Cork artist Oonagh Hurley: 'These women challenged the status quo of gender inequality'
Oonagh Hurley at her Women Unremembered exhibition in County Cork Library.
A picture of one remarkable woman led artist Oonagh Hurley to another and a voyage of discovery that would inspire her to embark on a series of portraits reclaiming the lives of women hidden in the shadows of history.
“I was looking up stuff about B52 bombers because there was a story about a plane that had landed near Clonakilty during the war," says Hurley. "I went down a rabbit hole and found a beautiful image of Amelia Earhart, and then another of the aviator, Lilian Bland, who lived near Belfast. She wasn’t allowed to join the local flying club because she was a woman so she designed, built and flew her own plane. Amelia Earhart was only about 12 years of age at that stage.”
Bland and Earhart feature in Hurley’s exhibition of portraits titled Women Unremembered, currently showing at Cork’s County Library. Among those also included in the series of portraits are Ireland’s first female botanist, Ellen Hutchins; Cork woman Mary Elmes, who helped save hundreds of Jews during World War II, and sisters Sheila and Nora Wallace whose small shop in Cork city was at the heart of IRA operations during the War of Independence.
Some of the portraits were previously exhibited at the Atrium in City Hall Cork in March 2019, in celebration of International Women’s Day and the naming of the city’s new pedestrian bridge after Mary Elmes. “All of these women challenged the status quo of gender inequality and the invisibility of women. Their faces I felt were so important because often they disappeared from view,” she says.
Hurley, who is originally from Clonakilty and now lives in Ballintemple, turned to art full-time after working for many years as a physiotherapist in Dublin and Cork. She returned to study part-time at the Crawford College of Art and Design, juggling her studies with raising her three children. She graduated in 2009 and her work is held in public and private collections.
“I loved being a physiotherapist and met some great people. There is a lot to be said for doing art as a mature student, you have a lot more life experience under your belt,” she says.
For the portraits, Hurley usually works from photographic images but not in the case of her painting of Ellen Hutchins, the botanist from Ballylickey who discovered thousands of plant species in her short life.
“Because she died pre-photography, there is no picture of her face. In the portrait, I have her collecting seaweed on the shore but from the knees down; her reflection is in the water.”
Hurley creates her distinctive portraits through a process of pouring paint on canvas in layers and then seeing where the results lead her. “A lot of these are black and white photographs which leaves me completely free to do what I want with the colour.
"I pour paint initially on my canvasses on the floor, let that dry, and add more layers. I work with acrylics which are pretty fast-drying. I look at the canvasses in all directions and try to see if there is a composition or something that prompts the image,” she says.
“In the portrait of Margaret Cousins — who was one of the co-founders of the Irish Women’s Franchise League with Hanna Sheehy-Skeffington — her entire dress is just the result of the pouring method, I came in around her with the image.”
Hurley says she still gets a real thrill out of seeing all the portraits hanging together. “As I was leaving them [at the gallery] last night, I got the same feeling I used to get when I would leave them in the studio. I would wonder, having brought these women together on the walls, what they would say to one another, what would they say to us,” she says.
Hurley’s show is non-commercial, and she would like to take it further afield; some of the portraits will be showing at the Blue House Gallery in Schull in July. She says she hopes the exhibition will contribute to the ongoing efforts to correct the erasure of such remarkable women from history.
“I would hope these portraits would prompt people to look further at the achievements of these women, individually and as a collective, which have been hidden. With women, I am preaching to the converted but I would love to see boys and men looking at them as well,” she says.
- Women Unremembered, an exhibition by Oonagh Hurley, is at the LHQ Gallery, County Library, Carrigrohane Road, Cork until May 13
