I LAY WAITING
BETWEEN TURF-FACE AND DEMESNE WALL,
BETWEEN HEATHERY LEVELS
AND GLASS-TOOTHED STONE.
Seamus Heaney
THE BOG GOTHIC
Culture Night 2021
This event weaves together perspectives from different parts of the community, old and new, through interviews, art work and objects sourced through local community groups such as the Bord Na Mona Mens Shed, and New Horizon’s Refugee Advice
and Support, which react to and reflect on the role the Bog has played in the community and psyche of the Midlands. This work is contextualised in the exhibition with the work of local artists Sheila Hough and Margo McNulty. The work of Sheila Hough reflects on the place of the Bog in Irish literature and history through the paradigm of the “Bog Gothic” which captures the way in which the Bog subtly dominates the physical and psychological landscape of Midlands life.
PROJECT CONTRIBUTORS
Sheila Hough
Sheila Hough is a professional artist living in Banagher, County Offaly.
Born in Kenya, moved to Cork as a child in the 1960s.
Having attended the Crawford College of Art, Sheila went on to attend L’Ecole des Beaux Arts and the University of Oslo, and then spent one year in the Royal Academy of Fine Art Copenhagen.
She also lectured Image Making in AIT for 36 years.
Sheila's Art Practice has always focused on the subconscious, the hidden, subcultures and liminal spaces - an exploration of psychological landscapes and subcultures, “In Between” and Liminal spaces.
While attending short courses in NCAD and IADT, from 2003 to 2009, Sheila explored tradition, ritual and the collective subconscious through a series of animal/ anthropomorphic work in 2003 – 2007.
During her MA from 2007 – 2009 she explored collective psychology of modern mythology and its link to tradition and ritual, particularly during the World War II era.
Sheila's current work explores the bog as a repository for collective unconscious, and its place in the Irish psyche, and what it represents.
It visualises the Bog as an “uncanny place” and Bog bodies as artifacts evoking in-between conditions of temporality which manifests the fears of transience of the human condition, as well as fear of the unknown and the wild.
The Bog features heavily in the Irish psyche as a source of light and heat, and also a place of concealment but not erasing, a deep unconscious in which collective ancestral memory and nothing is ever really forgotten, sins are catalogued and filed in geological time.
Her work is heavily influenced by the bog gothic and eco gothic literary and cultural traditions.
Margo McNulty
Margo McNulty was born in Achill Island, Co. Mayo and studied Fine Art in Galway and completed her MFA in NCAD, Dublin. McNulty has exhibited widely over the last few years with solo exhibitions and group shows in Ireland, Sweden, Poland and the UK. She has taken part in a number of Irish and international residencies, and her work resides in major collections nationwide. She is a Design lecturer in the Technological University of the Shannon: Midlands Midwest (TUS: MMW). Her work is influenced by traditions inherent in Irish culture and deals with hidden history, memory and place. The work concerns itself with episodes of chance, the intersection of personal and public histories and how these histories and meanings can be embedded in material objects.
