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National Craft Gallery, Kilkenny in partnership with Poetry Ireland and Solstice Arts Centre, Navan

kilkenny 2 Nov 2012 – 16 Jan 2013 | navan 9 Feb 2013 – 6 April 2013

Out Of the MarvellOus

curated by maureen kennelly & ann mulrooney

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cOntentsIntroduction Ann Mulrooney.................................................5

Introduction Maureen Kennelly........................................... 7

Images and Poems................................................................... 9

An Ancient Bond as Yet Unbroken Theo Dorgan....... 31

Biographies and statements................................................. 34

Credits........................................................................................ 39

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The act of collaboration is defined as a ‘working together’, generally to produce an artistic or intellectual outcome. In this sense, perhaps every exhibition could be labelled a collaboration, as by their nature they involve many people working together towards a successful outcome. This is particularly the case with Out of the Marvellous, and at every layer of the project: the poets and makers involved have worked together – either with each other or with the curators – to answer the challenge of the exhibition; Maureen and I, as co-curators, have also teased out and pulled together the many strands of the endeavor; and the various bodies involved – the National Craft Gallery, Solstice Arts Centre and Poetry Ireland, have also worked together to identify shared goals and aspirations.

Successful collaborations allow us to explore our shared ground – but more importantly, they encourage us to learn and expand, through the process of working with others. We are very grateful for the generosity of engagement of all those involved in bringing this cross-disciplinary project to fruition – sincere thanks to the makers and writers involved, Belinda Quirke and the team at Solstice, Joseph Woods and the team at Poetry Ireland, to Lorelei Harris of RTÉ for use of the recordings of Seamus Heaney, and to all those at the Crafts Council of Ireland and beyond who were involved in this production.

ann mulrooney Kilkenny, 2012

introduction

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“...as the poet, like a master potter, slowly shapes on his word wheel the given clay into a vase, an urn, a bowl and (effortlessly mixing dulce with utile) glazes it with living colour”. From a review by poet Eamon Grennan of Seamus Heaney’s collection Human Chain

Out of the Marvellous is an exhibition of work by some of Ireland’s foremost makers and poets (the title is taken from Seamus Heaney’s poem ‘Clonmacnoise’). Just as the best poetry can create moments of epiphany in the reader, so too can the finest objects stir in the observer feelings of pure emotion and understanding. This show seeks to trace the connections between both art forms, through an exploration of work by Sonja Landweer, Seamus Heaney, Angela O’Kelly, Gerard Smyth, Frances Lambe, Derek Mahon, Joe Hogan, Anne Michaels, Vona Groarke and Cóilín Ó Dubhghaill.

It strikes me that there is a wonderful kinetic energy, a kind of sprung coil sensation, present in the way poets and makers work, and I believe that there is an intriguing texture to some of the best examples from both worlds. Manifestations of both art forms allow us ways of looking at the world; these are often wonderful glimpses that can make for epiphanies of meaning and understanding and excite pure emotion in the observer. This show seeks to explore work by makers who can directly trace some of their work back to poetic influences and those whose work we admire of course. Language is often a channel to some sort of understanding of the world and objects can also very much provide this too - I’m thinking here a little of WG Sebald’s line ‘things know more about us than we know about them’. There is great wisdom to be found in some of the finest poetry and craft.

There is also an incredible sense of humility and honesty present in the way that makers and poets work – and simplicity and sophistication is equally evident in the way that each of these artists make their work. They continue to inspire a deep sense of wonder in us.

To have assembled these five pairings here is a great honour and it has been an enormous pleasure working with all of these artists. We hope that you will enjoy this show as much as we have enjoyed putting it together.

maureen kennelly Kilkenny, 2012

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A Decorative Art For Angela O’Kelly

For the contours you fashion in your decorative art, you turn to the hills of Saggart where the heat of the night is the heat of the stars. But further back, as a child, did you look at the Chinese lantern, the paper rose? At portraits from the Elizabethan age – the Tudor ruff worn by Shakespeare in his Bard of Avon pose.

