meditations in Time of Civil War / Hamilton Gallery Sunday June 13th - August 28th 2021

Meditations in Time of Civil War

Introduction by Susan O’Keeffe, Director, The Yeats Society

We are closed in, and the key is turned
On our uncertainty;

The gift of poetry is its capacity to shake, comfort and question the world in which we live. It has done so since humans discovered a way to make, and make sense of, written marks; messages which endure through the ages.

William Butler Yeats made a conscious decision to be part of that grand tradition, to be a poet, a man of marks, somehow divining as a teenager that poetry would endure as his medium, able to embrace and examine those mortal challenges, even as they changed during his life. And in 1922, when he wrote Meditations in Time of Civil War it was a time for change, for the poet and for Ireland. He had married five years earlier and now had two children. The horrors of World War I had ended but their shadow remained. And Ireland’s moving, from colony of the British Empire to a nascent republic, was turbulent and traumatic, raw and real. As only civil war can be.

Of all changes, bloodshed creates a deep mark; the moment between life and death. Yet Yeats never wrote directly about the years of bloodshed he had lived through, never permitting himself to appear to glorify war or sentimentalise death. Instead, this lengthy work, made up of seven pieces, is a challenging distillation, drawn from the changes confronting him, while rooted in the constant questions of human frailty, human error and the unchanging passage of time.

In these seven interlocking poems, the poet passes from the certainty of the world he knew and understood and the certainty he had created for himself, to a new, more fragile, speculative state, where familiar symbols and realities now have no place or resonance. Within this, he weaves his first-hand account of the bridge at his home, the tower, Thoor Ballylee being blown up in the civil war; his kitchen flooded as a result. Yeats also tells of the tower itself, of its sense of permanence and endurance as he climbs the winding stair to the top to see the ‘mist that is like blown snow’ – the immediate reminder once again of the contradicting impermanence of life.

No surprise then that this poem collection has borne such a broad and deep range of interpretation. Each artist has meditated on the work, seeking out the line, the words, a picture or symbol to create a new journey through the complexity of thoughts woven by the master poet. And a new medium in which to express that discernment.

Each work draws out and distils something precious; a fragment, a flash of colour, a new longing, a silence or a vague memory. And together, their collective work is a gift to us the viewers, of new ways of seeking old truths, a new set of marks; hieroglyphs from this age, bearing witness to the marks that went before, all integral to the story of our being.

Susan O’Keeffe, Director, Yeats Society Sligo

Meditations In Time of Civil War Ancestral Houses.jpg

Gillard, Medbh - Salmagundi Anima Mundi mixed media on canvas

Meditations In Time of Civil War My House.jpg

Mulholland, Carolyn - 'Meditations in Tme of Civil War' acrylic on canvas

Meditations In Time of Civil War My Table.jpg

Quick, Sarah - 'I must nourish dreams' oil on canvas

Meditations In Time of Civil War My Descendants.jpg

O'Farrell, Sorca - 'Nothing but stillness can remain.......' charcoal, indian ink & pastel €480 .jpg

Meditations In Time of Civil War The Road at my Door.jpg

Clarke, Nuala Everything and Nothing acrylic on board

Meditations In Time of Civil War Phantoms.jpg

Bri de, Orla - 'The Stare's Nest' bronze unique

View The exhibition

Inside The Circle - Exploring Cold Spaces by Heidi Wickham | Reopening Hamilton Gallery to the public

Saturday June 3rd 2021.

A long way back in the summer of 2019, Artist Heidi Wickham won the Hamilton Gallery / Cairde Visual prize. The opportunity of a solo exhibition that flowed from that award was initially scheduled to take place in 2020, but as we all understand, global events intervened in that arrangement.

It is with the greatest of pleasure that Hamilton Gallery re-opens to the public today, Saturday June 5th, with Inside The Circle - Exploring Cold Spaces by Heidi Wickham. We are delighted to have such a wonderful exhibition in place to welcome everyone back into our public gallery space that has been quiet for so long. The same reopening’s - reawakening’s even - of public art spaces will be taking place in galleries across the country this weekend and in the coming weeks.

There’s possibly no more ideally themed an exhibition than Heidi’s, to gradually re-introduce people to our public art space. As the CAIRDE Sligo Arts Festival Director Tara McGowan, writes in her introduction to the exhibition below “…for an exhibition that is so multi-faceted; the feeling here is very much one of quiet meditation.”

