ARTISTS OF ALL KINDS
Aileen Dillane with Marty Fahey and Liz Carroll
Artists of all kinds—poets, musicians, visual artists, dancers, singers, sculptors—are the first to appreciate the craft and skill of fellow artists. They understand the relationship between inspiration and toil, freedom and discipline, flow and form, process and product. They know and appreciate the years it takes to hone a craft and to develop an individual “voice” that identifies them as uniquely themselves, not merely derivative. Artists are driven by the need to create; it is what they know and who they are. They vacillate between working to deadlines or allowing their creation to find its ultimate form over days, months, and in some cases, years. Payment for their craft is well earned and appreciated, but not always consistent. Commissions are particularly welcome, though not only for the sake of remuneration. Ideally, commissions come with a set of parameters, like a timeline or a goal, yet offer flexibility for personal quirks and the signature touch of individual expression. This allows for creative deviations and unexpected expansions of the task, ideally liberating rather than restricting the artists.
When the artists featured in this catalogue were commissioned to respond to a work (or selection of works) from The O’Brien Collection, it set in motion the creation of a series of new works—soundscapes, paintings, poems, photographs, compositions, choreographies, and short stories. This process has culminated into a collection of beautiful, thoughtful, and inspiring works across a range of modalities and forms. This essay honors the artists who dedicated their time and energy to responding to a prompt to engage with art and artifacts by illuminating preexisting artwork in new ways. Initially envisaged as “dialogues,” these responses are indeed conversations between old and new artists and acts of creative translation and amplification. What follows is a brief insight into the process undertaken by some of the commissioned artists, gleaned from conversations and interviews facilitated by the authors during or after the completion of their commissions in early 2024. From discussions on the creative processes and intentionality to the personal journeys undertaken and how that translated into a greater understanding of aspects of the self, fragments from these interviews are loosely sutured here.
Four main themes scaffold this chapter: interdisciplinary dialogue, the creative process, identity and Irishness, and the liberating power of commissions. The interviewees responded in thoughtful and compelling ways to these themes, sharing many similarities in terms of approach and intention, but also evidencing deeply personal and autobiographical responses that proved insightful and enriching. The resultant mosaic of these commentaries sheds light into the creative processes undertaken and further underscores the invaluable contributions made by this unique coterie of creative practitioners.
Dialogues
As someone who works in the interdisciplinary arena of Irish studies in higher education in the US, poet Eamonn Wall is no stranger to conversations about the relationship between different artistic forms. When it came to talking about his inspiration piece, Paul Henry’s Thatched Cottage by a Roadside (1920s), he wanted to take a “tightly focused” approach where “the artwork is asking questions of me, and I’m asking questions of it,” as he put it.¹ The relationship between a poet and a visual artist seemed similar to him: both roles are about “paying attention.” As far as he was concerned, “The painter and the poet are in a collaboration,” making this dialogue an easy one to imagine and enact.
Multi-instrumentalist and composer Liz Knowles embraced the challenge of responding to a painting with a weighty theme—the consequences of detonating an atomic bomb, as rendered in the painting Device (1960) by Patrick Scott. As someone with an art and design background, and in spite of “not considering [herself] a visual artist,” responding to an abstract work, as opposed to something more literal or figurative, opened up a different kind of dialogue for Knowles. While in the past her artistic responses to art as a composer had been shaped by other forms of direct inspiration, this time something more organic, visceral, and interpretative was required, which called on all her communicative skills.
Artist Lillie Morris was the only visual artist asked to respond to another artist’s work and so entered into dialogue in a way that was both familiar and testing. How does one create a painting in response to another painting and not treat it in a derivative or literal way? In responding to Jack Yeats’s “Singing, Oh, Had I the Wings of a Swallow” (1925), Morris decided to start from the emotional and embodied place of being a singer herself. The dialogue was not only with the painting but with that musical part of herself. It was also a dialogue with the metaphysical, as she understood “that sense of being transported” that music offers, especially when one sings.
