Exhibitions, Writing News

As the world slowly opens…so, too, do the art galleries

The Irish Times recently published Gemma Tipton’s guide to “The best artworks to see in Ireland’s reopened galleries”.

Margo and I are thrilled that Duality is deemed one of them:

Margo McNulty’s show, Duality, is a collaboration with writer Shauna Gilligan, and both are fascinated by the stories that wrap around, and soak into the land. Find prints, paintings and an artist’s book from an exhibition that has lain quietly, waiting for the world to open up again. Until July 31th, with Mark Garry’s An Lucht Siúil (The Walking People) opening on August 8th.
Roscommon Arts Centre, Circular Road, Roscommon. Open now. 

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Source: https://www.irishtimes.com/culture/the-best-artworks-to-see-in-ireland-s-reopened-galleries-1.4288578 [Accessed 10 July 2020]

If you can’t make it to the exhibition in person you might like to take a look at this video which gives you insight into the process and also serves as a taster for the exhibition:

Roscommon Art Centre – Margo McNulty from puredesigns on Vimeo.

Writers Read

In Difficult Times…

In difficult times, literature can be a respite or a road map, fiction can offer a way forward or a means of escape, and poetry can be a pronouncement or a poultice.

This is what the Paris Review (233) editorial note by Emily Nemens reminds us.

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It is to literature that we turn. In need of connection, we search for the familiar and seek commonality. What brings us together until we can be together again is finding what we have in common, uniting against injustice and discrimination and stopping to listen to and observe what is happening in the world.

What we are living – and dying – through now is also made a little more bearable by connecting with nature. This week I visited a garden centre for the first time in over a year. It was full of people – many with masks – looking for inspiration to create edible and ornamental additions to their indoor and outdoor living spaces.

Looking for beauty. Finding objects that seem useful and promise to bring joy. I found myself veering towards bright colours, searching for light. I picked out a large cerise pot into which I planted Kale and Black Cabbage. All with the knowledge that from nourishing and caring comes flourishing and blooming.

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Writing News

UCD Press release Ebook of “Years of Turbulence” (UCD Press: Dublin, 2015)

This week University College Dublin Press has released the ebook of Years of Turbulence: The Irish Revolution and its Aftermath. First published in hardback in 2015 and edited by historians Diarmaid Ferriter and Susannah Riordan, it contains a collection of essays written in honour of Professor Michael Laffan.

I am delighted to have a chapter in this publication. Based on part of my MA thesis which Professor Laffan supervised, it focuses on the popular and scholarly portrayal of Patrick Pearse from 1916 to 1927.

Cover of Years of Turbulence

Years of Turbulence is available direct from UCD Press website or on Amazon.com where the blurb summarizes the book well:

Years of Turbulence powerfully showcases many new perspectives on the Irish revolutionary period of 1912-23, through the vivid and provocative scholarship of leading and emerging historians. The contributors to this fascinating collection not only focus on new angles, they also revisit traditional assumptions, and elaborate on some of the central, current debates on the revolutionary period. Many muted voices of the revolution are given a platform for the first time in these pages. The collection demonstrates a determination to uncover personal experiences and protests that until now have remained relatively undocumented and ignored. Such themes as the experience of violence in its various forms, the specific circumstances of individual counties, tensions between constitutionalism and radicalism, between elites and the grassroots, the extent to which the IRA’s campaign was effectively co-ordinated and controlled, as well as the challenge of writing about women and what they experienced, are deeply considered.Historians in this collection also recognise the need to address, not just events of the revolutionary period, but its afterlife, assessing what the revolution and its leaders came to symbolise, the extent to which a hierarchy of benefit existed in its aftermath, and what the implications were for survivors.Making use of a variety of recently released archival material – including censuses of Ireland of 1901 and 1911, the Bureau of Military History collection, the Military Archives and Service Pensions Collection – Years of Turbulence reveals a fascinating web of different experiences during the revolutionary era and is a fitting contribution, not only to the pioneering scholarship of renowned historian Michael Laffan, who this collection honours, but also to the current decade of commemoration of the centenary of the revolution. The book is richly illustrated with rare images of the period from the Des FitzGerald collection.