Hamilton Gallery Update - July 2022

WELCOME to the July Newsletter

Summer is officially here, and just in time for our new solar panels to take full advantage of the long days, even if there isn’t as much sunshine as we would have hoped for!

We’re striving every year to be more eco-conscious here at No. 4 Castle Street - all our lighting stock is LED format since 2017 - and it is certainly worth all the upheaval and disruption of the last couple of months to get the roof completely replaced and insulated and the panels installed. It’s a small contribution to a more sustainable future for the next generation.

We would like to say a massive thanks to all our contributing artists and visiting public for their forbearance and understanding during the renovation.

Our big news for July is, of course, that we are delighted to welcome Cairde Visual to Hamilton Gallery for the first time, showing now until 29 July. In its 7th edition, this dynamic and vibrant open exhibition will feature a 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. It has been our pleasure to support the exhibition each year by offering an award of a solo or duo exhibition.

The most recent winner of the Cairde Visual / Hamilton Gallery Award back in 2019, was artist Heidi Wickham, whose exhibition ‘Inside the Circle’ Exploring Cold Spaces opened here with us in 2021 due to the pandemic.

“Winning The Hamilton Award was a huge surprise for me, I was in Scotland and received a text! After making some pieces, the pandemic halted everything and rather than mothball the prepared work, I started a whole new project in early 2021. It's a beautiful gallery and I've had the pleasure of exhibiting in group shows over fifteen years, but a solo is a completely different animal. Hamilton Gallery has been very supportive of both local and international artists, with the highest level of professionalism and kindness. The resulting body of work combined my passion for paint and sculpture, creating an immersive experience with sound and texture. Everything that was for sale, sold and enabled me to buy a two week trip some four hundred kms inside the Arctic Circle on the borders of Norway and Russia. That's what art can do.”– Heidi Wickham

The organisers of Cairde Sligo Arts Festival and all of us here at Hamilton Gallery wish to thank this year’s Cairde Visual selection panel Aidan Crotty, Marilin North and Lorna Watkins

Three significant awards are linked to CAIRDE VISUAL again this year, and we’re delighted to announce this years winners are:

Anna Leask - 36 Views of #BenBulben
Winner of The Model - Artist Residency Award

Brian Mc Donagh - The Nymphs of da Gai
Winner of the Cosgrove’s Delicatessen -€1,000 cash award

Helen Merrigan Colfer - Temple vi (Flutter)
Winner of the Hamilton Gallery Award

The opening reception of the Cairde Visual was held at City Hall on Saturday 2 July, where the winners of the awards were announced.

Tara McGowan, Deputy Mayor Rosaleen O’Grady, Brian Mc Donagh, Anna Leask and Martina Hamilton

Martina Hamilton, Lorna Watkins and Barra Cassidy

Martina Hamilton with Helen Merrigan Colfer’s winning sculpture, Temple vi (Flutter)

Our annual Yeats themed exhibition, Lapis Lazuli has given way to Cairde Visual 2022, however if you’ve not managed to see it yet, the exhibition will return for an extended run immediately after Cairde Visual, to coincide with the 63rd International Yeats Summer School, which this year runs from Thursday 28 July – Friday 5th August, and is the longest running Literary Summer School in the world!

As a keepsake for Lapis Lazuli, and for Yeats Day 2022 we’ve produced a 4th edition of ‘Poem in your Pocket’ series, featuring a handful of W B Yeats poems, including Lapis Lazuli, which you can pick up for free in the gallery, to muse over with a coffee, after you’ve seen Cairde Visual or Lapis Lazuli when it returns.

We were also thrilled that the #YeatsDay communal poetry celebration this year trended up to No. 1 on Twitter in Ireland on the 13 June – a great achievement for this annual Yeats Society initiative which is sponsored and co-produced by Hamilton Gallery each year.

Finally, in May we had a surprise visit from His Excellency Akhilesh Mishra, Ambassador of India to Ireland and his wife Mrs. Reeti Mishra. They are both keen advocates of the arts and we hope that their visit will inspire and result in future arts collaborations between Ireland and India.

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