Love in all its guises is the subject of Grá, the new exhibition at Uillinn: West Cork Arts Centre, Skibbereen. It features 50 works selected from the National Collection of the Crawford Art Gallery by the LGBTQI+ elder artists’ collective Salt & Pepper, along with 30 works of their own.
“We had the choice of 4000 objects in the Crawford Collection, and we just went giddy,” says artist and activist Toma McCullim, who facilitated the project with the support of Uillinn director Ann Davoren and the Crawford’s Curator of Collections & Special Projects Michael Waldron.
“We wanted to include all types of love, which is quite difficult with the Crawford Collection, because a lot of the older works were donated by the clergy and people like that. But we went through everything, asking ourselves, what is it we want to bring into Uillinn and celebrate, really?” Of their final selection, McCullim says: “It’s like a big party with all our favourite things.”
John Lavery, The Red Rose.
McCullim describes herself as a “participative artist.” She has led any number of community projects in West Cork, having lived near Ballydehob since 1991. “I arrived with my ex-girlfriend and our triplet children, who were three-year-olds at the time. They were all very blonde and angelic, so we made a big impact arriving in the village. It’s a thing when people meet you with triplets. They ask, are you the mother? Explaining that we were both their mothers was a coming out process again and again and again. It meant that we were never in the closet.
“When the triplets were going up to ‘the Big School,’ the priest was saying they needed more children. And if we had managed three, he said, the rest of them should get a move on. So that was the kind of welcome we had in the village.” In 2022, McCullim decided to initiate a project with her peers in the gay community.
“It was around the end of the COVID pandemic,” she says, “and I was aware that a lot of older people had become very isolated. So I went around the parks, in Ballydehob, Dunmanway and Skibbereen, meeting people on park benches. That was a bit cheeky, it was kind of claiming the park as a gay site. But we started the Salt & Pepper group out of that. It’s mostly people in their 60s and 70s. But we start at 50. That’s our reserve. It’s like you’ve grown up enough to join us once you’re 50. But we go right up to 80.”
Victoria Russel’s Portrait of Fiona Shaw.
In 2023, McCullim made a film with the Salt & Pepper group called I’m In Love With Mother Nature. “That won a few awards,” she says. “Everybody absolutely loved it. And then I thought I’d like to organise a participative exhibition. I spoke to Ann Davoren at Uillinn about it, and I said I’d like to include stuff from the past as well as work by contemporary artists. I asked if we could get Edith Somerville’s painting The Goose Girl from the Crawford Art Gallery. And Ann said the Crawford had already been in touch, saying they wanted to do a participative art project, with community involvement. So it was perfect timing.”
With the Crawford being currently closed for refurbishment, it was happy to loan work for the Grá exhibition. The Goose Girl was not available – it dates to 1888, and is currently being tended to by the gallery’s conservators – but the Salt & Pepper group have included one of Somerville’s sketches for the painting, along with work by early 20th century artists such as Mainie Jellett, John Lavery and Mary Swanzy.
Featured also are contemporary artists such as Tom Climent, who is represented by a 2019 painting, Eden. “There’s a lot of magic in Tom’s work,” says McCullim, “and Eden is huge in scale. One of the older men in our group told me about leaving Ireland in his grey suit in the 1960s and going to a club in London. It was like that scene from The Wizard of Oz, when suddenly the world bursts into colour. Tom’s painting reminds me of that, you know, of this colourful world that opened up to embrace him.”
Another favourite with the Salt & Pepper group is Victoria Russell’s 2002 portrait of the actress Fiona Shaw. “There’s a lovely thing in that, of one lesbian painting another. Victoria’s an old friend of mine. I was at the women’s anti-nuclear protests at Greenham Common when I was a teenager, and so was she. She actually came and stayed with me in Ballydehob and led a painting retreat, well before she made that portrait of Fiona.”
Hi, Vis by Dragana Jurišić is part of Grá at Uillinn.
The Croatian artist Dragana Jurisic’s Hi, Vis, a series of photographs she produced of underwater swimmers in the Adriatic Sea in 2020/21, has also proved hugely popular. “They’ve been a big hit with everybody because we all have the grá for the swimming here in West Cork,” says McCullim. “And we’ve hung them right next to William Crosier’s painting of Lough Hyne, which is a special place to swim.”
A number of the Salt & Pepper artists have made individual pieces for the exhibition, but some of the most moving pieces are those they have worked on collectively. One, Nora’s Closet, refers back to a lesbian couple who arrived in Ballydehob in the 1950s. “Nora Golden and Christa Reichel established Gurteenakilla Pottery in 1955,” says McCullim. “They’re recognised as being the start of the Ballydehob arts movement. They’re the ancestors with whom we align ourselves. Nora’s closet, just incidentally, turned up on the freecycle website, and one of our members, Kai Fiáin, got her hands on it.
“The closet has some of Norah’s beautiful paintings on the front of it, and what we’ve done is we’ve put our clothes inside, and there’s a sound element that tells the stories associated with them. There’s the wedding dress that Eithne wore when she married Helen Ennis from Dunbeacon Pottery on the Twelve Arch Bridge in Ballydehob in 2008, long before Yes Equality, and a t-shirt that was worn on the day of the referendum. There are all sorts of stories in there. The whole show is quite theatrical.”
Grá opened on July 12, and McCullim is delighted with the reaction there has been to date. “It’s a landmark moment for us, to be hosting this wonderful event, and taking up cultural space. I hope that everybody is going to love walking in that door, feeling they’ve arrived, you know.”
Grá runs at Uillinn: West Cork Arts Centre until September 20. Grá Gallery Talk and Tour with Dr Michael Waldron (Curator of Collections & Special Projects at Crawford Art Gallery), 1pm to 2pm, Thursday 24 July and Thursday 18 September. Free to attend, no booking required Further information: westcorkartscentre.com
