Clúdach: Cover

For the covers of New Hibernia Review's twelfth volume, we offer a sampling of prints executed by artists associated with the Graphic Studio Gallery in Dublin's Temple Bar. The next four covers will present works that employ an Irish field as a central element. The first is Barbara Rae's 2007 42.5 x 60 cm. monoprint, Peat Field Belderrig. Born in Scotland in 1943, Barbara Rae CBE, RA, is a successful and highly acclaimed Scottish artist. A past president of the Society of Scottish Artists, Rae was made a member of the Royal Scottish Academy in 1992 and a Royal Academician in 1996.

This nameless landscape on the north coast of County Mayo displays the attention to texture and contrast that characterizes all of Rae's work, as well as her concern for land, its use, and its history. The layered composition, in which the plant stalks of the foreground stand all the more fragile against the forceful black band that fills the top third of the piece, convey both ephemerality and pressure at once. Belderrig is the community nearest the Ceide Fields site, the oldest-known cultivated land in Europe. Indeed, the image seems complementary to Seamus Heaney's poem "Belderg" from North (1975), in which he describes how the discoverer of Ceide Fields possessed quernstones that allowed him "To lift the lid of the peat / And find this pupil dreaming / Of Neoloithic wheat."

The oldest gallery in Dublin that deals exclusively in original contemporary prints, the Graphic Studio Gallery features the work of more than 150 Irish and international artists. In its affiliated Graphic Studio Workshop off Hanover Quay, it provides professional working facilities and studio space, at an affordable cost, to Ireland's leading printmakers. The workshop operates a "Visiting Artists Scheme," where prominent artists are invited to make prints in the studio; Barbara Rae is one such visiting artist. We thank the artist for kind permission to present this image to the readers of New Hibernia Review, and also thank Catherine O'Riordain, gallery manager, for her generous assistance.