West Cork Choral Singers

Flail, by Debbie Godsell

It’s not often an art exhibition has me running to my word processor to get a post out, but this one did it for me! On the surface, this is a quirky, amusing, thought-provoking, installation about the annual Harvest Festival, as practised in the autumn in Church of Ireland communities all over Ireland. Except it’s so much more than that. It’s titled Flail, and it’s on right now at Uillinn.

Debbie Godsell has taken the idea of the harvest festival and the communities that celebrate it, and turned it into a personal exploration of her own experience with it, as a child growing up in the C of I, and as a photographer recording the custom of decorating churches. In Ireland, this is a custom unique to the Protestant church – the minority religion. As such, there’s a strangeness to it when viewed by someone who grew up Catholic. Not strange in the sense of peculiar, but in the sense of unknown, slightly other-worldly, why-have-I-never-known-about-this?

But yes, it is quirky and amusing. Just take a look at these heads – they are the first thing you notice when you come in, titled ‘Ancestors’. Made from all kinds of found materials, some represent real people (hello, Great-Aunt Molly!) although most are simply heads – a bit like you might find on a scarecrow out in the fields around harvest time.

But after the first encounter you realise that this also of course, is the thought-provoking part of this exhibition Now you notice that they are on sticks, mirroring perhaps the heads on pikes that seemed to spell the end on many rebellions against English rule down through the centuries. In her notes, Godsell states:

Here, the heads take on an unsettling childlike quality, drawing from elements of folk drama and ritual. Rudimentary in form, they are a fusion of figures from Irish history and the artist’s own imagined lineage. Blurring the line between historical facts and personal mythology, the work interrogates themes of memory, identity and inherited trauma, challenging how history is constructed and remembered.

What does it mean, in Ireland, to be part of a minority religion? What has it meant in the past, and now? What if that religion was perceived to track closely with class, and land ownership, and unionist sympathies? 

We pride ourselves, in Ireland, now, on being a pluralistic and non-sectarian society. But if that is true at all, it is only recently so. The Ireland I grew up in – in the 50s and 60s – was deeply sectarian. Protestants and Catholics rarely mixed and we were forbidden, on pain of sin, to enter each other’s churches. We were educated separately, played some different sports (Anyone for lacrosse? How about men’s hockey?), sounded different, went to separate Brownie troupes, studied different curricula at school . . .

This exhibition explores the harvest-related parts of that separateness, but the opening, in which Debbie Godsell was interviewed by art critic Cristín Leach, also featured a discussion on folklore and a hymn by Cristín!

Cristín has said that Flail is ‘complicated territory’ for her and the hymn, Harvesting History, sprang almost spontaneously from engaging with the first Flail exhibition. It has been beautifully set to music by Susan Nares, and the West Cork Choral Singers presented it at the opening. Here’s a snippet.

I was particularly fascinated by the folklore discussion. As Roaringwater Journal readers know, we have used the Duchas/Schools Folklore Collection extensively over the years. One particularly important piece of research for me was to look at what it had to say about the Reverend Fisher – Saint and/or Souper of Toormore. What I found was a little shocking and it opened my eyes to an aspect of this wonderful resource that I had never previously considered – the decidedly sectarian nature of the collections. While some Protestant National Schools did participate in the School’s Collection of 1937/38, Protestants are very under-represented as informants. See this excellent article from History Ireland for more on this*.

Cristín and Debbie talked about the prevailing view of Protestants as seen in the overwhelmingly Catholic responses in the Collection – and it wasn’t a pretty picture. As I discovered with Fisher, and as Amanda has discovered with Holy Wells Folklore, the Protestants are basically blamed for anything misfortunate or discreditable – some examples here, and here and here. 

Go see this exhibition if you can. It’s fascinating, but more than that, it’s important. We are still trying to come to grips with our history, in Ireland. Art like this helps immeasurably.

