Sailing on: Sherkin artist fascinated by Ballycotton shipwreck

Majella O’Neill Collins says she's become a bit obsessed by the wreck of the MV Alta. The disintegrating ship has even inspired much of the artist's exhibition at Uillinn in Skibbereen

Mon, 08 Jan, 2024 - 15:21

Marc O’Sullivan Vallig

The MV Alta has been disintegrating on the rocks at Ballycotton in East Cork since Storm Dennis drove it ashore in February 2020. Majella O’Neill Collins admits she can’t quite explain her fascination with the ship, but it probably has much to do with her love of the sea; she lives on Sherkin Island, where her house is right on the shore.

"If I rolled out of bed I’d end up in the Atlantic – so the Alta could as easily have rocked up outside our front door, you know,” the artist explains.

Over the past three years, O’Neill Collins has made the journey of the Alta the subject of a suite of paintings she will exhibit at Uillinn: West Cork Arts Centre in Skibbereen from January 13. The 77-metre vessel was abandoned by its crew of ten after suffering engine failure 1,400 miles southeast of Bermuda in October 2018, and then drifted for 496 days across 2,600 miles of the Atlantic before meeting its destruction.

“It’s fair to say I got a bit obsessed with her,” says O’Neill Collins. “I didn’t want to visit, I didn’t drive to Ballycotton to force myself on her. But I watched drone videos, and did absolute mounds of research. The Alta was never designed for long journeys, she was a coastal boat. She had ten different names, and at one point it seems she was pirated, but she was then cut loose again. Crossing the Atlantic, even with all the technology we have today, she made it through the shipping lanes without being detected.”

O’Neill Collins had plenty of photographs of the Alta, but when she began painting the vessel, she did so from her imagination. “And then her journey as a ghost ship became a kind of metaphor,” she says. “I have a friend who’s an academic, and after many conversations, he came up with the title for my exhibition, Allegory of the MV Alta. For me, she was a mystery, floating in the doldrums with no wind. But I can relate to the journey she’s made; we never really know where we’re going, do we?

“When she was on the rocks, I thought the bits breaking up around her were more interesting than she was herself. It reminded me of how, when we leave the body, we come back into nature. She had the same journey. Man led her here but wasn’t respectful to what would become of her. And now nature has taken her over.”

O’Neill Collins’ own journey as an artist began when she attended Limerick College of Art & Design. A native of Church Cross, outside Ballydehob, where her parents ran the post office, she was the first of her family to attend college. “After I graduated, I travelled around for a while,” she says. “It was pure accident that I came to Sherkin. I came out here to a party with a friend, and I just knew when I landed on the pier that it was home. Back then, 35 or 36 years ago, there were all these different nationalities, there was great craic and a great sense of community, and there still is today.”

O’Neill Collins married a local man, a fisherman, and settled down on the island for good. At one point, she was offered a full-time position teaching art on the mainland. “That came with a pension and everything,” she says. “But I turned it down. Instead, I taught children’s classes on Sherkin, and got involved in the Sherkin Development Society, and eventually I began working on TU Dublin’s BA in Visual Arts programme.”

Sherkin is home to a whole community of professional artists, some local, and some international, and the four-year BA in Visual Arts attracts a body of students that are just as diverse in character. “I’ve been a facilitator on the programme for over twenty years,” says O’Neill Collins. “I teach, and I liaise with the community, working with the islanders who open up their houses and farms for the Degree Show every year. It’s not easy keeping the programme afloat; we struggle for funding. But it’s unique. We have no bells and whistles. No fancy building. No great equipment. But the programme enables you to find your way and keep going as an artist.”

When she isn’t teaching, O’Neill Collins paints every day. “I’m a morning person. I get up about 7, I’d be in the studio for 9, and I’d work away until half 3 or 4 o’clock. I need to paint, it’s good for the soul. I’d be in the studio for 8 if I didn’t go swimming, but I take a dip every morning with my friend Nora. It sets you up for the rest of the day.”

O’Neill Collins’ interests outside the studio include being a member of the Cork University Hospital Arts Committee, where she helped establish the CUH Millenium Collection of contemporary art. She also served as a member of the board of West Cork Arts Centre for nine years, and was Chairperson from 2003 to 2009, when she steered the building development project that led to the opening of Uillinn, the centre’s new premises in Skibbereen, in January 2015.

One of the pieces by Majella O'Neill Collins.

It seems appropriate that her new exhibition will now occupy two floors of the same building. “Ann Davoren, the director, and I had our own journey over the past few years, working on the exhibition,” she says. “It was my journey with paint, and her academic eye. I have 38 paintings done for the show, but we’ll see when we get them into the gallery how many will end up on the wall.”

As for what she will turn her attention to next, O’Neill Collins laughs. “I don’t think I’m done with the sea,” she says. “Living on Sherkin, everything we do is surrounded by water and dictated by the tides. At night, you can hear the sea all around you. If I travel, if I go up to Dublin for a few days, I miss it, it’s almost in my DNA.

“I’m blessed to have found a sense of place. If you have good neighbours and you can feel good in the morning about where you are, it’s like you’ve won the Lottery.”