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“St Brigid’s Well”

97 invited women artists respond to a specially commissioned poem by Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin.

Official opening by Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin at 12 noon on Saturday 4th of Feb

In association with Lá Fhéile Bríde, A Celebration of Women and Creativity pioneered by the Irish Department of Foreign Affairs.

This exhibition features new artists and additional works to the 2022 iteration the viewing of which was curtailed due to COVID Restrictions

The Poem:

The Exhibition:

St Brigid’s Well is open in Hamilton Gallery from February 1st.

St Brigid’s Well

Catalogue foreword to her poem and the exhibition it inspired by 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