It was a cold, overcast afternoon in February when I received the call. I continued walking up Kirikee, the hill above our home in Wicklow, while a member of the Kildare-based arts collective, element15, asked if I would be open to their creating an exhibition in response to my poetry. And so it began; 18 months of work that culminated in an exhibition of textile art and poetry which is currently on display in Dublin Castle. ROOTS consists of 50 textile and multimedia artworks in response to 31 poems from my three collections, published by Bloodaxe Books.
Little did I know that this tentative request would lead to our work being visited by 15,000 people; tourists from all over the world as well as individuals and school, community and arts groups from almost every county. The Coach House Gallery has become a place of active looking and listening. The distinctive dialogue between poetry and visual art turns observers into participants and prompts them to respond profoundly to both the visual and sonic stimulation of the exhibition.
Some visitors walk through the exhibition quickly, most linger to focus on particular works, reading the poem that inspired the work or to listen to the poetry on the sound installation. Many take the time to write a response in the visitor’s book, often remarking on how it brings them back to childhood, and to the people and places they have loved.
Aware that the stirring of childhood memories is not necessarily straightforward, I value how the poet Thomas McCarthy expresses our attachment to the past: We can love our past not because it was easy but simply because it was ours. The exhibition opens doors into memory, offering both solace and disturbance.
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People have sent notes or spoken to me about their reactions: “I was moved to tears and had to sit down on the floor of the gallery so that I could to listen to the poems being read while absorbing what the exhibition evoked for me.”
“It isn’t one or the other – it’s the combination of visual imagery and words that moves me immeasurably.”
“I’m not really into either poetry or art exhibitions but in that room I understood how together they can convey powerful emotion. It’s like going to a concert and finding yourself in tears without knowing why.”
The title of the exhibition is taken from one of poems that inspired a piece in the exhibition. I met the artists as a group for the first time in June 2023 when we reflected together on our processes as makers. I brought along my most recent poem, Roots, as an example of how a poem begins and how it is honed in the editing. It’s a poem about the emotional push and pull of taking care of my mother who has dementia and was then living on her own on the other side of the country.
The artists empathised with what I had expressed but as I drove away I felt a sense of shame. It is not easy to acknowledge ambivalence about caring for someone you love and who has cared for you. But this is where art comes from; those places of shame and guilt and regret as well as love and gratitude that cannot be fully conveyed in any other way.
It is what the artist makes out of these powerfully conflicting emotions that moves people because they see something familiar there and they feel recognised, seen and maybe less alone. I’m reminded of Robert Frost’s words: “No tears in the writer, no tears in the reader”.
One November evening as darkness fell, the artists and I gathered in the gallery to reflect on our experience of the exhibition. ROOTS had then been running for eight weeks. We shared our joy and excitement at the public response and then the artists began to speak about the profound impact of their slow, contemplative engagement with one or two poems over the months of making.
One of the artists seemed to speak for the group as well as herself when she wrote to me later: “We have all been affected and changed on a personal level, both within ourselves and in how we will work creatively in the future. I have delved more deeply into myself, and seem to have opened myself to working in a much more honest and authentic way.”
The exhibition’s exhilarating impact can partly be attributed to the range of materials and techniques the artists have wielded to express their visual response to the poems. Merino wool, silk, chiffon, driftwood, cotton organdie, oilcloth, leather, geotextile, Himalayan paper, tea bags, chicken wire, nails, washers, beach pebbles, acrylic paint, linen, soya milk, tulle are all used to powerful effect.
The processes are similarly diverse: painting, screen printing, hand embroidery and free machine embroidery, collage, quilting, needle felting, rust dying, kantha stitching and Coptic stitch book binding and appliqué. The artists have meticulously created works that give pleasure and also stimulate a kind of longing for something that is absent, as expressed by the Portuguese work “saudade’”.
ROOTS inevitably highlights the ancient connections between words and textiles which reach back to their roots in language. Both text and textile come from the Latin word “texere”, meaning to weave, write and tell a story. Writers were traditionally known as word-weavers and indeed, the word poetry is derived from the Greek poiesis which means to make or create.
I think of my poems as objects which I hand on to the reader or listener. Across our different art forms ROOTS demonstrates how artists and writer meet in the fabrication of memory, imagination, emotion and ideas into something that resonates in the minds and hearts of the viewer, listener or reader.
The textiles artists and I share the history in which women textile artists and women poets were disregarded for their art. Our work has been undervalued and criticised as being “confined” to the personal or domestic sphere. This exhibition testifies to what gender-biased critics consistently failed to recognise; that through the ages women have used textiles and poetry to express themselves individually and communally, reflecting on change in their own lives and in society, expressing political resistance, capturing stories and communicating their aesthetic visions while creating objects of great beauty.
The location of the exhibition in the ancient heart of Dublin has given me a surprising sense of return to a beloved place. I grew up on a farm in Co Roscommon and have lived in rural Wicklow for the past 30 years but for 15 formative years, as a student in Trinity and a community worker and psychotherapist in the inner city, I lived and worked among these streets.
While ROOTS explores, celebrates and mourns rural people and ways of life, its location in the urban setting of Dublin Castle seems to reflect the unique relationship between city and countryside in Ireland. Neither is too far from the other. There are inevitable resentments and misunderstandings on either side but beneath all of that are the shared roots that have shaped and continue to shape us as people living together on this island.
ROOTS: A Dialogue in Textile and Poetry runs at The Coach House Gallery, Dublin Castle until January 19th, 2025. Jane Clarke is the author of three poetry collections, The River (2015), When the Tree Falls (2019) and A Change in the Air (2023) published by Bloodaxe Books. She edited the illustrated anthology Windfall: Irish Nature Poems to Inspire and Connect (Hachette Books Ireland, 2023). Her most recent collection, A Change in the Air, was shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best Collection 2023 and the T.S. Eliot Prize 2023. janeclarkepoetry.ie
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