Hamilton Gallery countdown to our St Brigid’s Day exhibition at 12 Star Gallery, Europe House London, is underway.
The exhibition will open to the public on January 23rd and run until February 1st, St Brigid’s Day.
In the run up to our opening night in London we will bring you a daily blog with a selection of the 90 works by Irish women artists that will be shown at the exhibition.
We will include interviews and insights from the artists involved as well as other news and developments relating to events at the 12 Star Gallery in London which will occur in compliment to the exhibition.
In today’s blog we also include the poem St Brigid’s Day 1989 written by Leland Bardwell.
This is the poem that was circulated to the 90 women artists participating in this exhibition.
mixed media collage on fabric
30 cm x 30 cm
unframed
Exhibition Complete. Please Contact Gallery before purchasing as this piece may no longer be available
acrylic, pencil and charcoal on canvas
unframed
20 cm x 20 cm
Exhibition Complete. Please Contact Gallery before purchasing as this piece may no longer be available
bronze
1 of 5
Exhibition Complete. Please Contact Gallery before purchasing as this piece may no longer be available
Poet and Author Leland Bardwell with a very young Neil Jordan and Dermot (middle) Dublin 1970s.
St Brigid’s Day 1989
By Leland Bardwell
The women’s calls
go up across the lake.
On this still day their voices
whip the air – staccato notes
behind the reed-hushed margin.
Winter is writing out its past
before its time
while they trail the shore
anxious to garner reeds
for Brigid’s Cross, bending
in all their different flesh-shapes
like shoppers to admire a bud,
an early primrose, a robin
shrilly calling to its mate.
Although I gather rushes
like these strolling women
I’m made conscious
of the decades that divide us
and that I should be celebrating
Brigid in her strength
of fruitfulness and learning.
I can only offer her the satchel of these years,
I too, will make a cross, for luck and irony.
Amongst the witches coven I will raise my glass
so my children’s children’s children
will gather rushes for her turning.
Organised by Hamilton Gallery, Sligo, Ireland, with the support of the Irish Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade and the Irish Embassy to Great Britain.