The paper that you twist and coax into many shapes, speaks its own language; so has no need of Latin words, Greek or Sanskrit. No Gaelic either or Egyptian hieroglyphs, no sweet phrase from holy psalms. The paper that you coil and stretch, flex and clench into necklace, bangle, bracelet, has hidden knots, rhythms for the eye – like the wings of moth and butterfly.

gerard smyth

angela o’kellyFurther from their Source Printed text, felt, palladium leaf, dyed paper, yarn

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The Things We Keep

The things we keep are not the things we need: the red flag and porcelain horse. A calendar out of date since John Lennon was shot. Those heaps that grow in the attic and the garden shed: schoolbooks of the old curriculum, the winner’s cup we refuse to relinquish, a broken statue in salvaged shards; black vinyl discs – each one with a groove where the gramophone needle got stuck or skipped. A carpenter’s box with carpenter’s tools, a stack of cards from anniversaries that added one more year to a love affair, a marriage, a lost cause. Soft toys reported missing long ago. The Kodak camera bought with summer money – a roll of film locked behind its shutter holding secrets we’ll never know.

gerard smyth

angela o’kellyLost Printed text, paper, yarn, felt, platinum leaf

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Purism

The wind orchestrates its theme of loneliness and the rain has too much glitter in it, yes.

They are like words, the wrong ones, insisting I listen to sense. But I too am obstinate.

I have white walls, white curtained windows. What need have I of the night’s jet-black, outlandish ornament?

What I am after is silence in proportion to desire

the way music plumbs its surfaces or straight words do the air between them.

I begin to learn the simple thing

burning through to an impulse at once lovely and given to love

that will not be refused.

vona groarke

cóilín ó dubhghaillRitual 5 Copper

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Bodkin

A word from a dream, or several, spiked on it like old receipts. Something akin to a clavicle’s bold airs; a measurement of antique land; a keepsake brooch on a quilted silk bodice; a firkin, filled to the brink with mead or milk; a bobbin spinning like a back-road drunken bumpkin; borrowed, half-baked prophecies in a foreign tongue; a debunked uncle’s thin bloodline; a Balkan fairy-story, all broken bones poked inside out; a bespoke book blacked in with Indian ink; a bobolink in a buckeye or a bare-backed oak; a barren spindle, choked ankle-high with lichen; a fistful of ball-bearings dropped on a bodhrán. Body skin. Kith and kin. Other buckled things.

vona groarke

cóilín ó dubhghaillRitual 2, Ritual 4 Copper

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Achill

I lie and imagine a first light gleam in the bay After one more night of erosion and nearer the grave, Then stand and gaze from the window at break of day As a shearwater skims the ridge of an incoming wave; And I think of my son a dolphin in the Aegean, A sprite among sails knife-bright in a seasonal wind, And wish he were here where currachs walk on the ocean To ease with his talk the solitude locked in my mind.

I sit on a stone after noon and consider the glow Of the sun through mist, a pearl bulb containèdly fierce; A rain-shower darkens the schist for a minute or so, Then it drifts away and the sloe-black patches disperse. Croagh Patrick towers like Naxos over the water And I think of my daughter at work on her difficult art And wish she were with me now between thrush and plover, Wild thyme and sea-thrift, to lift the weight from my heart.

The young sit smoking and laughing on the bridge at evening Like birds on a telephone pole or notes on a score. A tin whistle squeals in the parlour, once more it is raining, Turf-smoke inclines and a wind whines under the door; And I lie and imagine the lights going on in the harbour Of white-housed Náousa, your clear definition at night, And wish you were here to upstage my disconsolate labour As I glance through a few thin pages and switch off the light.

derek mahon

frances lambeOval SongStoneware

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SimulacrumFrom the German of Rainer Maria Rilke, 1875 – 1926

Technology threatens our inherited riches – unmindful, makes its own mind up and, brusque, brushing aside the slow work of the ages, re-shapes our materials for a colder task.

Not just a new fad we can ignore, something in far-off factories decently dripping grease, now it is life itself, ‘as if’, a simulacrum torn down and redeveloped with equal ease.

Even so, existence remains magical, Orphean, sprung from so many sources, a pure flux striking the watchful eye with epiphanies.

Words still escape from our too quick embrace and music, dropping in stone notes, still erects its heavenly house in unexploitable space.

derek mahon

frances lambeSolitudeStoneware

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Extract from Words for the Body

Any discovery of form is a moment of memory, existing as the historical moment – alone, and existing in history – linear, in music, in the sentence. Each poem, each piece remembers us perfectly, the way the earth remembers our bodies, the way man and woman in their joining remember each other before they were separate.

