THE LIFE and work of Connemara-based writer and cartographer Tim Robinson will be celebrated next month in a series of events hosted by NUI Galway, the University of Exeter and Dublin City Gallery the Hugh Lane.
International writers, artists and academics are to participate in a free two-day symposium on September 9th and 10th at Galway City Museum, the Druid Lane Theatre and in Roundstone, where Robinson lives.
“Tim Robinson’s writing about landscape and the human place within it is one of the world’s cultural treasures,” NUI Galway Moore Institute professor Nicholas Allen has said.
Robinson, whose third volume of his Connemara trilogy – Connemara: A Little Gaelic Kingdom– has just been published by Penguin Ireland, is also the focus of an exhibition due to open on September 5th at the Hugh Lane.
His hand-drawn maps of the Aran Islands, Connemara and the Burren, as well as some earlier artwork, will feature in the exhibition entitled The Decision, which runs until January.
“I’m very gratified by all this attention,” Robinson said yesterday.
A member of Aosdána and the Royal Irish Academy, he recently completed a visiting fellowship in Irish studies at Magdalene College, Cambridge.
It was at Cambridge University that he studied maths, which he taught in Istanbul for three years.
He then turned to art, exhibiting in Vienna and London before moving to the Aran Islands in 1972 to write and draw maps. Robinson and his wife Máiréad subsequently settled in Roundstone and established Folding Landscapes, a specialist publishing house and information resource centre focusing on Galway Bay, the Aran Islands, the Burren and Connemara.
Robinson came to international attention with his two-volume study published by Penguin, Stones of Aran: Pilgrimage and Labyrinth.
The Connemara Symposium, as the two-day event is called, will include a screening of Pat Collins's film Tim Robinson: Connemara at Roundstone Community Hallon September 9th, as well as lectures and talks at Galway City Museum.
There will also be readings on the evening of September 10th at the Druid Lane Theatre by Andrew McNeillie, Manchán Mangan, Moya Cannon, Eamon Grennan and Robinson himself.
Robinson's Aran islands book quotes
TIM ROBINSON wrote in his classic Stones of Aran: Pilgrimage: "And in fact the three Aran Islands are fragments of a single, long, low escarpment, a broken arm of the limestone uplands known as the Burren on the mainland to the east.
“This bare, soluble limestone is a uniquely tender and memorious ground. Every shower sends rivulets wandering across its surface, deepening the ways of their predecessors and gradually engraving their initial caprices as law into the stone.”
The book, which was a companion volume to the subsequent Stones of Aran: Labyrinth, was first published by The Lilliput Press in association with Wolfhound Press in 1986, and subsequently taken up by Viking and then Penguin.
The book was described in a review in this newspaper as “one of the most original, revelatory and exhilarating works of literature ever produced in Ireland, and by the London Review of Books as a “wonderful achievement”.
This year is the 25th anniversary of its first publication.