Harpist Maeve Gilchrist described writing a “wonderfully indulgent” harp piece, reveling in its “harpness” because her inspiration was a piece of furniture—John Fletcher’s Shamrock Table (1852), which was “unabashedly” Irish in its carved referents of shamrocks, a harp-playing bard, and a figure of Hibernia (Mother Ireland) clutching her harp. Gilchrist had worked on interdisciplinary projects in the past, but they tended to be in the performing arts and alongside dancers and theater people. To respond to this nationalistically freighted piece of furniture design meant it was less a collaboration and more a deep, thoughtful conversation with the piece. Gilchrist understood she needed to move past her own understanding of stereotypical “Irishness” represented by the table to a place of “seeing beauty and sophistication” in what she was beholding.
Traditional tune composer Damien Connolly had collaborated with The O’Brien Collection’s curator Marty Fahey and with Liz Carroll in the past on the Who Do We Say We Are? project in 2022, but taking the “space and time” to compose a tune to a piece of “my own actual composition,” as he put it, was new and exciting. At the same time, he admits that initially, he found his inspiration painting, William Conor’s The Melodeon Player (1920s), quite “ordinary” and uncommunicative. But Connolly quickly realized that he had to immerse himself in the work, dedicating time to looking at it in order to discover its meaning. Over time, he grew to appreciate the joy and effervescence in the scene in which young men and women are chatting; this became his starting point once the painting finally spoke to him.
Poet Martin Dyar has always felt comfortable having interdisciplinary conversations and collaborations. For him, this initial foray began with the recognition of “artist affinity,” which has allowed him to “mobilize conversations and possibilities,” as a kind of “privilege” and an “exciting rapport.” But this kind of dialogue with the painting, The Owl Run (2013), and the painter, Hughie O’Donoghue, did not prove enough for him, so the idea of going on a pilgrimage out west, to his own county of Mayo, proved to be a critical intervention in his exchange. Dyar needed to walk into the territory of the painting and speak with locals. He became a poet-ethnographer.
Poet Linda Aldrich has long been part of what she calls “a salon group” with musician and composer Liz Knowles and others, where artists talk about their creative processes. At the same time, engaging with the canvasses of three paintings that she selected because of their differences—The Launch (1923) by William Conor, Reverie (1931) by Jack B. Yeats, and Harbour (2018) by Elizabeth Magill—was the starting point for her. So often “difference” itself is a creative point of exchange.
Composer and pianist Ryan Molloy entered into dialogue with a painting that Aldrich had also responded to—William Conor’s The Launch (1923)—but found it was Aldrich’s poetic response that most influenced his approach, rather than simply the painting itself, though the process of “really digesting the emotional content of the painting” proved critical as he approached the task of composition. No stranger to collaborations involving visual art and poetry, the challenge of responding simultaneously to both the painting and the poem, coupled with an intense self-dialogue and the exploration of his identity, formed the foundation of Molloy’s creative engagement.
“Poetry is between prose and music,” according to Aoife Mannix, and so to enter into a dialogue with a painting is to not only see but also hear the sounds and rhythms from the world being depicted. As a musical response by Fahey had also been crafted for the same painting, The Dreamer by Gerard Dillon (1956–57), Mannix factored both the visual work and the accompanying melody into her own response. However, this interpretation required cultural fluency, allowing her dialogue to extend beyond the painting to encompass everything Mannix associated with Irishness and Irish identity. Therefore, her dialogue came from a place of familiarity and comfort, rooted in her identity as an Irish poet deeply influenced by both music and the visual arts.
Fiddler and tune composer Eileen O’Brien had a deeply personal response with the subject of her inspiration painting, Joseph O’Reilly’s The Blind Fiddler (1892). Her starting point was one of empathy and understanding, as she sought to imagine how she might feel and act if she were the young blind fiddler in the painting. At the same time, O’Brien paired this feeling with the visual cues in the painting. Ultimately, the painter’s details proved less important than embodying the sound world of this young woman, from O’Brien’s point of view.
Thus far, each artist responded individually to another artist’s work from their own unique perspectives. However, for dancer Kieran Jordan and musician Sean McComiskey, their collaboration introduced a deeper level of engagement as they responded together to Oisin Kelly’s 1966 sculpture Girl Dancer. Further dialogue was created through their video of the commissioned choreography and music, making the videographer’s vision a crucial element of the final work. The still dancer in the sculpture spoke to them of deep desires for freedom and liberation, to which they responded with grace and joy.
