The Yellow River is not a nostalgic memoir for Seán McSweeney and Gerard Smyth

IT’S not nostalgia. The Yellow River, a collaborative project between poet Gerard Smyth and painter Seán McSweeney, delves deep into the pair’s memories of Co Meath, but Smyth, selecting words with the care to be expected of a poet, balks slightly at “nostalgic”.

“I would think of it more as a reclamation,” he says. “When Sean and I got into our stride, we knew it would be a project about memory. We went into our memory hoard to produce both the poems and the paintings, but we also did a lot of revisiting to the various sites from that memory hoard.”

The resulting exhibition’s titular Yellow River joins the Boyne at Navan, Co Meath, and is also a geographical feature which could be said to unite the personal histories of Smyth and McSweeney, both of whom spent time in their childhood in the Royal County. Smyth spent his summers in Knightstown with his grandmother, while McSweeney’s family lived in nearby Clongill until the death of his father. With 16 years separating them, their paths didn’t cross until decades later, when the connection was discovered.