Boglands inspire new exhibition

A CYCLING tour of the West of Ireland and a visit to its bogs are the inspiration behind Dutch artist Trudi van der Elsen’s Bog exhibition.

The exhibition will run at the Courthouse Gallery, Ennistymon from Saturday.
Trudi is a visual artist born in a bog-land area in the south of Holland known as the Peel. In recent years she has made her home in Clare, where she has built a solid reputation as an artist and art teacher. Bog-lands are a major inspiration for her and much of her artwork, painting, drawing and photography, resulted from research into bog-lands and the people who live in such areas.
This fascination, which continues with new research on the bog-lands of Ireland, was triggered in 1973 by a newspaper review of The Bog People, a book by PV Glob centering on the Tollund Man. The strange story of Tollund Man, and the Danish bog in which his remarkably preserved 2,000-year-old body was found, made a profound impression on the young artist, although the photographs of the Tollund Man’s body in Glob’s book gave her the impression that the body was that of a woman. The atmosphere in those bog-lands and the tale of the mysterious Tollund Man were the inspiration for a remarkable and highly acclaimed photographic series.
Trudi explains, “I was curious about what the bog people had experienced. I wanted to gain a better understanding of what Tollund Man and such people, killed and buried in bogs at that time, felt, heard and smelled when they disappeared in the bogs. So, as part of my research, I tried to reproduce the experience of being consigned to a bog and documented the process. I followed a geological line of bog-lands through Belgium, the Netherlands and Denmark, making black and white still-shots, which resemble freeze frames from an interrupted motion film. For me, the results were profound.”
An academic analysis and appreciation of Trudi’s images of bog people was published in December 2009 in the University of Chicago Press book Bodies In The Bog and the Archaelogical Imagination, written by Karin Sanders, professor of Scandanavian Studies at the University of California, Berkley.
As well as the photographic series, the Bog exhibition also includes examples of some of the artist’s varied and eclectic painting styles. These include a remarkable new work portraying the artist herself, painting an abstract inspired by Clare’s Burren area.
The exhibition runs until April 1.