Processes
Each commissioned artist followed different processes when it came to responding to their inspiration piece, with some doing a lot of background research prior to responding and others taking a deep dive into the challenge based on instinctive and emotional responses to the inspiration work. While further contemplating the Paul Henry painting Thatched Cottages by a Roadside, poet Wall researched the painter and, despite some familiarity with his works—or perhaps because of it—realized that his existing knowledge was insufficient for this task. As someone who did not really “know color,” Wall also felt it was important to be able to speak to tones and timbres in the painting, a point not lost on him given that the artist was color blind. This “exposure to my ignorance of color,” as he noted, allowed the poet to respond in particular ways that felt alive and dynamic. He committed to the structure of a lyric poem—a poem of the moment—which facilitated his approach to a kind of immediate and experiential “distillation,” as he described his task.
As a “visual musician” with considerable drawing skills, Knowles initially “sat down and drew into a book to think about motion and shape,” adding keywords to ensure that “sound would bloom, and spiral, and…have heat” as well as texture, in response to Patrick Scott’s rendering of an atomic bomb detonation. While her soundscape’s “language” was not traditionally Irish in form, it was informed by “the language of the fiddle [which] is based in Irish music and early music,” with the composition’s musical elements “spiraling, churning, and blooming” as the bomb detonates. This mixture symbolically integrates influences from Arvo Pärt’s minimalism to Arnold Schoenberg’s abstract expressionism, aiming to render the piece with sediments and layers of memory and commemoration, all pivoting around a central note.
Also drawing on the language of abstract expressionism, though this time in visual art, Morris wanted to capture the “soaring texture, tonality, and range” of music and of a sparrow in flight, in the creation of her painterly response to Singing, “Oh, Had I the Wings of a Swallow”, Morris also deliberately used a feather to generate a particular texture and sense of flight in her own painting gestures. She used blues intentionally, as deep reds were not working for the emotional impact she was seeking. The resultant painting is about movement and mood, with imagined embodiment as key.
When responding to her inspiration artwork, the table with the inlaid figure of Hibernia on it, harpist Gilchrist felt a strong need to reclaim the beauty of the harp and to pay homage to the long line of harpist composers who were part of bardic nationalism. Therefore, she drew on formal structures that were symmetrical but not fully so, using the language of melodic arpeggios across the whole range of strings to honor the concertos of iconic Irish harpists Loftus Jones and Turlough O’Carolan. Her piece was less an urtext or careful replication of these forms and more an interpretation enriched by her extensive skills as a harpist. At the same time, she saw placing certain “constraints” on the creative process as a form of “pleasure.” She felt truly unfettered to luxuriate in the full range and sweetness of the Irish harp.
Accordionist Damien Connolly did not do extensive background research into the painter of his inspirational work because he wanted to have a more organic and emotional response to it. As the painting grew on him and revealed itself more, he realized that he wanted to “capture that joy, that liveliness [and] nothing of Ireland that was sad at all. They were young people, connecting and having fun.” It was not an especially easy process for Connolly in that he felt his “creation had to respond to someone else’s creation,” so it was in some ways limited because the original artist was “calling the shots.” And yet at the same time, these constraints activated different approaches, and in a time-honored tradition, he borrowed sounds and techniques of tunesmiths from other eras, drawing upon Civil War and vaudevillian strains that would have still been active in people’s “musical memories” when the painting was produced in the 1920s.
Poet Dyar approached his inspiration artwork, the painting The Owl Run, with an anthropologist’s and folklorist’s sensibility by first engaging with on-site fieldwork in Mayo, in the townland of the artist in question. Rather than engage with the ekphrastic tradition of presenting a dramatic verbal or lyrical description of the work of visual art, he was more concerned with the feeling it invoked in him, along with the cultural practices and the lure (and lore) of the local with which, as a Mayo man, Dyar is deeply familiar. He admits he “had some interpreting to do,” which involved being in the landscape and talking to people about local traditions and the landscape of the “Aul Run”—an old, wide gulley between two fields that leads down to the Glencullen River. What became important to him then was the “metaphysical and ecological,” while simultaneously “avoiding a romantic vision.” He needed to walk and talk in order to understand and render.
