Clúdach / Cover

Cover.

Geraldine O’Reilly

Illustration for Mary O’Donnell’s poem

“Heron and the Women” in Unlegendary Heroes (limited-edition box set of letterpress poems and silk screen prints, 2021)

Used with the artist’s permission

the heron’s prehistoric pterosauresque form is suspended against the whiteness of the page. Skillfully rendered hand-painted marks capture the creature’s physicality, grace, and power. However, while the artist has carefully observed its anatomical details, its genus undisputed, the bird is decontextualized from its natural surroundings, removed from familiar environments. Its separateness takes on a symbolic power in the viewer’s imagination. All at once it is beautiful and majestic, yet its isolated state is unexpected, its presence uncanny and disquieting. The heron’s removal from nature allows the viewer to project their own meaning, emotions, and memories onto its shape. They are free to imagine, or remember, other places and events.

However, despite its lack of pictorial context, the heron is not alone on the page. On this landscape-oriented sheet, to the left of the image are the words of the poet Mary O’Donnell. The printed poem entitled “Heron and the Women” was the inspiration for the artist, Geraldine O’Reilly. The artist and poet have known each other for years. Encouraged by another poet, Dermot Healy, O’Reilly creates work that draws on what she knows. She admires the same trait in O’Donnell’s writing, in particular what O’Reilly describes as the poet’s ability to get to the heart of the matter, and her use of direct, unambiguous language when doing so. Much of O’Donnell’s oeuvre focuses on the lives of women, past and present, restoring their voices and recognizing the personal agency of generations of women previously ignored, neglected, or exploited.

Geraldine O’Reilly is one of Ireland’s most prolific and respected artists. She has been a visual arts member of Aosdána, a peer-elected association of Irish artists, writers, and musicians, since 2004. O’Donnell is a fellow member for literature.

Over two years ago, O’Reilly invited O’Donnell to collaborate on an art project where the poet’s words and the artist’s responding images would be presented side by side. The result is a limited-edition solander-boxed set of ten single-sheet screen prints with originally letterpressed poems entitled Unlegendary Heroes. Over the course of the project, O’Reilly partnered with other leading women in their fields: the poetry was set by Mary Plunkett of Belgrave Press, and the presentation boxes were handmade by book binder Éilís Murphy of Folded Leaf. The series was printed at Graphic Studio Dublin, the longest-established print workshop in Ireland. The paper is Fabriano Rosaspina Bianco, a mold-made 60 percent cotton paper, smooth to the touch.

Unlegendary Heroes comes from the title of a celebrated poem by O’Donnell which is also included in the collection. The poem is an elegy to the lives of rural Irish women, women who were often consigned homogenously to the roles of “wife of,” “daughter of,” or “servant of the parish.” While the poem comprises a list of fictious names and domestic achievements, the narratives are grounded in reality, representing women encountered and recollected by O’Donnell. The poem particularly resonates with older generations, including O’Reilly, as they remember similar women.

The theme of women’s lives and experiences, contemporary and historical, continues throughout this new series. O’Reilly selected ten poems from three different collections by O’Donnell: Unlegendary Heroes (1998), Those April Fevers (2015), and the most recently published Massacre of the Birds (2021). The artist produced a watercolor illustration in response to each, working in a medium notable for its delicacy and nuance. This technique also showcases the artist’s consummate draftswomanship. O’Reilly transferred her images photographically to silk screen, a process that preserved her mediative handmade marks. An artist renowned for her work as a printmaker, O’Reilly is fascinated by the visual qualities of the printed word. The poems were letterpressed first, then transferred photographically to a silk...