FÁILTE | WELCOME

Fáilte and welcome to the Carrickahowley Gallery’s St. Brigid's Day exhibition. We are proud to feature the work of Jenny Belton, Eamon Colman, Season Dailey, Mary de Blacam, and Louise Neiland. We hope you enjoy the work of these fine artists.

Savage | Curator's Notes

In Roman mythology, the Genius Loci, or the “protective spirit” of a place, was designated by a youthful figure holding a cornucopia, a snake, or a patera (a shallow bowl) and was often positioned outside of a threshold to the place symbolized, either a doorway, archway, or some kind of opening. The Genius Loci motif developed after the Roman Empire into a commonly used symbol of protection and divine care for a location. These later meanings would develop into a more common usage for the notion of a “spirit of place,” inspiring poets and artists alike to envision a particular locale as having its own “spirit”. Alexander Pope, in his Epistle IV, to Richard Boyle, Earl of Burlington sings of this spirit when he says:

Such a link between natural landscape and “spirit” would develop into contemporary landscape art, a genre rapidly growing to fit the vision of a world that has become threatened and fragile, yet connected to other places and other communities that inhabit these places. The “spirit of place” has become a phrase that gestures to these relations and to these links between places and between communities.

I can think of no better thematic link between the artists exhibited in our St. Brigid’s Day exhibit this 2024: Season Dailey, Jenny Bolton, Louise Nieland, Mary de Blacam, and Eamon Colman. In each artists work, place takes on multiple meanings and dimensions, revealing the sense that each work is “about” both the place itself and the artists’ connections to these places, whether it be the Australian influences in Mary de Blacam’s work, the austere and foreboding scenes of Louise Nieland, the explosion of the “in-between” spaces of Colman’s work, the locating of experience in Season Dailey’s travelogue that runs between home and elsewhere, or the incantations in color and hue that make Jenny Bolton’s work so very beckoning as it “trips” to other locales and other personal and cultural connections. In all, the spirit of place becomes multiple, global, dispersed at the same time that it marks the personal, the experiential, or the local. And that sense of convergence and divergence of place, we might argue, is at the heart of Irish contemporary art. International and global, and yet rooted in the “local” and biographical, Irish contemporary art is “pluriversal” in its visions of “here and there,” to quote critic and philosopher Arturo Escobar. And this “pluriversal” vision is, perhaps, just what our various worlds need right now as we artists, writers, and citizens re-envision our relations to each other and to the places that shape us. Fragile and threatened as these worlds may be, our St. Brigid’s Day exhibit celebrates the regenerative spirit of place as central to our renewed connections to each other and to the lands we inhabit. Indeed, the new Genius Loci might be depicted with brush in hand and with multiple guises, pointing the way through the threshold.

Robin Savage
Carrickahowley Gallery

Jenny Belton

Belton | Artist Statement

Jenny Belton is a Dublin based artist. She holds a BA (hons) from UCD. Although she has been creative through other realms and careers, she has only begun to build a consolidated collection of work in the last couple of years.

Largely self taught, she draws on her love of ceramic art, mid century interior design and architecture, still life, and nostalgic objects. She attempts to capture the essence of time and place through specific colour combinations and motifs.

Her paintings, though abstract, contain everyday objects that are at once familiar yet somehow idealised and enhanced by their abstraction and colourful expression.

Her work has been sold throughout Europe, the UK and US.