Poet Aldrich spent a considerable amount of time researching her responses to the artworks with which she engaged, but only “in small doses.” She learned about the details of the artworks from the curator, but then wanted to simply live with the paintings and look deeply at them every day and take notes. Only then, when she could “really see” for herself, did she research the artists’ biography. As she asserted, she wanted to be “strong in my own point of view.” When approaching his task, Molloy initially considered creating an Irish traditional melody in his vernacular style. But after a conversation with Fahey and Carroll, he realized that to address both his creative and sociopolitical identities, exploring the tension between his traditional style and his jazz and classical interests through a piano soundscape might be the most effective approach.
The process of composing poetry inspired by Dillon’s “The Dreamer” was, for Mannix, influenced by sound and mood as she played the music by Fahey associated with the work while conducting contextual research in books. She fully embraced different modalities of cultural expression and spent time connecting with the man depicted in the painting and with the work’s little details, which provoked a series of questions: Who is the man? Who has left the room? What is the story here? For Mannix, the man became a character. She responded to that character, first by meditating and then by simply writing unfettered. Then she went with “her gut rather than get it all.” That is, she didn’t want to be too concerned with representing the original intention of her inspiration artwork. Mannix felt unconstrained, and her unfettered emotional response was the guiding light here.
It was important for composer and fiddler Eileen O’Brien that the tune she created in response to Joseph O’Reilly’s The Blind Fiddler was imbued with bravery, pride, and self-esteem in honor of the young girl whose “gift of music brought light into the world and enabled her to earn a living by playing rather than just begging.” Regarding the technical aspects of the music, the depiction of “plucking of the strings” in the painting influenced her composition, as did the idea of using the building in the painting to amplify sounds. O’Brien imagined that the fiddler “chose that building…so that the sound would resonate and bounce off the stone surrounds.”
Usually, dancer Jordan and musician McComiskey would collaborate in person, but their entangled response to “Girl Dancer” happened virtually, which required a lot of creative artistic discussion and “fluid, propositional, free flow” of sounds, movements, and ideas. In addition, knowing that her choreography Girl Dancer was going to be a video performance rather than a live one meant that dancer Jordan could think about time and linearity in creative ways. Describing her inspiration, she explained that “the sculpture gets off the pedestal” and interacts with the park environment in which she is located, where “she slowly discovers herself.” For McComiskey, the tune needed to be “hoppy (in gesture) and light,” and using a cherished, restored accordion of great emotional value to him proved critical in creating the composition. The tune proved suitable to the type of community and social dancing so important to everyday life, and though the protagonist dances on her own in the park, we imagine others dancing with her, perhaps in the background or just outside the lens of the video camera that has captured her joyous expression in the park.
Identities
All of the responding artists engaged with the question of identity in different ways. Some became very aware of their own connections to Irish identity. For others, their identity as an artist took precedence.
Wall’s poetic response to this project was deeply personal, influenced by childhood memories of prints of Paul Henry paintings hanging in his house that were never spoken about— an experience shared by many Irish people of this era. In one sense, the images presented to Wall were familiar and evoked a nostalgia for a particular Ireland, albeit an economically deprived one. But contemplating Thatched Cottages by a Roadside also prompted new insights into his earlier ideas of Irishness, particularly regarding the importance of rendering Ireland’s landscape in a way that implied the presence of people, rather than excluding them. It was crucial to reintegrate those people, or the perspective of people in general, into his poem.
A sense of Irishness did not overtly inform Knowles’s response to her inspirational painting Device. As an American responding to an Irish artwork whose subject matter—an atomic bomb—ventures outside what is (stereo) typically Irish, her focus was on exploding any limited notion of what constitutes Irishness in subject or form. It became a question of recognizing the artwork’s cosmopolitan nature and its social commentary, its message for humanity, and the alarm one should feel at the threat of this kind of event. Concern for the biosphere and protecting the planet can be rendered in a musical composition in any musical language. Irish traditional music idioms and gestures are deeply embedded in Knowles’s soundscape.
