Achill’s desolate beauty has inspired many Irish artists, not least Linda Brownlee who has captured the island’s youth caught between land, sea and sky, writes Stephanie McBride
Achill’s defining characteristics were described by The Westminster Review in 1890 thus: ‘‚Ķfor if Nature has been niggardly in bestowing fruitfulness on the soil, she has richly endowed the island with scenic gifts.’ Two decades later, Paul Henry on his first visit to the island also noted the impoverishment of the land. ‘It meant incessant toil with the spade, ploughs being useless on those stony fields,’ he wrote in his autobiography and depicted this labour in his painting The Potato Diggers in 1923. Initially encouraged by Synge to visit Achill, Henry lived there for several years. His distinctive visual style and representation of its island life was adopted and promoted by the new State as the official image of Ireland, melding his artistic perception with constructs of national and cultural identity. In a contrasting style but echoing Henry’s rural content, Gerard Dillon’s disarmingly direct mode – at times invoking a surrealist turn – presented further images of life on the western seaboard. More recently Alannah O’Kelly’s striking 1990 work The Country Bloom, A Garden and a Grave reconfigures Achill’s topography through image and text to present a narrative of local loss, mourning and Famine memories.
Eleanor Flegg visits ceramicist Mark Campden’s Kilkenny studio to witness the process behind his gleaming table-ware
Paula Murphy examines the background to Oisín Kelly’s immortalization of Big Jim Larkin commissioned by the workers of Ireland
Technical developments enable artistic development’: John Behan reflects on the circumstances which spurred his move to sculpture, in conversation here with Brian McAvera