It’s over twenty-five years and every love poem says how your music and my words are the same: praising the common air, the motive, the memory.

To praise memory is to praise the body.

And I find myself describing the joining of hips and eyes, the harbours of thighs and lips,

as the singing of two small bodies in a dark ravine, as two small bodies holding up the night sky in a winter field.

anne michaels

joe hoganBog Vessel Willow rods and Bog Pine

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Extract from Last Night’s Moon

Try to keep everything and keep standing. In the tall grass, ten thousand shadows. What’s past, all you’ve been, will continue its half-life, a carbon burn searing its way to heaven through the twisted core of a pine. At night, memory will roam your skin. Your dreams will reveal the squirming world under the lifted stone. While you sleep, the sea floods your house, you wake to silt, long brown weeds tangled in the sheets. You wake in the bog, caked with the froth of peat, stunted as shore pine, growing a metre a century.

The bog bruised with colour, muskeg, hardpan, muck. Matted green sphagnum thick as buffalo fur. Sinking into, buoyed by spongy ground; walking on water. In time, night after night, we’ll begin to dream of a langsam sea, waves in slow motion, thickening to sand. Drenched with satiety we’ll be slow to rise, a metre a century.

Our brown bed is peat, born of water, flooded, burning with the smell of earth.

anne michaels

joe hoganPrimal Energy Willow rods and Ash wood

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Poet to BlacksmithEoghan Rua Ó Súilleabháin’s (1748 – 84) instructions to Séamus MacGearailt, translated from the Irish

Séamus, make me a side-arm to take on the earth, A suitable tool for digging and grubbing the ground, Lightsome and pleasant to lean on or cut with or lift, Tastily finished and trim and right for the hand.

No trace of the hammer to show on the sheen of the blade, The thing to have purchase and spring and be fit for the strain, The shaft to be socketed in dead true and dead straight, And I’ll work with the gang till I drop and never complain.

The plate and the edge of it not to be wrinkly or crooked — I see it well shaped from the anvil and sharp from the file; The grain of the wood and the line of the shaft nicely fitted, And best thing of all, the ring of it, sweet as a bell.

seamus heaney

sonja landweerRelationshipsBlack clay

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To a Dutch Potter in Irelandfor Sonja Landweer

Then I entered a strongroom of vocabulary Where words like urns that had come through the fire Stood in their bone-dry alcoves next a kiln

And came away changed, like a guard who’d seen The stone move in a diamond-blaze of air Or the gates of horn behind the gates of clay

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The soil I knew ran dirty. River sand Was the one clean thing that stayed itself In that slabbery, clabbery, wintry, puddled ground.

Until I found Bann clay. Like wet daylight Or viscous satin under the felt and frieze Of humus layers. The true diatomite

Discovered in a little sucky hole, Grey-blue, dull-shining, scentless, touchable — Like the earth’s old ointment box, sticky and cool.

At that stage you were swimming in the sea Or running from it, luminous with plankton, A nymph of phosphor by the Nordor Zee,

A vestal of the goddess Silica, She who is under grass and glass and ash In the fiery heartlands of Ceramica.

sonja landweerLarge Black OvoidBlack clay

We might have known each other then, in that Cold gleam-life under ground and off the water, Weird twins of puddle, paddle, pit-a-pat,

And might have done the small forbidden things — Worked at mud-pies or gone too high on swings, Played ‘secrets’ in the hedge or ‘touching tongues’ —

But did not, in the terrible event. Night after night instead, in the Netherlands, You watched the bombers kill; then, heaven-sent,

Came backlit from the fire through war and wartime And ever after, every blessed time, Through glazes of fired quartz and iron and lime.

And if glazes, as you say, bring down the sun, Your potter’s wheel is bringing up the earth Hosannah ex infernis. Burning wells.

Hosannah in clean sand and kaolin And, ‘now that the rye crop waves beside the ruins’, In ash-pits, oxides, shards and chlorophylls.

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2 After Liberation

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Sheer, bright-shining spring, spring as it used to be, Cold in the morning, but as broad daylight Swings open, the everlasting sky Is a marvel to survivors.

In a pearly clarity that bathes the fields Things as they were come back; slow horses Plough the fallow, war rumbles away In the near distance.

