Our latest exhibition in Working Artist Studios, Ballydehob, is ‘The Islands’ – a solo exhibition by Cork artist, Angie Shanahan. It is mostly an exploration of three islands, influenced by the book, ‘The Islands, Six Fictions’, by Irish novelist, poet and short story writer William Wall.
Please come to the opening at 5.00pm on Saturday 23rd March. ‘The Islands’ will run until Sat.13th April.
Angie Shanahan, a painter in the narrative style, graduated from Crawford College of Art and Design, Cork. Her current practice involves landscape impacted by human presence usually set within that particular water defined place, the coast. Often starting from an inland point, following river lines, from source to sea.
“There were three islands and they were youth, childhood and age”
The first Island featured is Castle Island in Roaringwater Bay, West Cork. A real place, a place of bleak but captivating beauty, less than half a mile long, “its castle, a ruined watchtower, and in the shadow of the watchtower, a cluster of ruined cottages”
Spurred by the way the writer’s stories evoke landscape, the artist was compelled to visit the Islands, to absorb the writer’s words through a sense of place; “the rumour of sea among stones, the grinding of pebbles” combined with the evocative nature and deep ecology of the island as suggested by Wall’s poetic descriptions. Both Wall’s words and the artist’s own journey created the potential for a rich visual narrative of the islands.
From the limestone island in Roaringwater Bay, the artist continued her journey to the Isle of Wight and the “story of the chalk and mud that is the island; to the third Island featured, Procida in the bay of Naples an island of black and pumice stone and old volcanic ridges. the latter two islands both densely inhabited.
While the main focus is on these three islands, the exhibition will also feature a number of other Irish and Italian island the artist visited on her journeys in the last number of years.
