“St Brigid’s Well”
97 invited women artists respond to a specially commissioned poem by Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin.
Nanchizi Art Museum | Beijing | February 1st 2024
St Brigid is one of Irelands three patron saints, alongside St Patrick and St Columba. St Brigid was an influential figure in the early Irish church, an abbess and female bishop. Before Christianity in Irish mythology Brigid featured as a powerful female god.
Nanchizi Art Museum Beijing
In Ireland we now mark February 1st, St Brigid’s Day, the first day of spring as a new national holiday. It is also a celebration of women and creativity, an initiative created and pioneered by Ireland’s Foreign Ministry and promoted by Irish Embassies and Consulates around the world.
St. Brigid’s Well is the third invited artists exhibition produced by Hamilton Gallery to coincide with the new Lá Fhéile Bríde / St. Brigid’s Day celebration of women and creativity.
We are truly honoured that one of Irelands leading poets Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin agreed to the commissioning of a new poem St. Brigid’s Well as the inspiration for the exhibition. The ancient tradition of seeking blessings and cures from the water of sacred wells is observed and renewed against an urban landscape, and through the stories and phrases of young women overheard or encountered in the poem. Eiléan’s poem was circulated among all the participating artists who have created these paintings in response to it.
We are deeply grateful to the women artists who have contributed so enthusiastically to St. Brigid’s Well and to our previous Imbolc / Lá Fhéile Bríde exhibitions and cultural initiatives. We would also like to thank the Irish Foreign Ministry for their continuing support for this exhibition series and its inclusion in their Lá Fhéile Bríde celebratory programme which this year marks 1500 years since the birth of St Brigid.
It goes without saying that we are delighted this exhibition will be shown in its entirety at the stunning Nanchizi Art Museum in Beijing. We offer our profound gratitude to Irelands embassy in Beijing, Irelands Ambassador to China Ann Derwin and all her embassy staff for making this possible. We also acknowledge and sincerely thank Vincent Deng of Loligo Art Space Beijing, for his invaluable experience and curatorial expertise in presenting this exhibition.
The Poem
The Exhibition
St Brigid’s Well
Catalogue foreword to her poem and the exhibition it inspired by Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin.
Poet Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin
Early in June 2021 just wriggling free of lockdown, I set out to find traces of St Brigid in and near County Kildare. I knew where to look for one St Brigid’s Well, having visited it on a cold February day many years before, an outing that quickly culminated in several hot whiskeys in a pub in the town. But I was searching for more signs of her presence, and for the people to whom the holy well had meaning. On this warm bright summer morning, the expedition seemed promising from the start, but I could not have anticipated how many surprises and mysteries I would encounter in the space of two days wandering around the level plains.
Stories, phrases, conversations overheard. Three young women planning a wedding that was to take place somewhere in England. A grandmother watching her grandsons jumping over the streams that flowed out from a well in Kildare. A well at Rathbride, that belonged once to St Brigid, but has now become the focus of a cult of Father Moore, and credited with curing several diseases – I met a man who pressed a bottle of water on me and told me he had been cured of two brain tumours.
In the poem I wrote I couldn’t cram all those details inside its boundaries. I did manage to include a couple of encounters, a glimpse of a nesting swan, and a snatch of a children’s game. They all circled loosely around the image of the well and the fame of Brigid, remote but radiating power still after a millennium and a half. Welling up out of history.
How striking then to find such a plenty of images in these artists’ work, which flow from the same source, in all their variety and strangeness. Dark with mystery or challengingly bright. I find it slightly bewildering, how freshly they remind me of those two crowded days. When I was passive, merely looking and listening, and astonished at how much there was to see and hear if one allowed it to happen.
The artists have made something quite new in every case. They have heard an echo in the words, the echo perhaps of what was not said, and they have made images of what cannot be seen. Water is the perfect image of what cannot be represented. Transparent, sinking into dust and sand and soil, thirsted and sought for but only made visible by its contexts: its courses and wells, the sky and the faces it reflects, as it dissolves and submerges and changes everything. Water is like everything and nothing, and the triumph of the image maker is capturing and revealing it.
Here too are hiding places and hidden secrets, dawns and twilights and the multiplicity of light, places and their weight of history. I can only salute the fine invention, and the skill, that displays so many unseen mysteries. Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin
water mixed oil on titanium white
30cm x 30cm x 2cm
unframed