Earagail Arts Festival brought substantial work by celebrated 20th-century artists, including Henry Moore and Pablo Picasso, to Donegal. Aidan Dunne reports
There is something strange about turning off Letterkenny's busy main street into the library building and descending the stairs to the art centre's basement gallery, a room strikingly devoid of natural light, to encounter substantial sculptures by some of the most celebrated artists of the 20th century, gathered for the exhibition Form. This should not, in itself, be surprising. In the past few years both John Cunningham and Shaun Hannigan, in their different capacities, have worked hard to ensure that, no matter how different it is up there in Donegal, as the tourism slogan has it, residents of the county should be able to see world-class art on their doorsteps. Hence the appearance of the likes of Jeff Koons on the list of artists included in the county art collection.
Not that the Earagail Arts Festival visual-arts programme is about bringing high art to the masses in some missionary sense. Rather the issue is one of engagement. Time and again festival events gave the sense that visual culture was something living, something rooted in the world rather than an embellishment to it, something open to debate and up for grabs.
The extraordinary range of sculpture on view in Letterkenny is augmented by an excellent show of graphic work, and some small sculptures, by Henry Moore at the Glebe Gallery, in Churchill. Partly because Moore is seen as representative of the high-art tradition of modernism, his work is currently unfashionable. In particular, there is a view that his prominent publicly sited sculptures typify the practice of imposing art on the community. So there is a degree of challenge in situating his work at the heart of a regional arts festival. This is underlined by the citing of Clive Bell's celebrated phrase "significant form", encapsulating his emphasis on the formal elements of a work of art, in relation to Form.
In that show Anish Kapoor's enigmatic and compelling objects, their surfaces thickly coated with powdered pigment, could be seen as contemporary counterparts to Moore's forms, with their rhythmic play of masses and voids. Void is the operative word in relation to Kapoor. His textured forms draw you in, trapping your gaze but leaving you curiously adrift as you lose sight of anything to hold on to. He does, as he says, make not so much objects as holes in space. He aims to offer the viewer a transcendent aesthetic experience.
All of which could be seen as occupying one end of a spectrum of cultural possibility. If that is so, at the other are events with their feet firmly planted in the community. There is the festival's visual-artist-in-residence, Gerard Mannix Flynn, whose work provocatively addresses the issues that go to the heart of society, chronicling the experience of an individual thrown on the mercy of the State's institutions. And there was Dreamtime/Aisling by An Cosan Glas Cois Fharraige, which has developed an annual outdoor participatory sculpture project, involving artists and children, over the past few years.
Aisling, this year's project, differed in that it culminated in a specific performance event, an hour-long beach spectacle at Trá Machaire Rabhartaigh. The organisers weren't sure what to expect in terms of audience interest, but chances were they did not expect the thousands of spectators - and the attendant traffic jam - that the event attracted. This huge response was a startling confirmation that there is an appetite for ambitious cultural projects with significant community involvement.
In fact Aisling, with its 20 performers, winged willow-and-paper figures, articulated sculptures and environmental son et lumière, drew on the skills and labour of 70 children, not to mention the adults, including Seamus Kennedy, Deirdre Ní Bhraonain, Annjo Carr, Ewan Berry, Billy Wynter and more. It is worth pointing out, though, that technology and pyrotechnics were never in danger of eclipsing the essence of the thing as a sculptural project that drew its materials and inspiration from the elements and the environment in a profound way.
Flynn's residency allowed him to assemble several of his series of recent, highly successful projects and work with them in a new context. His presence was crucial to this process, and both the text-based installations and his performative interventions elicited extraordinary responses from the audience. In complementary ways, Victim Impact Report and Not To Be Read in Open Court chronicle the experiences of an individual, James, who, put into the care of the State, is subject to institutional abuse. The works chart the levels of damage inflicted and the network of mutual reinforcement that operated between various authorities.
Flynn's breakthrough in terms of articulating this issue in visual form came with his employment of the documents and language of the powerful, of the institutions themselves, so that we get a dual account, from the points of view of the subject and the powers-that-be charged with his care, that is cumulatively chilling. It is also exceptionally accessible, and the siting of Victim Impact Report in the bandstand in Market Square in Letterkenny made it even more so. It helped, of course, that Flynn's commitment was total.
In another sense, so is the commitment of another festival visitor, Billy Childish, who was there in several capacities, primarily musical, perhaps, but backed up with poetry and, at the county museum, paintings. An unmistakable presence around town, Childish (known partly as a former partner of Tracey Emin) cut an anachronistic figure, tall and skinny with a prominent moustache and attired in first World War garb.
All of his work is characterised by a quality of outpouring, by a seeming need to constantly express his personality. He is extraordinarily prolific in everything he does. His paintings have a rough, expressionist character with a leaning towards icons of extremity, evoking feelings of isolation, suffering and pessimism.
Rather more understated by comparison, Element by Claire McLaughlin, at An Grianan Theatre, is a subtle show of small but outstanding ceramic work. Sidestepping the predictable, McLaughlin allies ceramic to the techniques of paintings and printmaking, and apparently involves the impress of natural materials, to make beautifully judged, delicately textural panels that pursue a dialogue concerning nature and culture. It is very fine, understated work that needs to be seen at first hand.
Was there, in Earagail, a dialectical tension between the modernist aesthetic embodied in pieces by Picasso, Barbara Hepworth, Sir Anthony Caro and Henry Moore and the art engagé of Mannix Flynn or Aisling? In the end, not really. It is not a case of arguing that community is good and art establishment bad, for example. Surely it is difficult to look at a wonderful sculpture such as Hepworth's Curved Form - Trevalgan without relating it to forms in the environment beyond the urban sprawl of Letterkenny.
For all the "development", Co Donegal remains a place in which the influence of the sea, the landscape and the weather is pervasive and enriching. Certainly, Hepworth, Moore and a sculptor such as David Nash, some of whose work brilliantly integrates geometric form with natural materials and processes, look thoroughly at home in the wider physical context of the county and, perhaps more importantly, help to shape the way we might see it.
Exhibitions continue at the Glebe Gallery until August 27th and Letterkenny Arts Centre and Donegal County Museum until August 28th
