Inspirational Beauty

We holidayed in Connemara a lot when my daughter was very young but her only recollections were from photos. To reacquaint her, she and I took a road trip there in honour of her birthday.  Our arrival coincided with the Connemara marathon and also with First Thought @ Kylemore – a day-long series of talks, music and meditation on beauty and Western inspiration organised by the Galway International Arts Festival in stunning Kylemore Abbey, home to an order of Benedictine nuns. My now adult daughter, Lucy, took the lion's share of the photos in this entry.

With a consistent undercurrent of humour, Gavin Pretor-Pinney of the Cloud Appreciation Society explained that the organisation of cloud watchers had developed rich and tangible shoots.  Time taken to cloud watch causes a mentally healthy change of pace and inspires lateral thinking about clouds amongst other things.  Clouds are unique, ever changing, cost nothing and needn’t always be considered harbingers of the unpleasant.  Learning their science and traveling widely to experience all varieties has enriched many lives, including Gavin Pretor-Pinney's, and led him to identify and formally establish the existence of a new, previously unrecognised cloud type.   This quest took him on a journey across continents and the international media.    The Cloud Appreciation Society has a manifesto with badges, tea towels and an old-style app  (an illustrated revolving cardboard wheel of technical information about clouds)  A few sufficiently knowledgeable audience members were presented with prizes of society paraphernalia when they proved capable of answering questions about cloud characteristics and definitions. 

Dr. Marie Bourke , Hughie O’Donoghue, and Brian Fay as moderator brought us down to earth - literally - by examining Western Irish earth as a consistent source of inspiration for painters.  Dr. Marie Bourke explained that living conditions, unique dress and customs of Western people had drawn artists West from far and wide for centuries, and intensified with the advent of rail travel. Their artistic produce had developed in many unforeseen directions, such as providing authentic visual records of how Western people had lived, from their spectacularly colourful style of dress, to how they worked and local religious practices,   Hughie O Donoghue spoke of his Mayo born mother’s consistent pull back “home” to Mayo from Manchester where she had moved as a young woman to work, marry and have her family.  As was the norm then, playing outdoors barefoot on his prolonged summer visits to his grandmother in Mayo had quite literally acquainted him with the land of his forebears. He believes the West has a timelessly stable identity all its own, and that the close identity of farmland and holdings with people is as significant as it is unique. People are known as much by place and forebears as by themselves - everyone in a village has family in the local cemetery.  In a very urban-centric depersonalised world this is unusual.  Whether in situ, or simply through recollection, the West draws its “people” (who need not necessarily even hail directly from there), back time and time again, and is a route to subconscious expression.  For Hughie O’Donoghue, an abstract painter, this realm has provided his artistic route.    

Yvonne Farrell, architect, Vona Groarke, poet, and Eithne Hand , curator of the day and additionally on this occasion,  moderator of the discussion, spoke about landscape and memory . Yvonne Farrell presented beauty in the form of an image of snowdrops pushing up through soil in early spring.  Beauty spots such as Kylemore are precious but not the norm. Nowadays people live and gather in ever spreading cities, rendering architecture the new earth surface. This means good architecture is now a responsibility and should be sensitive to the history, practices and circumstances of both land and people. When true to these prerequisites, it can produce peculiarly universal themes that may be considered universally beautiful. Two large photos flanking architectural models at an exhibition by the speaker's firm, Grafton Architects, were frequently mistakenly believed by visitors to be images of the same location –

(the following links are simply to illustrate, and are not from the exhibition mentioned)

- one was of Machu Picchu and the other was from the monastic settlements at the Skellig islands in County Kerry – both from far flung ends of the earth and time, yet both having required levels of superhuman effort to achieve and maintain that could be considered moving to the observer.   Vona Groarke read some of her work and described her poetry as architecture of words and ideas, and put the question of definition of beauty directly to the floor – was it popular decree, perfect proportions or something else?      

Dr. Sarah L. Townsend examined the recurring depiction of Irish people as animals with particular reference to the works of Enda Walsh’s Disco Pigs, and Pat McCabe’s,The Butcher Boy - work of both artists has been presented as Galway International Arts Festival productions in the past.  She discussed the effects of recent economic excess and subsequent collapse in the form of the Celtic Tiger.  She also examined international usage of “pig” as a term of abuse in music and popular culture internationally and specifically as an occasional term of racist stereotyping of the Irish, and pondered implications.

Some very charming local pigs we met (really!) at Rosleague - for old times' sake, we returned there - we used to stay in cottages there many comets and moons ago!

These events took place in the ballroom in Kylemore Abbey, where there was also an exhibition of photographs on display of earth, sea and sky by Nils-Udo.   Throughout the day, we had time to examine these beautiful images and also take breaks for refreshment in the cafe. From time to time, our hostesses, the Benedictine nuns, flitted in and out of lectures discreetly...

...and were seen going about the running of the business of the Abbey, its grounds and its tourist visitors in garb so traditional as to be remarkable, and cause for ponder and wonder at their endurance amid the undoubted beauty of their surroundings. Anyone who ever spent time in Connemara would be conscious of the often bruising weather conditions, and find daunting the sheer hard graft of maintaining a place such as Kylemore.

During break times, we emerged from the Abbey into the breathtaking panacea of mountains and lake and where, for that day at least ,the sun shone and the clouds most obligingly put on spectacular performances of gliding and shifting through the ever changing light and colour of the vast Western sky. As the sun began to set, and the shadows descended across the mountains, we walked up the path to the gothic chapel where, accompanied by Cormac de Barra on harp,  Julie Feeney, shimmering in flowers, sequins and spangles from head to heels. performed from her new album, "Clocks".  She explained that for several weeks she had been on the road promoting the album which, because of the gothic chapel's exceptional acoustic quality, had been recorded there last January. And in addition, as Julie Feeney herself is from Galway, that night was a very special home coming in several respects.

For the nuns, she also performed an earlier work, “Impossibly Beautiful”, which under the circumstances was never more apt.   Performers, performance, sound, lighting, surroundings all amassed with the audience in a way which.... well... perfect planning can go a long way, but after that you're into the realm of fairy dust and they got it.  Like many of the earlier themes (about beauty's expression in striving, authenticity and delicacy), the joy of the evening is pretty much inexpressible through words... You'd really just have to have been there!  Something almost every speaker mentioned throughout the day was unanticipated creative spin-off from pure artistic endeavour:  for me, a perfect example was the mutual warmth and openness of many very different worlds coinciding.  

Finally, Leo Enright gave us a tour of the Celtic Cosmos and spoke about how far space travel has developed, showing us Chris Hadfield's video as illustration.   He then introduced us to Orion; to a brand newly discovered comet which looks like a dumbbell made of earth (soil, as opposed to the planet) but is in fact made up of extraordinarily cold ice;  he took us through space stations, space craft and personnel with many of whom he is on cordially sociable terms, He also led a celebration of Yuri Gargarin Night - for which curator Eithne Hand had earlier alerted us we were officially registered as an Event at Kylemore.  Yuri Gagarin was the first human in space - a feat achieved on April 12th 1961, which culminated in a gathering outside the chapel under the night sky, while Julie Feeney and Cormac de Barra once again performed.  

What made the day so exceptional and successful in my opinion was that everyone there –from organisers, direct participants and audience –  were wide open to any outcome,.  I feel very lucky and grateful to have been there to have shared in the magic - because there was magic - and on a personal note, it was a great pleasure to be back there again to share such a unique experience with my wonderful, beautiful and now fully grown adult daughter, Lucy.

... even still loyally wearing my knitting! - one of the Gaptastic Paloma cowls