Research Output
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Review of Eimear O'Connor 'Sean Keating in Context: Responses to Culture and Politics in Post-Civil War Ireland'
2009-09, Kennedy, Roisin Askale
Sean Keating in Context: Responses to Culture and Politics in Post-Civil War Ireland is a much needed addition to the literature on this major figure in 20th Century Irish art. It is an anthology of the artist’s articles and broadcasts dating from 1924 to 1971. Almost half of the 32 texts are transcripts of radio broadcasts dating to the 1930s, appearing for the first time in published form. Eimear O’Connor also provides an excellent and useful discussion of the rather complex figure of Keating who has been stereotyped as a vehemently anti-modernist academic artist by earlier generations of Irish art historians and critics. As O’Connor points out much of this dismissal of Keating came from the need to champion modernist art in Ireland and to set up a rather artificial academic versus modern divide.
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Humans and Other Animals
2020-04-01, Kennedy, Roisin Askale
Janet Mullarney is a unique publication, a compilation of short personal tributes to the artist, and a complete and concise archive of her works from 1962 to 2019. Designed by Vermillion, the book is lavishly illustrated with full-page colour photographs of Mullarney’s work, some in detail and in installation, offering the reader unprecedented insights into the range and diversity of her output over the years. As a consequence, the publication is primarily visual in its impact. A suite of photographs of Mullarney’s My Minds i exhibition at the Highlanes Gallery, Drogheda in 2015 captures one of her most idiosyncratic and memorable installations. A range of small figures cast enormous shadows on the screen behind them. In contrast the 2010 RHA exhibition Things Made is on a more epic scale, highlighting the diversity of Mullarney’s work and its unique blend of traditional craftsmanship and fantastical imagination. Another image shows Mullarney at work in her studio, a seemingly chaotic and industrial space, where a cupboard painted Tuscan pink hits a familiar note. Another reveals a glimpse of the interior of the artist’s Italian home, where in a spartan white-walled space her large figurative sculptures add an otherworldly dimension. A photograph of the young Mullarney in 1985, shows her reclining amongst a group of her life-size wooden figures. They appear as companions and confidants, revealing of the purpose and meaning of her work.
Publication
Man of Letters
2019-01, Kennedy, Roisin Askale
RóisÃn Kennedy reviews the recently published collection of Brian O' Doherty's Letters, edited by Brenda Moore-McCann.
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Jack Yeats and Dublin
2009-08, Kennedy, Roisin Askale
Jack B. Yeats has often been stereotyped as the painter of rural Ireland, and particularly the West. In fact he spent a great deal of his life in towns and cities, and much of the important subject matter of his work is gleaned from this context. The National Gallery of Ireland has a number of Dublin scenes in its Yeats collection, including the Liffey Swim, one of Yeats’s most popular paintings and the first to become part of a public collection. By focusing on three of the National Gallery’s Dublin paintings as well as considering related examples from other collections, this essay will highlight the key ideas expressed in Yeats’s depictions of the city.
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'Out of Step' Michael Kane, Modernism and Irish Art History
2016-10, Kennedy, Roisin Askale
As a leading member of the Independent artists and a founder of the Project Arts Centre, Michael Kane has made an immense contribution to Irish art. Along with John Kelly, James McKenna, John Behan, and Charlie Cullen, he formed Group 65 in the mid 1960s. It came to dominate the Independent artists, the exhibition society, founded in 1960, as an alternative to the RHA and the Irish Exhibition of Living Art. Declaring themselves to be ‘the nucleus of a new school of painting in Ireland’, they saw their work as representative of an important aspect of Irish art practice, one that was neither academic nor one that slavishly followed international trends.