The Underworld Syra Larkin
Fáilte and welcome to the Carrickahowley Gallery’s Samhain Exhibition, Ancestors / The Dead. The Carrickahowley Gallery is pleased to welcome returning artists Syra Larkin and Robin Savage, whose previous work can be found in our Bealtaine and inaugural Ca Bhfuil Sinn Féin exhibitions. It is fitting, in this season of reconnection with the past, that we as a gallery invoke and explore our own, bringing back these two outstanding artists. Both active artists, and very much alive, Larkin and Savage nevertheless delve restlessly into themes of ancestry and death. We hope that their works, like the spirits of Samhain, will linger with you.
Samhain is the last of Ireland’s four seasonal festivals, marking the end of the harvest and the beginning of winter. This is a liminal time, when the boundary between this world and the Otherworld is lifted. Ancient burial mounds open, the Aos Sí (supernatural beings or fairies) emerge, and the spirits of the dead seek hospitality among the living. As the sun sets on the season, and the earth lays to rest, bonfires are lit to hold back the dark, and guises are donned to become it. Samhain is a period of reconnection with our ancestors, an acknowledgment that even the boundary of death can be crossed. Moreover, it is a recognition that death, tragic as it may be, is not always an ending, but rather a part of a greater cycle.
Robin Savage’s epic and vehement history paintings weave together the Irish and American strands of his cultural heritage. Much like Samhain’s lifting of the veil between worlds, Savage’s paintings similarly call the past into the present, offering fires and feasts for the dead with their vibrant color, luscious texture, and grand scale. And in the spirit of Samhain’s syncretism of time and tradition, Savage’s paintings reveal the wonderful, interlacing complexities of personal and artistic ancestry. Cubism and Expressionism engage with Social Realism and Mexican Mural traditions, revealing deep roots to a history of painting, and empowering his images with a foundation of considerable depth. Emerging from this artistic heritage are richly layered and allegorical narratives exploring colonial resistance in Irish and Irish-American history. As Savage states, “If such histories haunt us all still, then these paintings are also a re-confronting of the ghosts of our past, those that still bind us to our present and can either liberate or further imprison our future.”
Syra Larkin’s lyrical and allegorical paintings similarly explore this connection with the past, with the ancestral and the dead. When viewed together, the works of Savage and Larkin visually evoke the two poles of Samhain: the warmth of the fire and harvest against the looming coolness of winter and death. Larkin’s hues lean firmly toward the latter, her cool heather and sapphire tones complementing Savage’s warm cadmiums and ochres. This choice of palette suffuses her works with a soft and eerie beauty, while draining her figures of life. Indeed, her paintings seem to explore connection with the dead at the very moment of death. Pale blue figures rest in lifeless poses, contrasting markedly with the Neoclassical strength of their forms. But in each painting, there is also a trace of life, and an effort to reconnect with the departed (or departing), evincing a deep sadness and care, and alluding to the memories and stories that bind the living and the dead. This lingering presence of life also brings to mind the tenacious cyclicality of nature; death comes, but life goes on, and the earth renews.
Thank you again for joining us for the Carrickahowley Gallery’s Samhain exhibition. I hope you enjoy the work of these two fine artists.
Sláinte,
Chris Gray
The Lily Count Syra Larkin
Syra's five paintings are about loss and our connection to the earth. Syra acknowledges that death is very much apart of our existence, it is something we must all confront. Without death there is no past or future no renewal. Death links us all, it is a mystery, a common thread that binds us all past and present.
“There is a life and there is a death, and there are beauty and melancholy between.” Albert Camus
1. "The Vigil” Depicting the custom that for for generations we sit with the dying, waiting silently for that moment when life departs the body.
2. "The Lament" Sometimes words are not enough the sentiment is in the art.
3. “In The Underworld” reveals a world, just below the surface so we should always tread with care so as not to disturb what exist beneath our feet.
4. "Betwixt Birth & Death There is This Earth " Hopefully we will find some meaning to it all.
5. "The Lily Count " For every loss a lily blooms and so we count our losses.
As an artist it’s important not to allow yourself to be tied up into a neat package that can be easily understood; as like most things in life, it is not easy to explain or understand the things we create. I do not want to feel the restrictions of a pattern or a particular style—if I want to run I will, if I want to do a summersault I will. I feel my work is a genuine response to my personal existence. Waking in the morning and painting whatever the day might bring!
Syra studied Art at Hammersmith College of Art London and qualified with merit in 1972. In 1977 Syra together with her husband Irish Luthier Chris Larkin (RIP 2018) moved to a small windswept peninsula known as The Maharees on the West Coast of Ireland. Where they lived, worked, encouraged, and inspired one another daily. Syra lived and worked for many years in a caravan and today works from a purpose-built studio known as Shoreline Studio, where despite the remote location she has managed to develop her career as a professional artist. Taking part in many of the major open submission exhibitions in Ireland and London. She has had work in both solo and group exhibitions in Ireland, America, Spain, Italy, Belgium, France, and England. Syra’s work was selected for the Inaugural Kerry Visual Artist Showcase in 2015. Sponsored by Kerry County Council in support of The Arts, Syra Larkin’s art is found in both private and corporate collections. Syra’s work is mainly figurative in style and she would use these words to describe her work: figurative, emotional, poetic, symbolic, mercurial, narrative, eclectic.