According to Morris, during her creative process, she discovered that “the musician in me was as important as the painter,” which gave her a heightened sense of artistic identity that she had not previously embraced. Rather than being a painter who also happens to sing, Morris really focused on what it felt like to sing. Abstract expressionism had always been her preferred visual language, but tapping into her emotions about how it felt to sing—her voice being the most intimate and embodied of instruments—brought an exciting depth of understanding. She became a visual artist attuned to her body and her identity as a singer in new ways.
Artists and performers responded in different ways to questions about the Irishness of a work and its impact on them. For some, the focus was less on broad concept of Irish identity and more on specific regional identities. Poet Dyar is a case in point. Sharing his Mayo roots with Hughie O’Donoghue, the artist behind The Owl Run, one might expect a strong familiarity or at least a sense of closeness between the two. Yet Dyar spoke of the deeply felt local differences between his experiences of Mayo and those of O’Donoghue. To explore these tensions, Dyar took on the role of poet-ethnographer. Seeing a fellow Mayo artist from a different part of the county engage with the same geography and locality made his own Mayo-ness feel more special and even exotic. Ultimately, this process helped Dyar connect with O’Donoghue personally and artistically, because, like the artist, he identified as both a native Mayo man and an outsider.
“Outsiderness” recurs as a theme in the identity of American poet Aldrich, who mused, that it offered a powerful positionality when it came to making art. But it was Aldrich’s engagement with her Irish heritage and Belfast Protestant lineage that truly enriched her own life through this process, particularly in responding to William Conor’s The Launch, set in the Belfast shipyard of Harland & Wolff. As she described, it was “a real entering the wound for me at some level,” driving her to explore the history and context of Northern Ireland, particularly concerning sectarian and class divides and the erasure of Protestant Irish identities within the narrative of the Irish diaspora in the US. This reckoning ultimately allowed her to “own Northern Ireland” as part of her own identity and personal story. More generally, she asserted that “Irish People [have] deep artistic grooves working in them” and that this is why multimodal approaches to the Irish arts work so well.
Unsurprisingly, the theme of outsiderness was to the fore for Molloy also. He said that “being from the north and living in the south…as a young Catholic, in the ’80s and ’90s” had a profound impact on his sense of belonging, and over the years he became “increasingly sensitized” to flags, symbols, and objects. Moving the emphasis away from the Union Jack in his inspiration painting, he responded to allowed him to focus on the joy and pride of the men depicted at the launch. This shift gave him an opportunity to embrace the rich layers of history, self, and other, concentrating on both celebration and loss, as manifest in his piece “An Seoladh” (The Launch).
Mannix’s response to her inspiration painting, The Dreamer, allowed her to revisit childhood memories of holidays on the Aran island of Inisheer. There, the unique island light, encounters with strong, archetypal men, the sense of the place and its people as an authentic repository of ancient Celtic culture deeply influenced her identity as an immigrant now residing in the UK. Responding to the painting became a way to respond to her own self.
When engaging with Irish art in the Collection, the responding artist often finds questions about their own local, regional, and national identity coming to the fore. But for Eileen O’Brien, the question of identity was profoundly about that of the musician in her inspiration painting, in this case, a young disabled female musician who had the musicality, stoicism, and tenacity to make her way in the world by seeking out her own form of patronage. That said, while O’Brien felt the work could have been painted in a number of countries, she also felt that there was something “very Irish” about this subject matter and the depiction thereof.
The idea of community and the social life of dance was a core component of the identity question for choreographer and performer Jordan. For her creative partner, musician McComiskey, being raised in the Irish diaspora—with its strong ties to tradition as experienced through displacement from Ireland’s powerful cultural center—allowed him to compose a simple yet cosmopolitan tune that embraced all facets of his identity.
