Na Cailleacha: 'We’ve decided we're quite proud of being old women'
Catherine Marshall, third from right, and the other members of the Cailleacha arts collective.
A marginalised group appropriating a once-derogatory term is nothing new. LGBT movements have done it, some racial groups have done it. Now, it seems, it’s the turn of old women.
A new arts collective, made up of eight female artists based in Ireland with a combined professional practice of over 550 years, has adopted the name Na Cailleacha: the Irish word for hags or witches.
“We’ve decided that we’re actually quite proud of being old women,” art historian and curator Catherine Marshall, 72, says with a little smile.
“We’ve got to this stage, we’ve done all the things we’ve done. We decided we’d flaunt it, rather than apologise for it.
"Even if you call someone an old woman, you expect that to have derogatory connotations too. What are the stereotypes of old women? Interfering, poky, more trouble than they’re worth? We’re just people who accept what we are and who we are, and realise there’s a great strength for us in that.”
Last year, the Cailleach collective – Marshall, filmmaker Therry Rudin, visual artists Helen Comerford, Barbara Freeman, Gerda Teljeur, Patricia Hurl and Maria Levinge, with composer and saxophonist Carole Nelson – spent a month together making art, and examining the themes and questions that their advancing age has posed.
One such question is whether or not women become more radical with age, one that Marshall says is answered in the affirmative.
“We’re not afraid of what other people think of us anymore because we’ve been there, done that,” she says. “Now we just do what we believe in, in so far as we have the resources to do it. We’re empowered by age, actually.”
Marshall’s own career has seen her lecture in art history in several universities, serve as the first head of collections at the Irish Museum of Modern Art, curate exhibitions worldwide, and write and edit numerous works on modern Irish art. In the 1980s, she was the only female art history lecturer in Trinity College, while raising her two daughters alone.
As for many of Na Cailleacha, whose lives in art have coincided with a period of enormous societal change, feminism was a central concern for Marshall.
“Actually, I think I’d been a feminist without knowing the word since I was about ten,” she says.
“I had difficulties with people that I loved, about being a feminist, in the 1970s. There were people that I loved and really cared about who felt that the feminist movement, which was very in-your-face in the '70s, was making life more difficult for them.”
The current state of play in gender politics – including recent waves of hashtag activism including the #MeToo movement, and the integration or lack thereof of trans rights movements into feminist ideologies – is, from Marshall’s perspective, but one of a number of ideological shifts she has witnessed in the women’s movement in her lifetime.
“Getting older is helpful here again, because you’ve seen a lot more of it: what you realise is that there’s a place for all of it,” she says.
“I remember a time as a young woman where you would nearly feel like you were failing if men didn’t shout stupid things at you, or pinch your bum or whatever. We didn’t know we had the right to tell them to stuff it. That was a learning curve for us, because the culture did not empower us.”
When Na Cailleacha went on a month-long retreat together last September in Ballinglen Arts Centre in Co Mayo, Marshall participated in art-making sessions, and in her role as curator, she also prepared topics for discussion.
The products of this collaborative retreat – a 45 minute documentary, prints, a videoed performance piece, as well as contributions by the individual artists – will be exhibited alongside a day-long symposium, The Age of Reason/Unreason. With a guest gerontologist on hand, the symposium will address issues of aging and agency so firmly thrust into focus by the events of the Covid crisis last year.
As a collective, the work of Na Cailleacha is only just beginning, Marshall says: the artists are excited and energised, and already planning a next phase in their collaboration.
“We’re excited by it ourselves, and the energy we get out of our own excitement is keeping us going,” she says. “We’re sort of blown away by all the ideas that came out of it. We have ideas for the next artwork we want to make as a collective.”