To have lived it through and now be free to give Utterance, body and soul – to wake and know Every time that it’s gone and gone for good, the thing That nearly broke you —

Is worth it all, the five years on the rack, The fighting back, the being resigned, and not One of the unborn will appreciate Freedom like this ever.

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Turning tides, their regularities! What is the heart, that it ever was afraid, Knowing as it must know spring’s release, Shining heart, heart constant as a tide?

Omnipresent, imperturbable Is the life that death springs from. And complaint is wrong, the slightest complaint at all, Now that the rye crop waves beside the ruins

from the Dutch of J.C. Bloem (1887 – 1966)

seamus heaney

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The distinction between art and craft, insofar as it is made in order to distinguish a higher from a lower activity, does neither stream of human making justice; it is a distinction that is sometimes meaningless, often misleading and frequently grounded in nothing more than a snobbishness that neither artist nor craftsman can or should readily countenance.

The snobbishness, I think, derives in large part from an historically aberrant valuing of mental work over handiwork, and makes the double error of failing to understand the intelligence at play in craft work and the craft skills involved in making great art.

When it comes to making, the fact is that between artist and craftworker there is an ancient and indissoluble bond of mutual recognition and respect.

There is, one accepts, a distinction in essence between the two kinds of activity but there is also a very great deal in common between them, and as far as the union of hand, mind and material is concerned, there are great bonds of companionship, too, with a large number of other activities: there are ancient and still living affinities in our culture, for instance, between poetry and, to take some examples, smithcraft, woodcraft, handicraft, priestcraft and witchcraft but no longer, more’s the pity, with statecraft.

That mysterious man, Dylan Thomas, wrote a great number of his poems while tightrope walking between word-drunkenness and painstaking revision, between, you might say, inspiration and craft.

His poem In My Craft or Sullen Art, illustrates this negotiation:

In my craft or sullen art Exercised in the still night I labour by singing light Not for ambition or bread Or the strut and trade of charms But for the common wages Of their most secret heart.

an ancient bond as yet unbroken

Now Thomas has been by many considered the very type of the wayward inspired poet, a modern variant of the Romantic sensibility, swept away on the intoxication of words being various, a rhapsodist, a vehicle through whom poems mysteriously transmit themselves whole and intact or sometimes thrillingly obscure. This is a caricature, but it is sobering to discover how widely, if inattentively, the view is held. Thomas was a kind of visionary but he was also a canny craftsman, a fitter-together of sense and sound, syllables and sinuosities, his life spent in search of a word-music that would enable him to express both a visceral and a considered expansion of language beyond its inherited boundaries.

The craft or sullen art he speaks of is work with words, the inherited material of all poets. Robert Graves, evoking Ezekiel, says that the dictionary is a valley of dry bones, and the poet’s job is to breathe life, articulate energy, into the dry bones, to make them laugh and dance and sing and pronounce. Graves speaks, too, of the poem’s genesis in a kind of analeptic, integrative trance and then of the necessary work of crafting, casting and revising that follows the first fine inspiration. Graves, who insists on inspiration as the point of genesis in a true poem, wrote extensively on the craft, the working out into our shared language, our shared world, of what arrives to the poet as often no more than a small verbal nucleus, a handful of words, perhaps a persistent patterning in sound.

Any seasoned craftworker will recognise this process, as they will recognise that moment when a piece of clay on the wheel quickens, or the long repeat in a woven pattern begins to shimmer with unexpected (but wholly expectable) life, that moment when form announces itself as sufficient to hold meaning, or life proposes itself to the hands in a sudden variant on a familiar form.

Poets speak unselfconsciously of the craft, or at least many of them do, and I could wish that more would. In doing so they acknowledge that while a poet may be born and not made, the poem needs always a skilled midwife or worker to carry it by craft into permanent form. Sir Philip Sidney in his APOLOGY FOR POETRY points out that we derive our word for poet from the Greek poiein, which is to make, and the old Scottish word for poet, to drive the point home, is makar. Instructive here to note that in Scotland today their Poet Laureate is known as the Makar.

