Solo Exhibition
Courthouse Gallery
Ennistymon, Ireland
2025
Enchanting, and Then What Sorrow is an exhibition of sculptural installations using weaving and other textile processes, resonant ritual objects and moving image work to create a cormorant lair, a liminal space for grief and mourning, between our world and the otherworld. Enchanting, and Then What Sorrow
Exhibition Text by Niamh Moriarty
The flood-wave
and that of swift ebb:
what the flood-wave brings you
the ebb-wave carries out of your hand.†
Tonngu doirbh
is tondguba,
cid ara n-ordaigther
doirbthech dúthrachtach.‡
† Caoineadh na Caillech Bérri (Lament of the Hag of Beara)
‡ Old Irish from the Yellow Book of Lecan, 14th Century, held at Trinity College Dublin
The cailleach is variously described as a divine old crone, a blue-skinned cyclops, a wailing widow, a giant bird with its beak full of sticks, and a corn dolly to be tossed into a neighbour’s field if you wish to ward off a bad harvest in your own. Literally translating as ‘hag’, the Irish word ‘cailleach’ was also used to name an alcove near the hearth of a cottage, where the old woman would sleep with a mat of straw hung over her for a curtain.1
In Ireland, the mythical cailleach is associated with craggy headlands, rocky outcrops and sheer cliff-faces, places that are also home to An Cailleach Dhubh, The Black Hag, or The Great Cormorant. The mediaeval poem ‘Caoineadh na Caillech Bérri’ is narrated by the legendary Hag of the Beara Peninsula, where a sandstone boulder is thought to be her petrified head, turned to stone while waiting and wailing for the last of her lovers to return home from the sea. The Hag of Beara, is told through folk tales, to have had an unnaturally long period of youth, in which she birthed many successive generations of children, their fathers all fading away into old age before her. In her poem, she has finally grown old herself, and laments her life’s cruel ebb. She tells of joyfully wrapping her hair in woven veils of every hue in her youth, and then resorting to selling each of her eyes to keep a plot of land late in her life.
Enchanting, and Then What Sorrow begins with the embodiment of bereavement as it is represented in the landscape; at the most inhospitable and remote edges of this island. At a time of unbearable grief in her life, the artist began to walk each day on Killahoey Beach near her home in Donegal. Every morning she would walk, and every morning the cormorants gathered out on the rocks would raise their wings. The works presented here are in close contemplation of these, often derided, creatures that can outfish any human. They ask us to look closely, and to be looked at in turn, by something often othered: the animal world, the spirit world, the solitary widow.
This collection of ritual objects, the hand dyed, stitched and woven textiles; the hand turned and pinched ceramic vessels, and the personal gaze within the moving imagery, are each embossed with the offering to share experience and to take pause. The ‘site’ of the composition, points away towards the ‘nonsite’2, which can be a walk outside, a ritual practice, the experience of making. These material touchstones are offered as a form of protection to those in grief, and to the wild nature of the cormorants, whose prey and habitats are waning due to ecological collapse. The objects are hung and laid out in order to hold the narrow spaces between worlds open, if even for a moment. The chosen materials, clay, cloth, straw and wool, contain the accumulated experience of eons of making and mending. Indigo-dyed shibori linen and cotton evoke the wode bandages found carefully wrapped around mummified human remains, and the final river crossing that represents the soul’s transition into the afterlife. Sea birds mediate between planes of consciousness, they float on the surface; and subconsciousness, they dive beneath the hidden depths of dark waters.
The word cormorant comes from the Latin ‘corvus marinus’, or sea raven, literally describing the type of bird, but also, possibly, its inclination to gather in large social groups, akin to its land-bound namesake. Following the threads of symbolism attached to the cormorant, native to nearly every place on earth, we are brought on a journey to the Nagara River, where ukai, a fishing technique using cormorants, has been practiced continuously for some 1,300 years. In Japanese, 鵜 (u) is a single-syllable word that refers to the cormorant. 鵜飼 (Ukai) translates as ‘raising a cormorant’, expressing the familial animal-human bond that exists between the masters and their flocks. A scene in the short film pans above the heads of the ukai cormorants to show a prayer shrine set into their enclosure. Their homes are carefully woven individual straw baskets.
The exhibition is named for the haiku3 by seventeenth century poet and travel-writer Matsuo Bashō. The poem is itself a response to the traditional Noh play4 that tells the story of two monks who encounter a cormorant fisherman, or usho, illuminated by his beacon lantern and accompanied by his cloud of cormorants. The usho reveals that he has been catching and killing fish in forbidden waters and performs a ritual dance to demonstrate how the spirits of the ayu (sweetfish) are tormenting him; the tides that once aided his work are now pulling him under.
The terrors inflicted on both the cursed fisherman and the Hag of Beara warn of the transient nature of existence. The stories each tell us that everything we have been given will also, inevitably, be taken away from us. Contained within this exhibition is the opportunity to reflect, to reconsider the rhythms of time, the cyclical nature of the seasons, the ebb and flow of life and death.
Here, the Cailleach is a place for gathering, and the Cailleach is a place for rest.