We hope visitors to the gallery will enjoy this opportunity to step anew into that world of quiet meditation and engagement with art, via the inspirational art works Heidi has created for this exhibition. - Martina Hamilton

Covid19 restrictions do not permit indoor public gatherings. Accordingly what follows is the address by Tara McGowan, Director, Cairde Sligo Arts Festival written for the launch of Heidi Wickham’s exhibition

L-R Tara McGowan Director of CAIRDE Sligo Arts Festival, artist Heidi Wickham and Martina Hamilton

Introduction to Heidi Wickham’s Exhibition Inside The Circle - Exploring Cold Spaces by CAIRDE Sligo Arts Festival Director Tara McGowan

In walking around Heidi’s exhibition, Into the Circle – Exploring Cold Spaces, I feel like I have been transported - literally moved into a completely different world than the one I had been inhabiting just moments before. It feels like an invitation to play, to explore, to take time out, to come on an adventure. I feel in equal measures giddy euphoria and restorative calm.

I first lay my eyes on ‘Bears & Dogs’ and beside it ‘Seal Pup’. I love the imaginative use of found objects in art – the possibilities of something new or a new idea which can emerge from something that someone else has deemed to throw away or discard. The bears and dogs are crossing a rusty old bridge. What journey are they on? What brings them together? The wood which seems to be holding the decrepit bridge together itself looks like an ancient seal or maybe a whale or perhaps some pre-historic sea creature whose job it has been to keep this bridge aloft. The journey seems at once to be an important odyssey, a crossing from one world to another and at the same time a simple afternoon jaunt between unusual friends.

The seal pup, a mass of blubber; clumsy and awkward-looking on land. Its’ simple and naive form hiding its primitive features. Heidi tells me that it’s made from rubbish collected on beach walks; a bundle of plastic bottles formed and held together with scrim.

Next up is the series of ‘Inuit Face’ portraits, charcoal on wood; close up expressive portraits, somewhat intense. This Inuit tribe have been invited to witness the representation of their part of the world here in our little corner of the world. It really does feel like they are in the room.

Heidi says for this exhibition she has cherry picked some of her favourite pieces from the extreme north of the world; the people, the animals, the artefacts, the sounds. In so doing she is also sharing with us the multidisciplinary nature of her work. Known perhaps largely for her incredibly intuitive, deeply empathic and beautifully drawn charcoal & pastel representations of animals – also featured here with her Snow Bunnies and Bears; Heidi was first and foremost after graduating a sculptor. Following this she spent some time on life drawing. Many people will also be familiar with Heidi’s Toxic Dogs, Wasteland Group – a performance troop who have travelled to Body and Soul, Electric Picnic and more where costumes, head pieces, props and even vehicles are made from recycled materials.

All of these aspects and more come into play in this exhibition - and yet for an exhibition that is so multi-faceted; the feeling here is very much one of quiet meditation.

The Shaman’s Garland, made completely from found and natural materials and Moon over Fish both look like an invitation to a tribal ritual; something which might form an integral part of a collective gathering.

In amongst playful caribou pieces reminiscent of ancient cave drawings, or a primitive whale etching, we have the polar phone - an invitation to listen to a group of polar bears using an old fashioned black telephone on Icelandic fleece and archival recordings of ice bears. It can remind us of how connected we actually are – out of sight, needn’t be out of mind.

It seems playful but it’s also unusual for the bears to be crying out in this way – a cry for help perhaps? This exhibition certainly touches on environmental concerns but is far from didactic or preachy; it’s a natural, thoughtful consideration and musing; an homage to a world which obviously holds much fascination for the artist. An invitation to step out of your own world and glimpse another.

Heidi Wickham was the recipient of the Hamilton Gallery Award at Cairde Visual in 2019 and Into the Circle – Exploring Cold Spaces is the result of this award. I asked Heidi what receiving the award has meant to her. She spoke of being both delighted and gobsmacked; the importance as you spend years building and developing your career as an artist to feel this sense of validation and how much more meaningful it was that the award was for a solo exhibition in her home town. She spoke of the sense of pride she feels to be part of the creative tribe which makes Sligo what it is today and to be in The Hamilton Gallery which has over time developed an exquisite space for artists to share their work with the public.

Last week when I stepped inside a gallery for the first time in 15 months it was a truly joyous occasion and a privilege to wander around this richly textured, diverse exhibition – so expertly hung and displayed by the gallery. The exhibition will run until July 31st and I really recommend that people take the time out of their daily lives to visit the far north right here in the centre of Sligo town.

Cairde Sligo Arts Festival is grateful to Martina Hamilton and her wonderful team at Hamilton Gallery for their ever collaborative spirit and for creating and sharing this wonderful space with us. And to Heidi, sincere congratulations on winning the Hamilton Gallery Award and thank you for your incredibly tireless, inquisitive creative mind and for this invitation to take time out, to lose oneself. - Tara McGowan

“That’s no ordinary rabbit….” Heidi and Martina confront a deadly foe.