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I have often tried to imagine who it was first thought of making clay vessels. How did it come about, what was the inspiration? I like to think of a woman or man squatting at the side of a stream, pondering the way in which a horse’s hoof print in mud holds water while the stream continues to flow away. I imagine them coming home in the evening, the day beginning to cool, and seeing water still cupped in clay that by now has hardened. Did she reach unthinkingly and lift the mud cup, that first potter? We don’t know, but I imagine also the early poet who first noticed that repetition of sound, repetition of images, held some utterance in memory, evoked a reproducible response in the listener and I think of these two as brother and sister, not literally of course, but in the craft guild sense of brotherliness and sisterliness, engaged in a very similar work, the lifting into imagination of the material world, the common elements of our world, clay on the one hand, breath on the other.

In its original meaning, in Old English, in Old High German, in Old Norse, craft meant strength, power, force. Then it came to mean skill in construction, ingenuity, dexterity, terms shared by the makers of poem and craftwork alike. Nowadays we more usually have these latter meanings in mind, but it is worth our while, I think, to reflect on the origins of the word, on these qualities of power and force.

A well-made object has this quality, it inhabits space with a kind of insistent presence; it governs the space in which it sits, it calls attention to itself by the manifest clarity of its construction and a more than usual sense of being charged with power. So, also, the well-made poem. The well-made object has this, too, in common with the well-made poem, it declares its own absolute sufficiency, it is clear that nothing can be either added or taken away without somehow bringing about the collapse of its presence to itself and therefore to us.

I am suggesting here not equivalences but affinities, not so much between objects and poems, although a case might be made, but between work practices, affinities sufficiently clear to practitioners that there is an unbroken compact from the childhood of our world between maker and makar, the mutual loyalty of the world’s workers who understand what work is, and what work is for.

theo dorgan, 2012

Theo Dorgan is a poet and writer. His most recent books are Time on the Ocean (New Island)

and the poetry collection Greek (Dedalus).

Sonja Landweer

Almost from the beginning when I came to Ireland in June 1965 to join the Kilkenny Design Workshops (KDW), Marie and Seamus Heaney became friends.

When we settled at the Island in Thomastown, there arose the possibility for the Heaneys, with their then-small boys, to move there also, away from the raging troubles in the North, and we found a place for them. However, the realisation that Seamus would have to commute to Dublin because of his teaching job and would only be at home on weekends, changed that to Ashford in Co. Wicklow. When they moved to Dublin, their house became for me a ‘home from home’.

When we became involved in the start of the Kilkenny Arts Week (the brainchild of George Vaughan, also responsible for starting the Grennan Mill Craft School) we began poetry readings to which Seamus came for several years to introduce the poets and their work. All of them stayed with us in Jerpoint for night-long sessions of exchange – Robert Lowell among them, who died not so long afterwards, when Seamus replaced him as ‘Poet in Residence’ at Harvard for many years.

Of course I love Seamus’ work, but cannot single out particular poems that specifically inspired pieces of my work – or mine of his work; he, as a human being – and likewise Marie – are simply inspiring to be with.

Sonja Landweer’s practice is as a groundbreaking ceramicist, sculptor and jeweller. She studied at the Amsterdam School of Industrial Design, following which she was apprenticed to Zaalberg Pottery in 1952-53. In 1965 she was invited to Ireland to set up a ceramic studio at the Kilkenny Design Workshops, and she has been based in Ireland since that time. Her work is held in numerous museum collections across Europe, and she has shown worldwide over the last five decades, from the Smithsonian Institute in New York to the Victoria and Albert Museum in London. Her total oeuvre was celebrated in A Life’s Work, VISUAL Arts Centre, Carlow, Ireland, in 2011.

Seamus Heaney

Born near Castledown, Co. Derry, Seamus Heaney studied at Queen’s University, Belfast and has held professorships at Harvard and Oxford universities. Major poetry collections include Death of a Naturalist, Door Into the Dark, Wintering Out, North, Field Work, Station Island, The Haw Lantern, Seeing Things, Electric Light and District and Circle. The Spirit Level and a translation of Beowulf have both won the Whitbread Book of the Year Award. Heaney has published several works of prose and criticism, including Preoccupations. He has also adapted Sophocle’s plays Philoctetes and Antigone as The Cure at Troy and The Burial at Thebes, and co-edited two selections of poetry with Ted Hughes, The Rattle Bag and The School Bag. Heaney won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1995 and was made a Commandeur de l’Ordre des Artes et Lettres in 1996. His latest collection of poems Human Chain won the Forward Poetry Prize in 2010.

