New exhibitions unfold in Ennistymon

TWO new exhibitions are opening at the Courthouse Gallery, Ennistymon this weekend.
Colombian native Domingo Cautindioy will present his works in an exhibition entitled Yacharuna from this Saturday in the main gallery space. His exhibition will be officially opened at 5pm on Saturday by poet Brian Mooney, with music by Michael Hynes and Denis Liddy.
In the gallery’s Red Couch Space, Kinvara-based artist, Fiona Woods, will exhibit a selection of her works called Unfolding.
A spokeswoman for the gallery said that Domingo Cautindioy’s work consists of paintings, carvings, linocuts, wood engravings and, more recently, mosaics on canvas and bone and are characterised by an innate strength of design and loving attention to detail. “Above all, each piece has a unique and evocative presence,” she said.
He was born in 1959 into the Ingano tribe, whose homeland in the foothills of the Colombian Andes is a repository of ancient culture and knowledge. Domingo’s people are subsistence farmers and by eight years of age, he was already working as a day labourer to help support his family. With only a few months primary education and no artistic training, he suddenly began to draw and paint in his mid-30s.
“His creative inspiration comes from a deep affinity with the natural world, as well as from his experience in the shamanic arts acquired during 20 years with the Siona tribe in the Amazon Rainforest of Bajo Putumayo, where he went to live at the age of 15.
“For Domingo, the unexpected emergence of the artist within, at the age of 34 and, a year or two later in 1996, his voyage through time and space from the equatorial rainforest to the edge of the Burren in North Clare, were miraculous transformations in his life equal to any in the history of his tribe. The time away from tribal life proved crucial in Domingo’s development as an artist because it allowed him the personal space necessary for his unique gift to blossom,” the gallery spokeswoman added.
Since the positive response to his first exhibition in Ennis in 1999, his work has been shown in numerous solo and group exhibitions in Ireland, France, UK and Colombia and is to be found in public and private collections in Europe and the Americas.
Yacharuna, meaning shaman in the Inga language, is Domingo’s sixth solo exhibition. The show runs until Thursday, October 7.
Fiona Wood’s exhibition, Unfolding, will be opened also this Saturday at 5pm by Trudi van der Elsen.
For her exhibition in the Red Couch space, Fiona will convert the area into a studio. Over the course of the exhibition, she will develop a new work, which has been commissioned for the TULCA festival of Visual Art in Galway, opening in November. The exhibition will take the form of an unfolding, as ideas and images are developed over time, taking on a gradual visual and physical form in the space. The artist will follow her normal work schedule and will be present most weekdays in the space between 10am and 2pm.
“Fiona is a visual artist whose practice includes curating and writing. She has received a number of commissions to make work, including the recent project Collection of Minds for PS2, Belfast. She is a participant in Rhyzom, a European research network exploring local cultural productions and trans-local disseminations. She is a recipient of the Arts Council of Ireland’s 2010 Visual Arts Bursary award,” she explained.