The Burghers of Calais Robin Savage
My work is primarily informed by postcolonial/decolonial concerns and the intersections between the resistance of formerly colonized peoples and cultures. These intersections also link struggles in gender and class resistance, making my work a creolization of many “lines” of cultural representation. This work for the ANCESTORS exhibit is an attempt to trace some of those lines and their connections to my Irish-American experience in the US. Much of the past three years of my creative practice have been spent working on a re-connection with that experience and with both sides of my cultural heritage, Irish and American. Hence, the theme of the show for my own work and my bi-cultural heritage is one of a kind of double-helix: the influences of my time in the US Southwest and South, and the influences from my Irish histories.
The paintings I submitted, therefore, have two distinct yet related “branches”. On the one hand, my Irish paintings explore a connection to the modified cubism of Mainie Jellett, Evie Hone, and Mary Swanzy, Norah McGuinness and Nano Reid, and through them to Albert Gleizes and the Section D’Or school of early twentieth century Gallic modernism. This strain informs my own recent style of Irish Jazz, a modified cubism (like theirs) that is used for representational purposes. Specifically, these are the paper collage and more abstract pieces that you see in the exhibit, and they are composed differently than the others using cut out paper shapes rather than drawing as the first stage of composition. Like Gleizes’ theories, these pieces radiate out from the center of the canvas, and both converge and diverge from this center point, creating a dynamic movement created in an intuitive moment of composition. Then, I paint these compositions, again using intuitive “leaps” as I alter and re-combine these shapes and forms. Those moments of intuitive composition and re-composition emphasize what I call “other ways of knowing,” and are linked to traditional Irish culture and to the tradition of interlace, spiraling, and ambiguous space so common in Irish design.
On the other “strain,” I am influenced by a tradition in American painting of figurative, muralist expressionism that borrows and riffs off of WPA artistic work and German Expressionism with artists like Philip Guston, Max Beckmann, and other WPA muralists combining with Charles White, Hale Woodruff, Elizabeth Catlett, the Mexican Muralists, and the Chicanx murals of my childhood in the desert Southwest. These pieces in the show, then, are representative of a constant shifting and hybridizing of these influences with my own figurative tendencies, and therefore become an example of such intersections, such solidarities, and such possibilities. All of this combines in an effort to re-tell histories of struggle, oppression, and resistance, and in doing so, remake American history painting. If such histories haunt us all still, then these paintings are also a re-confronting of the ghosts of our past, those that still bind us to our present and can either liberate or further imprison our future.
Muralism is a particularly vibrant artistic movement in the US and the rest of the world in recent years, especially with the multiple George Floyd murals that have been created in the past year. Prior to that recent activity, muralists have been designing public art with an eye toward social consciousness, historical memory, and community building in the US since at least the WPA arts projects of the 1930s (the Federal Arts Project, in particular). Drawing upon these “early” social realist and abstract murals of the 1930s, artists have continued to create murals for various audiences and communities from the 1960s to our present time, mostly focused again upon civil and human rights, histories of oppression and resistance, and the voices of those so often erased from the gaze of dominant culture. In the US and internationally, muralism has become a keystone of cultural struggle, often working despite the art market and its focus upon “contemporary” art that tends to exclude the common modes of muralist production like social realism and narrative painting. In this sense, muralism tends to be regarded by practitioners and public alike as a “people’s art,” one that can give voice to the marginalized, to painful histories, or to the collective.
Irish muralism is a crucial part of artistic production in Ireland, and like these international movements, Irish muralism is a mixture of the political, the historical, and the communal. Perhaps the most poignant of the Irish murals of the 20th and 21st centuries are the murals dedicated to Republican struggles and the resistance to British Imperialism, and perhaps most famous of these are the Bogside Murals located throughout an area referred to as “the People’s Gallery” in Derry. There, three artists known as the Bogside Artists (William and Tom Kelly, and Kevin Hasson) have created a series of twelve wall paintings that signify the histories of the Bogside during the Troubles of the 1960s and 1970s. Begun in the mid-1990s, these murals depict various figures and moments from the Battle of the Bogside and its attendant histories, in an attempt, as Tom Kelly has stated, to “think about the past and process painful memories" and "enable and facilitate cross-community conversation around shared experiences seen from different perspectives and contexts.” Such artistic creation produces a public art that can move beyond the market and into the hearts and minds of those who view them, urging us all to push over the walls that divide us and enter into a free zone of critical consciousness. In such “zones” we become not only aware of the past as a reality that still exists, but also as a constructed narrative which is itself a kind of combat zone. And, hence, such art makes us think about the constructions of ourselves as it places us upon historical crossroads. For just these reasons alone, Carrickahowley Gallery salutes the Bogside Artists and their work this month, as they connect us to Ancestors (the theme of this month’s show) and to other ancestries and ties, from human rights struggles across the world to civil rights struggles within our own communities, beckoning us to assume our right to “look” at ourselves and our worlds.
Carrickahowley is in County Mayo, Ireland, and is the historical site of the stronghold castle of Grace O’Malley, or Grainne Mhaille. Grace O’Malley was a seventeenth-century pirate queen of Western Ireland who led an entire fleet of ships over her long career and met Queen Elizabeth I in a historic meeting. The name references many things, therefore, from respect for women in Irish history to fierce independence and capable leadership.
The stronghold and its location conjure the rocky coast of Maine, with its opening to the Atlantic Ocean that separates Ireland from Maine.
Support the bridge between Irish and American art by shopping at the Carrickahowley Gallery. You’ll find prints and original art at affordable prices. Plus, a portion of the proceeds benefits the Carrickahowley Art Gallery and our mission.