This Shortest Day

So the Shortest day came, and the year died,

And everywhere down the centuries of the snow-white world

Came people singing, dancing,

To drive the dark away.

They lighted candles in the winter trees;

They hung their homes with evergreen;

They burned beseeching fires all night long

To keep the year alive,

And when the new year’s sunshine blazed awake

They shouted, revelling.

Through all the frosty ages you can hear them

Echoing behind us – listen!!

All the long echoes sing the same delight,

This shortest day,

As promise wakens in the sleeping land:

They carol, feast, give thanks,

And dearly love their friends,

And hope for peace.

And so do we, here, now,

This year and every year.

Welcome Yule!

 

Image: JesseJames. Words: Susan Cooper.

Manniken Pee Platz

At Jesse’s suggestion, at James’s instigation both, first Jesse, then James, in penumbra urinated, their sides contiguous, their organs of micturition reciprocally rendered invisible by manual circumposition, their gazes, first Jesse’s, then James’s, elevated to the projected luminous and semiluminous shadow.

Words: James Joyce (adapted). Image: JesseJames.

Inis Oírr – A Reflection, Ivan McMahon

The Aran Islands have been a source of inspiration to artists for generations. One of the first people to photograph them was John Millington Synge whose images, made around the turn of the 20th century, centred on the islanders and their daily lives. More recently, in 2007, Irish painter Sean Scully produced his exhibition and book Walls of Aran, which focused on the iconic and timeless dry stone walls that criss-cross the islands.

 Film-maker and photographer Ivan McMahon has created a series of photograph which comprise striking black and white landscapes of Inis Oírr. McMahon’s photographs are closer to the work of Scully than Synge but have their own potent and distinctive visual stamp. They might more accurately be described as rockscapes rather than landscapes as McMahon explores the tones and textures of rock formations that have been shaped and sculpted for millennia by sea, weather, and time.

McMahon has titled all his images after deities and figures from Irish mythology.  He is interested in natural, rather than man-made, structures though ‘Na Sídh’ presents a dramatic interplay between the two as hulking, fissured slabs of cliff are sandwiched between low rocky walls at the top and bottom of the image. Elsewhere, natural forms seem to echo man made ones as in ‘Dagda’ which suggests ancient castellated battlements, or perhaps the prow of a mighty stone ship projecting outward toward the sea.

The catalogue carries two resonant quotations about the work; from The Iliad there is ‘Gods are hard for mortals to recognise’ and from renowned French photographer Robert Doisneau there is ‘To suggest is to create; to describe is to destroy’.

 Inis Oírr – A Reflection (Ivan McMahon photographs) exhibition runs at the Town Hall Theatre bar in Galway throughout January 2018.

A Reflection, Ivan McMahon

Having grown up along the wild and dramatic west coast of Ireland, Ivan McMahon has held a lifelong love and fascination with the landscape of this exposed and rugged part of the world.

Exploring the transcendent terrain of Inis Oírr, sculpted as it is by the dynamic North Atlantic, Ivan studies its tones and textures in a bid to glean an impression of its fundamental energy, that which conjures fleeting glimpses of dieties, mythical giants and tragic heros of a near forgotten time.

Ivan McMahon’s photographic exhibition, A Reflection, opens at Aras Éanna on Friday 1^st September 2017 at 8pm and runs for one month.

The Children of Lir

 

As part of the Family Picnic at Aras Éanna (Arts Centre), the story of The Children of Lir was revealed through the artistry of  Dara McGee, the music of Julie and Frida from County Mayo and the narrative voice of islander MacDara.