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Frances Lambe

A friend read a review in a newspaper of the book of poetry Life on Earth by Derek Mahon and saw links between the content of the poem ‘Research’, which was featured, and my sculptural work. I have been reading Mahon’s poetry ever since.

Many of Mahon’s poems comment on the difficult process of writing and the solitude that is required for this task. Not every sentence that is written makes it through. This resonates with my experience of making sculpture. Slowly wrought, Mahon’s poems are masterfully structured, where each word is positioned with great care. They invite the reader to sound them aloud.

Some poems contain ‘erratic word monoliths’ that send me scrambling for the dictionary. Mahon’s watchful eye savours the detail in his surroundings and brings this to our attention. He notices the way the wind moves a leaf, the gleam of moonlight on a wave and the sound of the pebbles clinking in the tide. These marvellous details, placed into sequenced ideas, lead to the abstract and the eternal.

For the past 14 years, Frances Lambe has developed a distinctive body of sculptural ceramic forms influenced by the natural world. She has exhibited widely internationally, including with Galerie Hélène Porée, Paris, France, Het Bildt, the Netherlands and the American Irish Historical Society, New York, USA, plus the solo exhibition Microcosmos, Basement Gallery, Dundalk; National Craft Gallery, Kilkenny and Millennium Court Arts Centre, Co. Armagh, 2009 – 10. She was selected to represent Ireland in the Ceramic Art Museum, Fuping, China, and European Ceramic Context 2010, Bornholm, Denmark. Her work is included in many public and private collections including the National Museum of Ireland, Dublin and the Department of Foreign Affairs Collection, Ireland.

Derek Mahon

Derek Mahon was born in Belfast in 1941, studied at Trinity College, Dublin, and at the Sorbonne, Paris, and has held journalistic and academic appointments in London and New York. A member of Aosdána, he has received numerous awards including the Irish Academy of Letters Award, the Scott Moncrieff Translation Prize, and Lannan and Guggenheim Fellowships.

Publications from The Gallery Press include The Hudson Letter, The Yellow Book, Words in the Air (bilingual, with the French of Philippe Jaccottet), Birds (a translation of Oiseaux by Saint-John Perse), Harbour Lights (2005) (Winner of the Irish Times Poetry Now Award 2006), Adaptations (2006), Life on Earth (2008), An Autumn Wind (2010) and New Collected Poems (2011). Selected Prose is forthcoming.

His work for the theatre includes versions of Molière’s The School for Wives and High Time, Racine’s Phaedra, The Bacchae (after Euripides), Cyrano de Bergerac (a new version of Rostand’s ‘heroic comedy’) which was produced at London’s National Theatre in April, 2004 and Oedipus (after Sophocles) published in October 2005.

He received the David Cohen Prize in 2007 for recognition of a lifetime’s achievement in literature.

Angela O’Kelly

It has been a really insightful experience working directly with another artist, particularly an artist of words. Writing is something I shy away from but I am stimulated by text on paper. Seeing dimensions and layers of our conversations emerging so eloquently in text is fascinating. What I attempt to do in my three dimensional drawings is to echo the fluency, meanings and rhythms of the text and reinterpret them in a complimentary visual language.

‘The things we keep are not the things we need’, but somehow they are. These are the things that make us unique. I keep stones and pebbles from beaches which spark and refresh memories of places visited, remembering feelings, sounds and smells, images locked away. The simple shapes of my collected stones inspire this work. I reconstruct line and form through a mix of textured materials in subtle colours. They are a quiet introspection of my life.

Born in Dublin in 1973, Angela O’Kelly studied Jewellery and Silversmithing at Edinburgh College of Art and graduated in 1998. She currently lectures in the National College of Art and Design, Dublin and is an established curator of contemporary craft. She has exhibited extensively in international exhibitions and galleries, including with The American Irish Historical Society, New York; Galerie Beeld and Aambeeld, Enchede, the Netherlands and Electrum Gallery, London. Her work can be seen in many private collections and in the public collections of the Crafts Council UK; the Museum of Scotland, Edinburgh; the Museum of Arts and Design, New York; the Cleveland Arts Centre, UK; the National Museum of Ireland, Dublin and the Office of Public Works, Dublin.