* A ‘Protestant folk’? Author(s): Deirdre Nuttall and Críostóir MacCarthaigh Source: History Ireland , Vol. 25, No. 5 (September–October 2017), pp. 48-51 Published by: Wordwell Ltd. Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.2307/90014607

In the Wilds of West Cork

West Cork night life

West Cork night life

What on earth will you find to do in the wilds of West Cork? One friend asked me this when I announced my plans to move here. Others may have been too polite to express the thought, but the question hovered. They needn’t have worried, of course. I don’t think I have ever lived anywhere else where there was so much going on and so much to do. If that was true in the winter, it’s more so now. It’s spring and summer’s around the corner, so West Cork Festival Season has gone into high gear. I wrote about the Ballydehob Trad Festival six weeks ago. Since then, there have been two more – a jazz festival in Ballydehob and the Fiddle Fair in Baltimore. 

Live jazz in the Irish Whip Bar

Live jazz in the Irish Whip Bar

The Jazz Festival featured a street market, and jazz sessions in most of the pubs all afternoon and well into the night. The village hall was decked out as a night club one night, with dancing into the wee hours. There were musicians and jazz aficionados from all over Ireland, and the pubs were bursting at the seams and spilling over onto the sidewalks.

Soul Driven and the riveting dancer Ksenia Parkhaskaya

Soul Driven and the riveting dancer Ksenia Parkhaskaya

This is the second time we have been here for the Baltimore Fiddle Fair, which has ben going now for over 20 years, under the brilliant direction of Declan McCarthy. World class acts come to play in this tiny village. The audience is diverse too – we met people who had come from Britain, Germany and the USA just for this weekend. We had season tickets, which meant we weren’t asleep before 2 in the morning for four nights in a row – probably earlier than most of the attendees!

Eddi Reader

Eddi Reader

A highlight was Eddi Reader, a Scottish singer/songwriter with a larger than life stage presence, a great line in stories, and a soaring voice. Robert loved seeing Aly Bain, one of his musical heroes, in concert and we both appreciated the wide range of music on offer, from Appalachian old time fiddling to Swedish polskas, Scottish and Irish tunes, and an entertaining group call the New Rope String Band who kept us laughing with their slapstick humour. For the readers who have been requesting videos, I recorded one lively number and uploaded it to YouTube – take a look. It’s a tiny taste of what we experienced.

John Sheahan with young fans

John Sheahan with young fans

One unforgettable afternoon was devoted to a concert by John Sheahan, the sole surviving member of the legendary Dubliners. Accompanied by Eamon Keane on the keyboard, he told stories, read us his poetry, and played his own compositions. He is truly an Irish icon, and it felt like a real privilege to hear him in such an intimate venue. He played a wide variety of music and I recorded this one: St Patrick’s Cathedral.

Of course all these late nights and bouncing around on seats takes a toll on the body, leading to the need for a rejuvenating day at a spa. Fortunately, there is a marvellous one in West Cork, on Inchydoney Island, where my friend Amanda and I repaired for a girly day of pampering. You can read her account of our hedonism here. 

The strand at Inchydoney Island

The strand at Inchydoney Island

And in case you might feel that the entertainment described above is not highbrow enough, last night we attended a performance of a Haydn mass and Mozart’s Requiem by the West Cork Choral Singers. Accompanied by an excellent small orchestra (we recognised some of the players from our regular Firday night trad sessions: fiddlers turned violinists) and four outstanding soloists, the choir rose to the challenge of an ambitious program magnificently, garnering a well-deserved standing ovation by the appreciative audience.

West Cork Choral Singers present Mozart's Requiem in Skibbereen

West Cork Choral Singers present Mozart’s Requiem in Skibbereen

We won’t have much time to recover from all those late night – next weekend is the Fastnet Short Film Festival in Schull as well as a Skibbereen Historical Society trip to Cape Clear, and the one after that is the Ballydehob Country Music Festival (where I may have a small role to play). More on those events in an upcoming post. If I survive it all…It’s a tough life, out here in the wilds!