FÁILTE | WELCOME

Fáilte and welcome to the Carrickahowley Gallery’s Samhain exhibition. Samhain is the last of Ireland’s four seasonal festivals, marking the end of the harvest and the beginning of winter. This is a liminal time, when the boundary between this world and the Otherworld is lifted. Ancient burial mounds open, the Aos Sí (supernatural beings or fairies) emerge, and the spirits of the dead seek hospitality among the living. As the sun sets on the season, and the earth lays to rest, bonfires are lit to hold back the dark, and guises are donned to become it. For this show, co-curators Robin Savage and Chris Gray are proud to feature the work of Kadie Annice, Eliza Ulmer and Jordan Wood, whose paintings and prints effortlessly tread this liminal space of Samhain. We hope you enjoy the work of these fine artists.

Kadie Annice

Annice | Artist Statement

A curated selection of prints from a larger series within Annice’s work, Female Torture Devices: Witch Hunt is about remembrance. This time of year, people don their pointed hats and long flowing dresses, paint their faces green and point plastic wands, and take to the streets of Salem, listening to a man in a werewolf mask play the accordion. Because of this, Annice seeks to bring attention to how the idea of witchcraft has been used as a tool of oppression against women. While still used on men, each of these devices were specifically designed to attack not only one’s humanity but one’s womanhood, with the main victims of the first two devices being women who have been accused of witchcraft, who practiced different religions, and women who did not fit the mold that the patriarchal society of the time forced upon them. She is also making the argument that lobotomies were used as a similar way to witch hunts for social stratification and control of women who did not fit the gender roles ascribed and asserting that ‘hysteria’ was a new-age witchcraft accusation. Using the privilege of a show during the time of year where witches are on the mind, Annice seeks to take a moment to remember and mourn the women who were persecuted and murdered all over the world in gendercides for this very ‘crime’. The second series is about a different type of remembrance. A grave stone rubbing of her 8th great-grandmother and chosen namesake, Kadie Annice remade the stone in the form of an etching, changing the inscription so that the woman it is supposed to represent in death is no longer defined by her relationship to a man.

Biography

Kadie Annice is an interdisciplinary artist from the Midwest that primarily works in print making, installation, and sculpture. She received her Bachelor’s degree in Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies from University of Wisconsin-La Crosse in 2020 and her Masters of Fine Art from Maine College of Art and Design in 2022. Annice seeks to use her artwork to bring attention to the oppression and violence women face, making space to have conversations. She is currently based in Southern Maine, working as an Adjunct Professor in the Print Making department at MECA&D as well as a Studio Assistant for Dean Barger in Westbrook, ME.

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Eliza Ulmer

Ulmer | Artist Statement

Eliza is an multidisciplinary artist with focuses in painting and ceramics. Her work encapsulates many themes ranging from landscapes, interiors, multidimensional painted objects and functional pottery. As a landscape painter, her work is often first inspired by the natural world. Eliza uses the seasons combined with a sense of nostalgia for place and time. Her work varies widely in tone, from the self-referential and silly to somber and thoughtful. This grouping of work celebrates Autumn and the coming of darker, colder weather as the northern hemisphere leaves summer behind.

Biography

Eliza Ulmer is a long time lover of art, music and literature. She studied Plein Air painting in Dingle Ireland in 2015 and received her BFA through SUNY Plattsburgh in 2017. She received her MFA through Maine College of Art & Design in 2021. She lives in her hometown of Spencertown, NY with Partner Noah, and their cat and dog. She currently works at Art Omi, a sculpture and architecture park in Ghent, NY. 

Elizajoanart.com

@elizajoanart

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Jordan Wood

Wood | Artist Statement

Jordan Wood’s main influence with her paintings in “Samhain” are drawn from tropes she sees in movies typically watched around this time of year: scary movies. Many of the main themes in the horror genre movies include imagery of Haunted Houses, witches, harvest, mortality, and the mystery of what may be lurking in the woods. Rather than trying to avoid those cliches, Wood dives into them and emphasizes the allure of witnessing the forbidden, the adrenaline of walking up to places that hold the unknown, juxtaposing the excitement of approaching the unsettling house in the woods with the calmness of the seemingly normal domestic home that holds much more within. She tempers and combines that cinematic influence on her work with a layer of her own experiences of living in historic New England. Her works display a sense of unease that she has of the woods. The burnt oranges and deep mahogany hues seen in her work capture the warmth of the New England Fall, while the imagery within them show the tropes of horror. There is attention to the afterlife that is both dreadful yet interesting, which is what Wood captures: the appreciation of life while playing closely to the fine line of death.

Biography

Jordan Wood is a painter from the greater Milwaukee area of Wisconsin. Jordan graduated with a Bachelor's Degree of Fine Arts from Eckerd College in St. Petersburg, Florida. Because of her love for the changing seasons and scenery in the North, Jordan moved to Portland, Maine to pursue a graduate degree from the Maine College of Art and Design, which she completed in 2022. She is now working there as an Adjunct Professor, as well as teaching classes in the Continuing Studies Program at MECA&D. Jordan is heavily influenced by film, which led her to combine the love for that genre with a New England atmosphere in her paintings. Artist Statement

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Featurette | Evie Hone

Our Samhain featurette focuses upon one work of visual art by Evie Hone that, like earlier featurettes on Mainie Jellett and Norah McGuinness, is a wondeful example of work by a generation of Irish women artists who broke through barriers of exclusion to represent modernism and abstraction in Irish visual art. Though underappreciated in its time, the work of these women, particularly Jellett and Hone, transformed a conservative Irish visual framework and brought modernist principles to the island from France. There, Jellett and Hone had worked with Andre Lhote and Albert Gleizes, becoming Gleizes’ top (and initial) students as he formed his Section D’Or group of cubist abstraction. Modifying cubism with elements of Northern Gothic tradition, Gleizes and his students would continue on to theorize and create work that hybridized various approaches to visual composition and meaning-making in painting, and in Hone’s case, Stained-glass work. That work culminated for Hone in her monumental MY FOUR GREEN FIELDS, a towering stained-glass work for the 1939 World’s Fair. Since then, it has found a home as a completely renovated work in the entrance to the Government Buildings in Dublin. In the work, Hone represents multiple symbols, most notably of the traditional signs for the four provinces of Ireland, in a dazzling composition that represents in its entirety the bringing together of divergent visual languages. Such hybridity represents, in and of itself, a crucial resistance to Irish predilections for realism and naturalism, and creates a space where the avant-garde of the continent could, in mid-century, combine with Irish compositional and design principles to create a distinctly Irish modernism that is part of the global modernisms created as response to dominant European metropolitan Modernism. In this way, modernism’s “revolutions” were extended to those in the Global South who, in some ways, reoriented and refocused modernist tendencies to make them fully postcolonial and decolonizing both.