Rachel Parry: Bone cloaks and seaweed dresses in West Cork
Rachel Parry with her Kelp Cailleach.
Living by the sea in Allihies, West Cork, the artist Rachel Parry has often created sculptural objects from materials – such as fishbones, jellyfish and seaweed – she has found along the shore. Cloaks and Pinholes, her forthcoming exhibition at the Allihies Copper Mine Museum, on the Beara peninsula in West Cork, features a series of pinhole photographs and two new sculptures – or ‘cloaks’, as she calls them – she has fashioned from similar materials.
Cloaks and Pinholes opens on October 10 as part of the Mine Museum’s Autumn School, which this year focuses on the Cailleach Bhéara. The Cailleach is one of the most ancient and revered figures in Irish mythology, a corn goddess from whom the clans of Munster claim descent. The subject of an epic Old Irish poem, she is remembered in many local legends, one of which describes how she turned herself to stone to avoid conversion to Christianity by an over-zealous priest. This is the form in which she survives today, overlooking the sea in Kilcatherine, in the neighbouring parish of Eyeries.
