Breaking down the walls in art at Cúil Aodha
A Kerry-based artist with a long association with Seán Ó Riada will be one of the visitors to Cúil Aodha for a unique event marking the late composer’s birthday, writes
The contours of a horse’s pelvic bone frame the surrealist artwork Charlie Haughey commissioned from Maria Simonds-Gooding, the Blasket Islands beloved by both of them appearing in the background through a heart-shaped aperture.
The work, “large and very dramatic”, formed part of the fledgling artist’s Dublin exhibition, opened by the composer Seán Ó Riada only months before his death aged 40 in 1971.
Maria, born in India to an English father and Irish mother, still looks out over the Blaskets from her home in Dún Chaoin, Co Kerry, the county to which she first came to live as a child in 1947, and whose stone wall-enclosed fields continue to inspire her work.
It was in the same Corca Dhuibhne Gaeltacht that she first met Ó Riada, as he immersed himself in Irish language and culture while staying in the house of their mutual friend, sean-nós singer Seán de hÓra.
Maria’s friendship with Ó Riada endured his move to Cúil Aodha, where that connection will be renewed this week at Féile na Laoch, a once-in-seven-years festival honouring the ‘Mise Éire’ composer and fellow cultural ‘heroes’, its prime mover being Ó Riada’s son Peadar.
“I met Seán on the Dingle peninsula before I ever met him in Cúil Aodha. Seán was so fond of this peninsula,” Maria recalls.
“I knew Seán de hÓra very well and it was in his house that Seán Ó Riada learned his Irish. And then I was there at dear, beloved Seán’s funeral."
“I have always admired both Peadar and his father enormously. They are heroes for me. Peadar is the most open spirited person, who can totally absorb anything I put before him, from the most minimalist to the most representational.”
Aosdána member Maria is one of seven artists whose work will be exhibited during the festival, which also sees seven ‘heroes’ each of dance, music, poetry and other cultural disciplines contribute to an all-night performance which reaches its zenith at dawn on Seán Ó Riada’s birthday, August 1.
The artists’ works will be shown not in a gallery, but framed in the windows of private homes, those who view them participating in a house-to-house art pilgrimage from Cúil Aodha into the surrounding countryside.
The setting is apposite. Maria’s visual landscapes in paint, plaster, and aluminium reflect man’s cultivation of countryside into fields or enclosures, though notably, the works are never peopled by the humans who effect such change.
@johncreedon Ag éisteacht leat agus mé ag ullmhú an chláir @FeileNaLaoch a bheidh ag tosnú an tseachtain seo chughainn. Bhfuil aon rud agat le Nine Wassies from Bainne agus Giordaí Ua Laoghaire - beidh sé ina laoch!
— iGaeilge (@igaeilge) July 20, 2018
Her art has been sold at Sotheby’s, and exhibited in New York, but this will be the first time it has been viewed from without by an audience positioned in a landscape as sparse as that of her artworks.
“My passion about fields is about not just any old field, it’s about fields in remote and difficult places where the elements are critically challenging.
“What the farmer does to overcome those challenges is different according to the elements in different parts of the world,” she explains.
“They’re living on the edge of nothing, but the spirit of these people and their intelligence and the way they overcome all these problems, that is what drives me. It’s the strength of the spirit and what it can do.
“It’s about the people that work the fields.” Whether inspired by Corca Dhuibhne, or travels to Greek Islands or Himalayan valleys, “my fields are not territorial. They’re all about survival and the elements,” she says. Her earliest influence, her Indian nurse or ‘ayah’ introduced the young Maria to Indian life on the land.
“I remember my first wish was for my ayah to take me to a beautiful cornfield along a mountainside. I was only two or something. I couldn’t walk there, and she took me. Fields have always been central in my work. It’s very deep in one’s subconscious. Whatever my ayah did, she must have given me a huge passion and insight into survival and poverty.”
A lifetime after that mountainside pilgrimage, those who walk in Cúil Aodha between the works of Maria, and Robert Ballagh, Cliodhna Cussen, Tadhg Mac Suibhne, Maeve McCarthy, Imogen Stuart, and Walter Verling may gain their own insights into these fields of vision and their man, or woman-made, boundaries.
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