FÁILTE | WELCOME

Fáilte and welcome to the Carrickahowley Gallery’s St. Brigid's Day / Imbolc exhibition, featuring the work of Breslin Bell.

Curator's Notes: Breslin Bell

Breslin Bell’s work in printmaking, sculpture, and installation art turns the notion of patriarchal mastery inside-out, becoming a moving and powerful meditation on the female Body and the signifiers that mark it and that attempt to control it. In some ways, this links her work to a whole host of recent feminist work that explores and explodes the very languages that imprison and represent the female body, and the associations that such signifiers generate that shape, frame, and contain the agency of the gender Other. Such containment, as noted in other Carrickahowley exhibits, has everything to do with power, particularly the power to represent oneself and the power to resist the policing languages of such mastery over women and their “spaces,” including both the space of their bodies and the space of language itself (what surrounds the word and links it to other words and meanings). If Western patriarchy has attempted to “put a lid on” female agency and the female body since at least Greek notions of female “pollution,” then a feminist art must confront such spaces of control and attempt a liberation. In short, Pandora must open that box defiantly. And Breslin Bell’s work defiantly allows such liberation to exceed its imposed borders and boundaries, to transgress with joyous defiance, and to redefine the very languages that represent women and the body by allowing their meanings to “seep” out, to exceed the typical world of printmaking even and the aesthetic values that are traditionally associated with it and with its “patterns.” Such patterns of power are the key to Breslin’s work and her feminist resistance against such authoritarian control of gendered space. Or, as many feminists have argued since at least Virginia Woolf, the struggle for feminist resistance is to find a language in which to articulate new selves and new spaces for being, one outside of patriarchal mastery. Such a struggle is fraught with problems, however, for the signs of patriarchy permeate every space and every word with their exclusionary presence. They dominate like that lid placed upon woman since Greco-Roman antiquity. They fence off and contain, never allowing trespass and a right to roam into other possibilities of being and representation.

Like the female form, therefore, or the formless female that must be contained, so, too, does power delineate space in the “natural” environment, even defining the very concept of “Nature.” And it is this very link that unites the projects of feminist resistance and environmental justice and ecological resistance. If patriarchy has always represented woman as both natural and unnatural, as the very cipher for naturality (think of the West’s obsession with maternity as the sole defining role for Woman), then to deconstruct patriarchy one might need to deconstruct this central notion of Woman/Nature and Woman’s Body as the Landscape. In all of these ways, Bell’s work explodes power as she forces us to think of these spaces—body, language, nature, land—as porous and impossibly anarchic in their insistence upon transgressing boundaries and trespassing across borders. In Breslin Bell’s art, the female body is free, and its formlessness is celebrated as it tears down the fences that cordon off its meanings and its possibilities for reinvention, change, mutability. And, likewise, as it intersects with other spaces—natural and cultural (the very words that define us)—Bell’s work claims the amorphic threat of the uncontained as the space of constant resistance. For it is here, in the space of the uncontained and all of the patriarchal and colonial ideas that surround it, from “wildness” to the ”monstruous”, that Otherness finds its power and its revolutionary virtue. Breslin Bell’s art challenges us all to accept radical openness, radical revisioning, and radical new relations. It asks us to re-see the prisonhouse of our desires for control, for dominance, for definitions, and for hiding the realities of our bodies (the fluids that we share) as it issues forth in its deliquescent delirium. It is almost an ecstatic rupturing of the walls that surround us, like Sappho’s poetry or the dance of the Bacchae, and in this it is very much like the first rumblings of spring that Imbolc traditionally celebrates, and that remain alive in the figure of St. Brigid who, herself, stands between the borders of a pagan, pre-Christian Ireland and the “lid” of the Catholic Church.

We are so proud and excited to allow Breslin Bell’s work to pour into your eyes for this Imbolc exhibition. Having featured her work in other group shows, we at Carrickahowley Gallery have been lucky enough to have her work showcased here in a solo exhibit so that viewers can get a more full idea of the power of her art and her defiance. We hope that this art changes your mind and your desires, that it awakens in you a “spring” of the imagination.

Breslin Bell

Bell | Artist Bio

Breslin Bell is an interdisciplinary visual artist working primarily in print, sculpture and installation informed by feminisms and feminized rights. Bell is also an educator and museum professional. She has exhibited widely since 2016 in a number of group exhibitions in London, Edinburgh, New York, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, Maine and Japan. Highlights include Body Autonomy with Latela Curatorial, Tomorrow 2021 with White Cube London and Woolwich Contemporary Print Fair 2021. Her work has been featured in Arts Thread’s Global Design Graduate Show 2021 Judges Favorites, Woolwich Contemporary Print Fair Panelist Picks, RISD news outlets and other publications. Bell is a recipient of the American Cities Internship Program Award with the Elizabeth Foundation for the Arts, Robert Blackburn Printmaking Workshop; MASS MoCA Artist-in-Residence; Center for Contemporary Printmaking Artist-in-Residence; and Alice C. Cole ’42 Studio Project Grant. Bell earned her MFA from the Rhode Island School of Design and her BA from Wellesley College.

breslinsheastudio.com

@breslinsheastudio

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Featurette | The Icon of St. Brigid

To celebrate St. Brigid on this day is to celebrate a dual tradition that is contained in her symbolic identity as a bridge between Celtic pagan and Christian traditions, representing the first day of spring in Imbolc transformed into the “Mary of the Gael” figure who becomes the Catholic Saint. A fascinating weave of legends lends her dual role a wealth of visual iconography, from the famous legend of her spreading her cloak to claim land for her monastery from a Gaelic chieftain whom she would later convert, to her representation as a patroness of the arts (illustrated manuscript and metalwork, in particular), to the symbolic rejection of violence and wealth represented in her iconography by her frequent depiction standing on a sword. St. Brigid, like her cloak in the legend, continues to grow throughout the centuries to represent the persistence of Celtic traditions within the Catholic church, and she comes to represent multiple valences of the history of Ireland and the histories of women’s roles in Irish culture.

So, too, do representations of her abound. From the Brigid’s Cross to numerous paintings, engravings, etchings, sculptures, and votives, St. Brigid’s image becomes constantly reproduced, even into contemporary art in Ireland. Perhaps the most iconic image of her is in Kildare, at the St. Brigid’s Parish Church, where an image created by Sr. Aloysius McVeigh, R.S.M., stands near the flame guarded and kept alight by the Brigidine Sisters since the 16th century when it was temporarily dowsed after previous centuries of constant flame dating back to the 5th century in legend. The painting is wonderfully reproduced in an interactive image at the following web address (https://brigidine.org.au/about-us/our-patroness/the-icon-of-saint-brigid/) where viewers can visit and click on parts of the image to activate various parts of her history and legend through the symbols that represent both. Carrickahowley Gallery encourages all to visit the site and learn more about St. Brigid and the icon, or to visit Kildare itself!

For her devotion to the arts alone, Carrickahowely Gallery celebrates St. Brigid on this “bridge” day. Legend has it that the art school that she founded and had directed by St. Cloneth produced such incredible art work that it was renowned throughout Ireland, Wales, and Britain. And her cloak continues to grow!

Happy St. Brigid’s Day and joyous Imbolc to all!

Brat Bride ort! (“the cloak of St. Brigid on you”—a popular blessing used throughout Ireland, as the webpage states).

Robin Savage