Folklore inspires Lennie books and exhibition

IT will be a very busy Friday for the Courthouse Gallery, Ennistymon this week with the launch of two books and two exhibitions.
In the Red Couch Space of the gallery there will be the launch of two artist’s books and an exhibition of related work by Vicky Lennie.
The Scottish-born artist moved to the West of Ireland in the ’90s where she helped to establish the Doolin Artists Group, who held several successful exhibitions.
Speaking about this exhibition and the books she explained, “The books, Stones and Stories: Sketchbooks From the Burren and Aran Islands and Early Irish Monks Understood that the World is Round, are drawn from sketchbooks and paintings made around 1998/99, when I was living close to the Atlantic Ocean in Doolin. Explorations of the surrounding area and folklore at that time led me through local stories and landscapes to the many strange tales connected with the Atlantic.”
The exhibition will include original sketchbooks and paintings, as well as the books themselves. Vicky now works from her studio at the Blue Frog Café and Arts Venue, Ennistymon, where she also teaches life drawing and programmes arts events and exhibitions for the venue.
She has exhibited in various Irish galleries and arts centres, including the Belltable Arts Centre in Limerick and the Department of Arts, Heritage, Gaeltacht and the Islands in Dublin.
That same evening at the gallery will see the launch of Townlands, an exhibition by Alan Counihan and Gypsy Ray.
Townlands is an exhibition of works made over the past two years by the two artists as part of the Townlands Project. The works to be shown at the Courthouse Gallery will include photographs, drawings, sculpture, installation and film, all of which have grown out of creative interaction with the artists’ local landscape.
The Townlands Project (www.townlands.net) is an ongoing creative exploration of a rural landscape and community in North Kilkenny. It has involved the gathering of place and field names in nine parish townlands along with a series of oral history recordings.
Engagement with the community has been wide-ranging, resulting in a collaboration between Barnstorm Theatre Company and the local national school, an artist-in-residence-programme, a seminar and a short film, all based on the local landscape and its history. It is anticipated that a publication will follow in 2011-2012.
Over the past 20 years, Alan has realised many large site-specific works in the public domain and exhibited widely both in Ireland and the USA. His work is in many public and private collections on both sides of the Atlantic.
He has been the recipient of several grants and awards, including the Pollock-Krasner Foundation Award. While perhaps best known for his object-based work, his practice also incorporates photography, theatre, sound and texts.
While resident in the USA, Gypsy gained a national reputation for her social documentary photography, especially for work focused on the issues of HIV/AIDS and its impact on specific communities.
Here in Ireland, she has continued her creative engagement with place and people using both photography and drawing and was recently awarded a Kilkenny County Bursary for her initial work with the County Kilkenny Traveller Community.
Her drawings are a regular feature in the RHA annual exhibition. A book of landscape imagery, The Poetry of Place, was published in 2007.