Gerard Smyth

Gerard Smyth is a poet and journalist. He was born in Dublin where he still lives and where he worked for over 40 years with The Irish Times. His poetry has appeared widely in publications in Ireland, Britain and the United States since the late 1960s, as well as in translation. His seventh collection, The Fullness of Time: New and Selected Poems was published in 2010 with Dedalus Press. He was this year’s recipient of the O’Shaughnessy Poetry Award from the University of St Thomas in St Paul, Minnesota. He is a member of Aosdána.

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Joe Hogan

Every time we walk out into the world we have the opportunity to see it anew and to experience the wonder of being here. Rilke talked about us being “the bees of the invisible” gathering the honey of the visible and storing it in the hive of the invisible. When I make artistic baskets (as opposed to functional work) I am trying to deepen my sense of appreciation of being here and I find poetry helps me greatly in doing this.

I had almost stopped reading fiction when I read Anne Michaels’ novel Fugitive Pieces and was amazed at its poetic quality. Its exploration of memory moved me and helped me to further explore my own fascination with how a place carries the memory of the elements (lichen marks on bark and stone for example) and the traces left on the landscape by the people who have gone before us. I was thus led to her poetry and her collection, Poems has been a great source of insight since I discovered it. There are some marvellous images (“ravens sewed up the sky with their black stitches”) and a wonderful sense of deep layers of meaning.

Joe Hogan has been making baskets at Loch na Fooey, Co. Galway since 1978. He wrote the definitive Basketmaking in Ireland (Wordwell, 2001). Although he continues to practice traditional techniques, recent work also explores the creation of non-functional objects. Hogan has shown widely internationally, including with Landskrona Museum, Sweden; Johannes Larsen Museum, Kertminde, Denmark; The American Irish Historical Society, New York, USA and Galerie Ra, Amsterdam, The Netherlands, plus the solo show Bare Branches, Blue Black Sky; Garter Lane Arts Centre, Waterford; Scottish Gallery, Edinburgh; Áras Éanna Arts Centre, Co. Galway; Dunamaise Arts Centre, Co. Laois, 2011. Recent awards include selection for the Living Legend Programme, World Crafts Council, 2012; Crafts Council of Ireland Bursary 2006 (joint prize winner); and first prize, Pinolere International Basketry Competition, Canary Islands, Spain, 2005.

Anne Michaels

Anne Michaels is the author of three highly acclaimed poetry collections: The Weight of Oranges (1986), which won the Commonwealth Prize for the Americas; Miner’s Pond (1991), which received the Canadian Authors Association Award and was shortlisted for the Governor General’s Award and the Trillium Award (these two volumes were published in a single-volume edition in 1997); and Skin Divers (1999).

Fugitive Pieces (1996) is Anne Michaels’ multi-award-winning, internationally bestselling first novel. In Canada, it was #1, and on the national bestseller list for more than two years. The literary prizes the novel has garnered to date are: in Canada, the Chapters/Books in Canada First Novel Award; the City of Toronto Book Award; the Martin & Beatrice Fischer Award; the Trillium Book Award; and an Award of Merit from Heritage Toronto. In the U.K., the Guardian Fiction Award; the Jewish Quarterly Prize for Fiction; and the Orange Prize for Fiction. In the U.S., the Harold Ribalow Award and a Lannan Literary Award for Fiction. And in Italy, the Giuseppe Acerbi Literary Award.

Cóilín Ó Dubhghaill

For me, the starting point of a new piece usually presents itself during the making process, my bench strewn with half made things. While hammering or planishing a yet unfinished piece, I’ll pause and think - this form shows promise, next time I’ll stop here. Or when working with a new metal or alloy I’ll be struck by the material properties, how easy it is to form or stretch the metal. And I’ll think – I could push this in a new direction. These small instances are stored up and used as prompts for new work.

For this exhibition I’m working with Vona’s poetry as the starting point for a new piece. I roll the words around in my mouth - firkin, bobolink, barren spindle, other buckled things. I’ve no idea what these are, but they conjure objects and images in my head. I think of constructions and revolving forms, of shapes and surfaces. The transition from my imagination to the workbench will change them again. My aim here is to capture these words in translation.