Jenny Belton Art

Eamon Colman

Colman | Artist Statement

Eamon Colman was born in Dublin in 1957. He is an elected member of Aosdána since 2007 in recognition of his major contribution to Irish culture. His professional career spans from 1979, having created nearly forty solo exhibitions presented nationally and internationally. In 1997, he was invited to host a major mid-term retrospective exhibition of his work entitled ‘Post Cards Home’ at the Royal Hibernian Academy, Dublin at the age of 39 years. This was accompanied by a monograph on his work by writer and art critic Brian Mc Avera entitled ‘Dreams from The Lion’s Head, The Work of Eamon Colman’ published by Four Fields Press. A 25-year retrospective of his work is featured in a substantial publication by Gandon Editions, Kinsale: ‘Profile 25 – Eamon Colman’ (2006). In 1989, he won the First Prize Painting Award in EVA International; in 2001 First Prize Painting Award in Eigse, Carlow Arts Festival; in 2002, he was the first Irish artist to be awarded Full Fellowship Award from the Vermont Studio Centre, USA; in 2005, he won a CCAT Interreg Major Award for touring an exhibition in Wales, UK and in 2018 he was awarded a Culture Ireland GB18 Award. His work has been included in exhibitions representing contemporary Irish art in Brussels, Denmark, France, Spain, UK, Hong Kong, Canada and USA. His work can be viewed in his representative gallery: Solomon Fine Art, Balfe Street, Dublin 2.

Eamon Colman Art

Season Dailey

Dailey | Artist Statement

Considering the recognized rules to aesthetics, Season’s paintings exist within an individualist ideology. From a personal gravitation towards vibrance, contrast and abundance, a new setting is created evoking a dialogue between the subjects and the viewer. Through digital collage she combines photographs of the subjects and archived images of textiles and household items to create new settings. The main considerations are personal aesthetics, contrasts to the gendered space and sensitivity to the subjects. As well as figurative, she creates intuitive mark making paintings and abstract landscapes.

Season is an American visual artist, living and working in Dublin. She graduated from the National College of Art and Design in 2020, where she received a First Class Honours in Painting. Her degree work was shortlisted for the RDS Visual Arts Awards, and also included in the Rua Red Winter Open. Since then her paintings have been added to a number of public and private collections and included in multiple exhibitions, most recently a large group show organised and exhibited by Hangtough Contemporary.

Season Dailey Art

Mary de Blacam

de Blacam | Artist Statement

Mary de Blacam was born in Lansing, the state capital of the Midwestern state of Michigan, USA. Her family later moved to Dublin, where she grew up and is now based.  Mary is a graduate of the Mackintosh School of Art, Glasgow.

The character of her work draws on a range of influences she absorbed over many years travelling and living in different parts of the world. This included London, Glasgow, San Francisco, New York and a truly absorbing part of her life spent living in Australia.

“My work tends to feature bold colours that provide an immediate impact.  My style could be described as both fully abstract and semi-abstract with influences from the plant and animal kingdoms.  I tend to work very quickly in acrylic paint. My work has been characterised as broadly expressionist in nature.  The more paired down Swiss Guard Series is reminiscent of the modernist tradition".

Publications

Mary's work has featured in the following publications:

The Sunday Business Post
The Examiner
The Irish Arts Review
The Artists' Cookbook

Galleries

Mary has exhibited at the following Dublin galleries:

Gormleys Fine Art
The Origin Gallery
The Leinster Gallery
The United Arts Club
The Trinity Gallery
Locks Restaurant

In 2021 Mary was invited along with 21 other  Irish artists to take part in the Kilkenny Catwalk Project.  Mary's Kilkenny Cat was exhibited at the  historic St Canice's Cathedral

Mary de Blacam Art

Louise Neiland

Neiland | Artist Statement

Louise Neiland is a world-builder. Each new painting adds breadth to a painterly globe that has been expanding now for three decades. Outpost is a body of work that document the period of time during which they were made – in this sense, they possess the intimacy of a diary. The landscapes depicted, however, are not entirely recognizable from the painter’s everyday life. Certain landmarks are rooted in reality, but these paintings seek to map territories hitherto unmapped. Outpost is a record of travels across the painter’s innermost landscapes. The topography of this region, the peculiarities of its architecture, creaturely presences, celestial phenomena, create loops within this painted journey. We find ourselves in a place of echoes and mysterious harbingers; the unknown revealing itself gradually.

Louise Neiland Art