You could be forgiven for thinking you had stumbled into a rather chic TriBeCa apartment at the inaugural exhibition of Noelle Campbell-Sharpe's reincarnated Harcourt Street gallery, Origin, on Monday. For her exhibition, called "artist in residence", Edwina Sandys lined the walls with her work and filled the rest of the gallery with coffee tables, clutter, hat stands and a table set for a dinner party.
Edwina, a grand-daughter of Winston Churchill, lives in New York with her husband Richard Kaplan, who runs the family's J.M. Kaplan Foundation. The exhibition was a chance for Edwina to catch up with old friends, Desmond Guinness, his son Patrick, a nd Desmond Fitzgerald, the Knight of Glin, who is actually a relation, as he too is distantly related to Churchill.
The soundtrack to the opening was provided by Julian Jones, a young man with impeccable musical credentials. Son of the late Brian Jones of the Rolling Stones, his stepfather is now Donovan Leitch, and Julian quite happily admits to "stealing" Donovan's unwanted tunes - with his permission of course. Meanwhile, in another corner a video was playing of Edwina's two TV performances that day - with Marty Whelan on RTE, and on Sky News. Afterwards the party moved to the knight's house in Waterloo Road, where he and his wife, Olda Fitzgerald, provided a buffet supper. Of course, Noelle has plans to ensure that future exhibition openings at Origin (previously the Cill Rialaig gallery) become latenight affairs - she's opening up her Harcourt Street premises as a private arts club, shortly. We warn you, though: according to the brochure you will meet "Ireland's most interesting painters, poets, writers, sages and satyrists [sic]. . ."