Clare Rhythms - Mostly!

Opening Speech by John O'Donohue

There are times in one's experience and in the experience of a culture when a fracture happens that unleashes a darkness and chaos that is truly disturbing and frightening. In the last few weeks we've had that experience. A time when humans revealed the incredible destruction that they are mindlessly capable of.

A friend of mine, a poet in America, spent a week after it incredibly upset at what had happened. She told me that she began to recover her sense of belonging again when she went back to work on her farm and to enter again the ancient faithfulness of the art. It is amazing that humans can so successfully forget that we live on a wonderful planet and that the earth is actually such a touching intimate and beautiful place to be. There are certain landscapes then which have a particular luminosity, a particular spirit and presence and shape; landscapes which are inexhaustible in their mystery in their rhythm and in what they evoke. One of these landscapes without a doubt is what is called the Burren in Co. Clare.

I grew up there. We never called it the Burren when I was small - it was just all the names of the places. Then when it became touristy it was known as the Burren and lots of strangers became to come. It's an incredible place where the most extreme contradictions somehow manage a harmony that is sheltering and healing. On the one hand it's a completely bare place, just look at all the bareness of the stone and you see in that painting of Noírín Mooneys there, the bareness of the skies and the clean sheen of the grey stone. On the other hand it's a place of such intimate gentleness where the most delicate flowers of beautiful colours co-exist amidst all kinds of severity. It's also a place which has a huge depth of presence, and for any of you who that have walked that landscape and taken your time and really looked - every two steps you take you are in a different kind of place. I have stopped there at different times and looked out and seen shapes of things with the light and the angle you'd be looking at and then come back maybe a few hours later to try to find it but you'd never get it again.

It is a landscape, which is completely alive, the rain, plays a huge role there. Water is the actual primal sculptor of the Burren. In these paintings of Noírín Mooneys we see a landscape of severe stillness achieving such an incredible fluency and movement. Somebody said once that the ocean comes in under the Burren and that that accounts in a way for its delicacy of rhythm. The rain, which in the West of Ireland is immensely faithful to us, then changes the place completely. One minute the place is white and glistening, the next thing the rain comes and everything is completely black and then the wind and the breeze whips off the darkness again and a new landscape is revealed, washed and new as if it had just emerged from the ocean.

It is a landscape of a huge kind of memory and that makes for its presence. As humans we find it very hard to enter the mind of landscapes and that's the miracle I think of what a painter like Noírín Mooney Mooney does. They attend in front of that hugh temple called the Burren and gradually find shapes and forms and sequences which open it up in a completely new kind of way.

One of the oldest questions in all thinking is - what is the secret life of the object. In a certain sense an object is a complete misnomer for - I was going to say for a thing, but a thing is also a misnomer. There's a lovely phrase by Joseph Brodsky where he says "an object makes infinity private". In a sense that's what the artist actually does, they try in someway to start with nothing but the empty canvas, it kind of a creatio ex nihilo and gradually let the presence of the object emerge. It's almost as if you're invited to accompany the object on its journey into identity. That's the mind of the artist which is more interested in the forconned cradle of possibility that lives at the heart of the object rather than the fixed kind of object.

It's lovely to see the Burren landscape in these paintings achieving such a wondrous form of colour and presence. One of the nicest things that I know about colour was written by William Blake who said "colours are the wounds of light". When you look at this exhibition you see the way objects insist on their identity as colour and as form. There's also in them a recreation of that sense of presence that you get in the Burren. Often when you look at something amazingly beautiful, in a certain sense it's not there and you look back again and you find a bit of it, and you look back again and you see it. It's like the Buddhists say "first there is a mountain, then there is no mountain, then there's a mountain again". It is the third time of the mountain, when the luminosity had dawned and the magic of the presence has breathed near you, that you feel touched by it.

I really love the painting of the goats. I always smell them before I see them - you'll be walking up and the next thing suddenly a breeze suddenly swells with goat smell and you look and there they are. If you were a designer/outdoor consultant, and you were asked to design the optimal animal for that kind of landscape it's almost the goat. They work very well against the stone and are one species who have no respect whatsoever. Any farmer in the Burren will tell you that they're almost killed rising walls after goats.

The paintings take time to really attend to. What is happening in them is not defined and they emerge and come closer to you. As we look here to the dogs and the horses emerging out of that background you see the picture and you can't really make out clearly which subverts your normal perception, then when you attend more closely gradually you yourself become implicated in an act of attention that allows the presence to form anew for you.

That wonderful musician Miko Russell, he used to always play a tune called "the limestone rock" on the tin whistle and in a certain sense in this exhibition - the rock sings. So it's a nice transition into the amazing portraits of musicians that are a central part of the exhibition.

One of the things about music is that it's the nearest art form to full participation in the eternal, because it totally changes your experience of time. You can't see music. People who can read music and compose can see it. If somebody from another planet looked in through a keyhole in a big concert hall at a wonderful symphony of Mozarts or Beethovens, they would see everyone listening, but couldn't know what they were actually doing. What is attempted is almost a portrait of the music breaking beyond the form of the instrument and the person and the frame. Noírín Mooneys portraits of musicians are wonderful.

This is an exhibition that demands time. You can look and linger and look again, the real test is if you come back again and you can find more, and in this exhibition I believe that you will and find more and more. It's a unique portrait of an amazing endless infinite landscape. She should be very proud of it and I congratulate her.

John O'Donoghue