Seanchas;Lore Bridget Flannery RIP, Jen Donnery and Jackie Carter at Damer House Gallery.

Bringing together the work of three artists is not an easy task. Often, finding a common thread can be difficult for the viewer, or pieces jar and make little sense. Here, however, in the exhibition Seanchas;Lore, the artists share a common bond. The female domestic. From the historical accounts of Ireland from Carter and Flannery to the contemporary Ireland of today for women discussed by Donnery, it is the female voice that ties the work together. A strong sense of maternity, strength and resilience celebrate each of the three spaces. Through drawing and ceramic sculpture, Donnery explores the stories of women. The modern collective views of motherhood and being an artist mother. She examines the endurance of the female body through birthing and the physicality of mothering. The matrescence, the psychological and physiological changes to a woman’s being though pregnancy, and the aftermath of changes to the body. The visceral. Challenging the long imposed ideal and classical nude, Donnery shows us the imperfect, the scars, the stretch marks and the truth of the female body. Flannery’s work deviates from her normal painting practice, the sculptural, textile pieces are a form of expanded painting. Texture, colour and material work with each other. Sitting alongside her paintings, they complement but also stand-alone. They tell stories of lives lived, of abandoned places and ask questions, cad atá fágtha? What is left? Cad atá cailte? What is lost? The pieces collectively speak of domestic work, generational birthing, loss of native language and land. Flannery opens up a discourse on displacement and memory. Carter frames her work in a constructed and imagined story. Creating artefacts that reflect a museum-like collection, we are introduced to a woman, Agnes. Through the medium of textiles, her life story, as both a rural farming woman and mother, is regenerated. Set in the time period of early 1900s in Ireland, from childhood to motherhood, the work reflects the thoughts and reality of Agnes’s life. The sacrifice of mothering and the changing narrative of Ireland’s politics are all present in the work. Agnes was Church of Ireland. She is also Carter’s grandmother, a lost history reimagined to take her outside of her epitaph, Devoted Wife and Mother.  The exhibition will travel to the Atelier of Enrico Ferranini, in Florence under the direction of Academia del artist del disengo later in the year. Open: Wed - Sunday, 10.30am - 5.15pm.

Join us on Saturday 27 April at 3pm in Damer House Gallery for a celebration of the work of Jackie Carter, Jen Donnery and a tribute to the late Bridget Flannery RIP.  Muireann Ní Chonaill, Arts Officer Laois Co. Council will be the guest speaker. All welcome and we look forward to seeing you there.