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.

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.