PATRICK IRELAND — ONE HERE NOW: The Ogham Cycle

essays by Alexander Alberro, Peter Murray 

ISBN 978 0946641 758      40 pages (hardback)      21x31cm       36 illus

This  book documents a major painting installation at the Sirius Project in Cobh. The Ogham Cycle can be seen as the culmination of three decades’ interest by the artist in this ancient Irish alphabet. The huge installation covered the walls of the gallery with Ireland’s paintings and their attendant cryptic symbols.

EXTRACTS

"Patrick Ireland’s most recent fugue of wall paintings, a nine-part series entitled The Ogham Cycle, is now installed where it belongs: in the Sirius Project Gallery at Cobh, a port town in Ireland that was at once the departure point for generations of emigrés and a nexus for the historical experience of empire. The new installation charges the enigmatic alphabetical and geometrical codes employed in this series of paintings with a cultural and political significance. Three of the gallery’s four walls are covered with Ireland’s paintings and their attendant cryptic symbols; the fourth wall, directly across from the entranceway, features three large Roman-arched windows through which streams of natural light pour into the space. Combined, the large, brightly coloured wall paintings and the plenitude of light (the room is also equipped with two skylights) create an atmosphere of vibrant, luminescent colour not unlike that produced by light emanating through coloured glass panels. Indeed, like medieval stained glass windows, Ireland’s installation also tells a story. The historical narrative conveyed is one of sorrow and oppression, and once its layers of complex codes are understood, the series of paintings take on the status of a memorial to those who were forced to leave Ireland, as well as an act of resistance against the legacy of what has been described as ‘the age of empire’."

— from the essay by Alexander Alberro

"The installations and rope drawings of Patrick Ireland, many of them inspired by his interest in the Ogham alphabet, aspire to a high plane of art in so openly acknowledging and welcoming the central role of the observer in the act of creation, but as a natural consequence, the artist himself has been somehow placed in a shadow world, at one remove from those artists less questioning and more assertive in their desire to impose their own particular world view on the observer.
          Perhaps Ireland’s Irish background is at play here, manifesting itself in an ambivalence, a knowing of the limitations of power. Much of the history of Ireland is marked by thwarted attempts to impose control, while the tenets of the Counter-Reformation echo both in the work of this artist and in contemporary Irish life. The religious wars of the seventeenth century are history and yet also, sporadically, reappear in the present. A confusion of past, present and future for many years has been endemic in Irish society, and while this mode of thought may contain truths about the workings of the mind, it contrasts with the focused thinking of modern urban society, where the past is treated with less regard and an emphasis is placed on the here and now or the future.
          It is in the fluid and ever-changing space between these two ways of thinking, between remembering and forgetting, that Patrick Ireland locates his art. Even after thirty years in the United States, the artist’s native country remains a central concern, as witnessed by his name change and the creation of many works – including the recently-completed Ogham Cycle at the Old Yacht Club in Cobh – that draw on threads of Irish history and address notions of identity both in a local and in a universal sense."

— from the essay by Peter Murry