Commissions
Artists welcome commissions, not only for the financial security they bring, but also for the sense of worth they give to the artist; for the validation that their creations are important and have something to offer. As a well-established poet with a long career, the commission to respond to a painting from the O’Brien Collection provided Wall with the opportunity to “find new things and to push and to challenge” himself, particularly in a moment when he felt he had “reached a plateau.” This opportunity provided a valuable moment for growth, exploration, and reinvigoration for Wall.
Being commissioned to create an artwork in response to one by a renowned artist like Yeats was, for Morris, “an honor and a responsibility…and a tall order [she] took very seriously.” Such commissions are unusual; it’s uncommon for an artist from one medium to respond to the work of another. This opportunity proved challenging and stimulating and allowed the artist to extend herself in new and creative ways.
For Connolly, this commission was rewarding because it both supported what he sees as his craft—writing tunes—and also involved him in a collective of artists engaged in creative acts. On a personal level, it proved valuable for Connolly. Thinking, talking about, and doing this project “shone a light onto what my process is,” he mused. Not having really reflected on this before, he concluded that “what I’ve been doing all along” is worthwhile. This commission therefore gave him new insight into the mechanisms of his craft and what it means to observe, being inspired, and simply create.
Some artists face a commission with anxiety, as Dyar suggested. Yet when the process is animated and one enters that creative space, there’s a need to trust it, without resorting to “blind faith” that something can “only be said in a poem”: the visual arts also speak. For Dyar, another important aspect of the commissioning process was feeling the “curatorial hand” guiding and enabling his creative process. He was very clear how welcome and empowering that direction and invitation are for the artist.
As a regular contributor to initiatives by the Portland Museum of Art in Maine, poet Aldrich is no stranger to collaborations between the visual arts and poetry. However, this commission was different for a number of reasons. First, it was an invitation as opposed to a submission; second, she had a sense of the audience for this poem, which shaped her process; and third, she knew she was creating something that would have a life-span, in that it would live in this catalogue. Together, these material facts gave her work both freedom and weighty substance along with a real sense of purpose.
Molloy’s experience with this commission led him to contemplate the limited engagement with the visual arts among people in Ireland, especially those within the traditional arts. While the work challenged him at a personal level in terms of confronting the creative tensions within his own work as an artist, more broadly he felt real value in this type of work. “More projects like this are needed,” was his clear message, not only for what the subsequent works offer to the public “when sent out into the world,” but for how the process challenges the self to wrestle with inherent biographical and creative tensions within the context of exploring Irishness.
Mannix was quite straightforward on the value of her commission and how she “thrived” on the challenge, the timeline, the process, and the sense of being part of a wider community of artists engaged in this specific project. There was no anxiety for her; instead, she deeply embraced the familiar and comforting from a place of emotional security and creative freedom. The nature of the commission does, it seems, really matter.
It’s not often that choreographer Jordan is asked to respond to a sculpture in the form of a dance performance, particularly in a dance language based on Irish traditional and contemporary dance, so this was a welcome creative challenge and opportunity. McComiskey has a long history of responding to creative prompts, though his responses are never strictly programmatic. Working closely with a dancer-choreographer to create an intricately woven response illustrates how powerful collaborative responses can be.
Reflections
This project has been an extraordinary journey for all involved, including the O’Brien family, who assembled this art collection, and curator Marty Fahey, who has been instrumental not only in preserving the collection but also in leveraging its potential to communicate and educate. Fahey has actively sought ways for artists to engage with and promote the collection’s message, advocating for a multimodal approach to Irish studies. For both Liz Carroll and Marty Fahey, this project has provided an opportunity to work with the very best in diverse artistic fields. Overall, The O’Brien Collection project has modeled an ambitious, multidisciplinary approach to critical and creative engagement. It exists not only to be admired, but also to inspire others to explore similar creative collaborations among the various branches of the arts, which are, so to speak, “cultural siblings.” The work with this Collection models potential pathways for integrating various art forms, aiming to enrich both the artistic and intellectual landscape. The commissioned responses will undoubtedly stand the test of time and will remain tied to this extraordinary art collection and its reception history not only through this catalogue, but also through the associated multimedia recordings.
¹ Eamonn Wall, interview by Aileen Dillane and Marty Fahey, January 5, 2024