Grin and Bere it: West Cork island enjoys its very own arts festival
Mary K Sullivan is one of the organisers of Bere Island Arts Festival.
Few people have embraced island life with as much enthusiasm as Mary K Sullivan. Since moving to Bere Island, Co Cork from her native Kealkil over thirty years ago, she has - with her husband Mike - fished for shrimps for a living, and run a successful restaurant and marine business. Along the way, as they reared their family, she somehow found time to complete a degree in art.
Given her work ethic, it is no surprise that Sullivan has also - along with Caitriona Hanley, of Wild Atlantic Glamping, and Pauline Hanley, Principal of Beara Community School - helped found the island’s first arts festival. Bere Island Arts Festival runs from Thursday 21st to Sunday 24th September, and will feature appearances by film director Neil Jordan, writers Dónal Ryan and Annemarie Ní Churreáin, and musicians Máirtín O’Connor, Zoe Conway and Dónal Lunny.
Sullivan is organising the festival’s visual arts programme, which includes her own project, The Hold, at the Old Military Drill Hall; an exhibition of new paintings by Sarah Walker at Wild Atlantic Glamping; an Islanders’ Art Exhibition at the Lecture Theatre; and a display of children’s art in the windows of Scoil Mhichíl Naofa.
Sullivan began work on The Hold in 2020. “I’m fascinated by the hold Bere Island has on people, myself included, she says. “So that’s where the title came from. But as it happens, I’ve had to put the whole project on hold a number of times over the past three years. My mother passed away in January 2020, so I had to put off starting until September that year.”
The Hold is the latest in a series of arts projects Sullivan has created in response to living on Bere Island. On graduating from the DIT School of Creative Arts on Sherkin Island in 2018, she was awarded the RDS Taylor Art Award for her installation At Home, At War, which found common ground between domestic routine and military life in the old British Army base on the island. The following year, she created the installation Breathe at the World War I-era Lonehart Battery for Beara Arts Festival.
Her ambition for The Hold was to involve the island women in an art project. “I wasn’t sure that anyone would come on board,” she says. “But when I put the call out, twenty-four women responded. The next problem was Covid. The lockdowns meant we couldn’t meet up as a group, so I went around and met everyone individually, while maintaining a social distance. I interviewed the women, and that became part of the project.”
Sullivan’s first proposal was that they should work collectively to produce a quilt. “I asked them each to make a square of patchwork, something that was relevant to their lives on the island. So Pauline Hanley, for instance, came up with a square of rubber, the kind of thing her husband Frank would use to repair a hole in their boat, the rib she uses every day to go in and out to her job in the school on the mainland. Then she put in a quote about her favourite walk during Covid. And lastly she put five green dots at the corner, representing her family.
“I gave the women a deadline of twenty-four days, and they all came up with something. I wanted there to be a military element to the project, so we had what I called ‘the handover.’ The Covid regulations were still in place, so each of the women walked out of their houses and left their patch at the gate for me to collect. Then Harriet Andrews, who’s a seamstress here on the island, sewed the whole thing together.”
Everyone on Bere Island is familiar with the Red Line, the imaginary boundary that divides the east end of the island, seized by the British military at the end of the 19th century, from the rest. “I wanted to put a red line around the quilt,” says Sullivan. “Though that was a bit controversial. The Red Line was used to divide the island in the past, but I explained that I was using it now to unite people.”
Sullivan formed a WhatsApp group for the project, and the women began coming up with ideas of their own. They kept diaries, and recorded sounds, which were then combined as a single sound collage. At one point, Sullivan suggested they each bring their favourite object to their favourite place on the island, and arranged for a photographer, Jed Niezgoda, to record them.
“I spent two days going around with Jed, photographing them all. It could have been anything. My sister-in-law, Catherine, had a garden hoe she’d been given as a present by John O’Sullivan of the Post Office. It dates back to 1926. She loves gardening, and her favourite place is the polytunnel, so we photographed the hoe in there.”
Sullivan planned an exhibition of the work – the quilt, the photographs, the diaries and the sound collage – in 2021. “But then we had another hold. My daughter had an accident, and I couldn’t organise the exhibition until we’d dealt with that. But I worked on the catalogue during that time – the poet Paula Meehan wrote a wonderful foreword – and it was the icing on the cake for me, to have it ready for the first iteration of the exhibition in June 2022.”
On that occasion, The Hold ran for a week at the Drill Hall. “This time, it’ll run for four days at the same venue. I’m delighted we’re doing it again, so more people can see it. Majella O’Neill Collins will formally launch the catalogue, and a group of singers called the Starlings will perform.”
- 7.30pm, Thursday 21st; Theatre with the Peninsula Players at the Drill Hall
- 8pm, Friday 22nd; Majella O’Neill Collins launches The Hold catalogue at the Drill Hall
- 4.30pm, Saturday 23rd; Dónal Ryan reads from The Queen of Dirt Island at Wild Atlantic Glamping
- 6pm, Saturday 23rd; Neil Jordan launches Sarah Walker Art Exhibition at Wild Atlantic Glamping
- 8pm, Saturday 23rd Music with ZoDoMo (Máirtín O’Connor, Zoe Conway & Dónal Lunny) at Wild Atlantic Glamping
- Earth Rising, Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin 21st – 24th September: A four-day festival of free events aimed at addressing the climate crisis. imma.ie
- Pascal Ungerer: Speculative Artefacts, Uillinn: West Cork Arts Centre – 21st October: New paintings by the West Cork-based artist. westcorkartscentre.com
- Following Threads, Crawford Art Gallery, Cork – 28th January 2024: A major exhibition of textiles-based artworks. crawfordartgallery.ie
