Catherine Marshall looks at the evolving artistic expression of Maria Simonds-Gooding and her recent experimentation with tapestry design
Returning to Dun Chaoin on the Dingle Peninsula after an appearance on Gay Byrne’s Late Late Show in 1987 Maria Simonds-Gooding met John Joe Sheehy from Dingle. ‘Marie Goodings’, he said to her, ‘They won’t forget you. A woman from the West who can get her dog to sing and a painting with nothing in it!’ In many ways John Joe Sheehy’s comment sums up Simonds-Gooding’s career better than that of any art critic. She will be remembered as a woman from the West (the Kerry Gaeltacht, although she is not native and struggles with Irish), for her total commitment to nature (getting her dog to sing) and for the extraordinary reductiveness of her austere paintings, plasterworks and prints
