She Leaned On Her Ancestors Linda Rowell-Kelley
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 Kait Gallaugher, Elyse Grams, Linda Rowell-Kelley, Eliza Ulmer, and Jordan Wood, whose works effortlessly tread this liminal space of Samhain. We hope you enjoy the work of these fine artists.
She Leaned On Her Ancestors Linda Rowell-Kelley
A lifelong student of art, I studied sculpture, drawing, painting and graphics at the Portland School of Art (MECA) in Portland, Maine.
Working in all kinds of weather, plein air painting is the focus of my work. As a Reiki practitioner, my artwork has a healing quality, a mixture of what is seen and unseen, walking the line between realistic art, impressionism and abstraction.
In 2021, transitioning from living on Mount Desert Island to Freeport, the landscape has offered inspiration and opportunities for new work.
Recent work has been shown at the Meetinghouse Gallery in Freeport, The Maine Art Gallery in Wiscasset, Yarmouth Art Festival and several businesses on Mount Desert Island.
Patience and Virtue are Overrated Elyse Grams
These four works play with memory; memory as a form of historical preservation, memories of childhood car rides and childhood crafts, and memory as something that can be lost and found again. I return to memory often as a conceptual thread throughout my practice, that is often shifting in media and scale. I am interested in how we remember, if re-telling or re-remembering is ever truly accurate, and how memories both personal and collective can become history if we keep records of them. Who is allowed to remember and what is deemed worthy of remembrance are questions I am always trying to unravel.
Originally from San Antonio Texas, Elyse is a 2020 MFA graduate and current admissions counselor at the Maine College of Art & Design. She has participated in the 2020 and 2023 CMCA Biennials, her work Patience and Virtue are Overrated was recently acquired by the University of Southern Maine and she co-curated I have stood in doorways and looked ahead at MECA&D this past summer with Jenna Crowder. She was a 2019 fellow at the Artist Campaign School and a 2019 Resident at Watershed Center for Ceramic Arts. Her work has been exhibited in solo exhibitions at Revenant Gallery and the SMART project space, both in San Antonio, TX. Other work has been shown in group shows in Texas, Tennessee, New Hampshire, Maine, and Massachusetts. Grams lives and works in Portland, ME.
View from Bebe Hill Eliza Ulmer
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.
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.
Untitled Kait Gallaugher
This series of Risograph Prints were created specifically for the Samhain exhibition. When I was considering what the celebration of Samhain means to me as an Irish American living in Maine, I thought of visiting the ocean with friends and collecting rocks and shells that stood out to us.
These prints were made as digital photographs that were then separated into individual color layers and printed on the Risograph printer. The process of taking these images from the digital to the physical, and then back into the digital realms mimics the planes between the spiritual and physical realms on Samhain.
Kait Gallaugher is an artist, teacher, and writer who works in a broad range of media from wearables, to zines, to interactive sculpture. The common thread through all of their work is human interaction, which stems from their experience as an educator. Gallaugher attended SUNY College at New Paltz and graduated with a Bachelor of Science in Visual Arts Education with a Concentration in Metal in 2021, before spending a year working in public schools while applying to graduate school. During this gap year they were able to exhibit their work in group shows at Unison Arts Center in New Paltz, New York, and at Lagoon New York as a part of New York City Jewelry Week. They are currently pursuing a Master of Fine Arts in Studio Art from Maine College of Art & Design (MECA&D), with an expected graduation date of May 2024. While at MECA&D Gallaugher has worked as a Writing Coach in the Joanne Waxman Library, where they support students with things like time management, professional writing, and studio research. Moving forward in their practice, Gallaugher plans to continue working closely with their community through a series of participatory print installations.
For the Taking Jordan Wood
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.
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
Carrickahowley is in County Mayo, Ireland, and is the historical site of the stronghold castle of Grace O’Malley, or Grainne Mhaille. Grace O’Malley was a seventeenth-century pirate queen of Western Ireland who led an entire fleet of ships over her long career and met Queen Elizabeth I in a historic meeting. The name references many things, therefore, from respect for women in Irish history to fierce independence and capable leadership.
The stronghold and its location conjure the rocky coast of Maine, with its opening to the Atlantic Ocean that separates Ireland from Maine.
Support the bridge between Irish and American art by shopping at the Carrickahowley Gallery. You’ll find prints and original art at affordable prices. Plus, a portion of the proceeds benefits the Carrickahowley Art Gallery and our mission.
Maine Irish Heritage Center
Corner of Gray & State Streets
PO Box 7588
Portland, ME 04112-7588
(207) 780-0118
maineirish@maineirish.com
