Sheena Wood: Quay Co-op exhibition by Ewe Experience artist will raise funds for Gaza
Sheena Wood at her exhibition at the Quay Co-op with Arthur Leahy (Quay Co-Op), her husband Kurt Lyndorff, and politician Dan Boyle.
Sheena Wood, Beyond Words Sheena Wood is best known to most for the Ewe Experience, the sculpture garden she and her husband Kurt Lyndorff opened at Tooreen, a few miles outside Glengarriff, Co Cork, in 2004. The couple made the decision to close this year, and placed the property, including their six-bedroomed home, on the market. Not that they plan on retiring; they have many other projects in the pipeline, and Wood already has an exhibition of new artworks showing at the Quay Co-op in Cork.
The exhibition, Beyond Words, runs across all three storeys in the Co-op, and features paintings, textiles and ceramics, many of which reflect on the couple’s time in Palestine.
“That was forty years ago,” says Wood. “But Palestine will always be close to our hearts. Kurt was a war correspondent. We were based in Jerusalem at first, but his work took us all over. We moved to Nicosia after a time; most of the war correspondents lived there, as it offered wider access to the Middle East. It was a volatile time, in Lebanon in particular. There were a lot of hijackings.”
The couple’s first daughter, Kloe, was born in the Middle East, and their second, Eliza, in Costa Rica, where the family moved when Lyndorff became the Latin America correspondent for a Danish newspaper. In 1993, they decided to relocate again. Seeking somewhere quieter, they came to Ireland and settled in Goleen on the Mizen Head, where they established Ireland’s first interactive and interpretive sculpture garden.
The move to Glengarriff nearly ten years later gave them the space to develop the concept to its full potential. They engaged an architect to design their three-storey home, Falling Water Lodge, beside a spectacular waterfall, and created a series of sculpture, science and poetry trails on the adjacent two-and-a-half acre site. The Ewe Experience, as they called it, has since enthralled thousands of visitors every year.
Wood grew up in the south of England, where she studied environmental and three-dimensional design at college. “I did ceramics as well,” she says. “I can work in almost any material or technique.” The last season of the Ewe Experience saw Wood sell off a great deal of her artwork, with much of the proceeds going to four charities; UNICEF, Cork Cancer Research, the Alzheimer Society and Bantry Hospice. She also spent the summer months preparing for her exhibition at the Co-op.
“A lot of the new work is quite big,” she says. “You have to work big when you work outdoors, if you’re to make any kind of impact, and that’s carried through to the pieces in this exhibition. I’ve shown my artwork everywhere we’ve lived, but I’m a bit allergic to formal exhibition spaces. What I love about the Co-op is that it’s so informal. People will be eating and chatting alongside the exhibition.”
Wood has been horrified at Israel’s bombardment of Gaza and its treatment of the Palestinian people, and she will donate 20% of sales to UNICEF and Médicins San Frontieres (Doctors Without Borders). All proceeds from art works made especially for the exhibition, plus a range of art T-shirts from the Ewe Experience, will also go to Gaza, along with the proceeds from a raffle for a small sculpture, which will run throughout.
“I called the show Beyond Words because that’s how so many of us feel about the situation in Gaza,” says Wood. “I’ve written about it before, but this is a visual response. What I’m channelling is our experience of the joys and sorrows of Palestine. There are harrowing images, but the exhibition is also a celebration of Palestinian customs, the embroidery, the markets, the fruit and so on. Palestine was the first culture Kurt and I got properly marinated in. We’ve always remembered the warmth of the people.”
Wood and Lyndorff look back fondly on their time running the Ewe Experience, and are grateful to have reared their family in such an idyllic setting. Their older daughter Kleo still lives in Glengarriff, running a garden design business called Two Green Shoots, while her sister Eliza is an occupational therapist in Norwich.
The couple closed the Ewe Experience for good on September 1. They plan on visiting Lyndorff’s mother in Denmark shortly, and will then start arranging viewings of Falling Water Lodge and its gardens for prospective buyers.
“There’s great interest in the property,” says Wood. “It’s a stunning place and has fantastic potential. It could be anything, really. It’s on the N71, so it could easily be a foodie business. Or it could be a Steiner school, or a retreat, or even a private home. There’s no expectation from us that people will maintain it as a sculpture park.”
Two film crews have made arrangements to shoot footage of the property, one for a travel programme presented by Boyzone star Ronan Keating, the other for a documentary being produced by the London-based filmmaker Holly Aylett. “And we’ll start dismantling the sculpture trail after that. We plan to stay on in Glengarriff. We’ll continue to work on our own creative projects, and as consultants, providing outside-of-the-box ideas for other people too.”
- Sheena Wood, Beyond Words runs at the Quay Co-op until Christmas. Further information: theewe.com