Metalworker Cóilín Ó Dubhghaill is currently a Senior Researcher at Sheffield Hallam University. He has exhibited widely internationally, including exhibitions at the National Museum of Scotland, Edinburgh; the Victoria and Albert Museum, London and the State Hermitage Museum, St Petersburg, Russia, and a solo exhibition in Galerie Marzee, the Netherlands, in 2011. His work is represented in the collections of the National Museum of Ireland, Dublin; the Department of Foreign Affairs Collection, Dublin; the Incorporation of Goldsmiths, Edinburgh and the Marzee Collection, the Netherlands.

Vona Groarke

Vona Groarke has published five collections with The Gallery Press, including Shale, Other People’s Houses, Flight (which was shortlisted for the Forward Prize and won the Michael Hartnett Award), Juniper Street and, most recently, Spindrift which was a Poetry Book Society Recommendation for Autumn 2009 and was shortlisted for The Irish Times Poetry Prize in 2010.

Her version of Eibhín Dubh Ní Chonaill’s classic eighteenth century Irish poem was published in 2008 as Lament for Art O’Leary and an opera of this translation is currently in development by composer, Irene Buckley.

Vona Groarke has taught at Villanova University and Wake Forest University in the U.S., and currently teaches in the Centre for New Writing at the University of Manchester.

In 2010, Vona Groarke was elected to Aosdána. She is currently completing her sixth collection, with the working title, X.

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We would like to gratefully acknowledge the following publishers and writers for their kind permission to reproduce the material in this catalogue.

Vona Groarke, ‘Bodkin’ and ‘Purism’ from Spindrift (The Gallery Press, 2009).

Seamus Heaney, ‘To a Dutch Potter in Ireland’ from Spirit Level (Faber and Faber, 2001) and ‘Poet to Blacksmith’ from District and Circle (Faber and Faber, 2011).

Anne Michaels, Extract from ‘Last Night’s Moon’ and extract from ‘Words for the Body’ from Poems (Bloomsbury, 2000).

Derek Mahon, ‘Simulacrum’ from Raw Material (The Gallery Press, 2011) and ‘Achill’ from Collected Poems (The Gallery Press 2011)

Gerard Smyth’s work produced for this exhibition is unpublished at time of going to print

The National Craft Gallery

Established by the Crafts Council of Ireland in December 2000, the National Craft Gallery is Ireland’s leading centre for contemporary craft and design. We play a critical role in building understanding of craft and material culture. We exhibit Irish and international designers, artists and makers who push boundaries in their engagement with the making process. We inspire appreciation, creativity and innovation through our exhibition and education programme, and along with our touring programme we reach an audience of over 100,000 annually.

The Crafts Council of Ireland is the champion of the craft industry in Ireland, representing all craft disciplines. It strives to foster the commercial strength and unique identity of the craft sector, and to stimulate quality, design and competitiveness. It is funded by the Department of Jobs, Enterprise & Innovation through Enterprise Ireland.

National Craft Gallery, Castle Yard, Kilkenny, Ireland T + 353 (0) 56 7796147 E info@nationalcraftgallery.ie W www.nationalcraftgallery.ie

Team

Manager and Curator: Ann Mulrooney Co-Curator, Out of the Marvellous: Maureen Kennelly Gallery Assistant: Brian Byrne Education and Outreach Officer: Susan Holland Technician: John Whelan Sound installation: Nicky Ward Additional recordings: Ken Maguire Graphic Design: Oonagh Young, Design HQ Photography: Sylvain Deleu Press: Christine Monk Voice Artists: Fergus Cronin, Catriona Crowe

Solstice Arts Centre

Solstice Arts Centre is a multi-disciplinary arts venue located in Navan, County Meath. Its facilities consist of a tiered 320 seat theatre, visual arts spaces, studio and café. The artistic programme predominantly covers music, theatre, film, comedy and visual arts, and is also a popular venue for local groups to present their productions. Since opening in 2006, Solstice has exhibited, curated and commissioned a diverse range of exhibitions, theatre and music events, gaining recognition as a key visual arts space and performance venue in Ireland.

Solstice Arts Centre, Railway Street, Navan, Co. MeathT +353 (0) 46 909 2300 | E info@solsticeartscentre.ieW www.solsticeartscentre.ieDirector: Belinda Quirke