Artwork by Greag Mac a’ tSaoir

0

Shares

Greag Mac a’ tSaoir Photograph: Stephen Mullan

As part of a series of occasional articles profiling some of the contemporary artists featured in Newry and Mourne Museum’s temporary exhibition, Newry Artists Past and Present, the series continues with Greag Mac a’ tSaoir discussing his work.

Five Decades, resin hands, metal links, 2022 Exhibited as part of Three Views of a Border exhibition in 2022, a collaboration with fellow Newry artist Anna Marie Savage and Ciaran Dunbar. Courtesy of Greag Mac a’ tSaoir

I was born in Newry in the early 1960s, living at what was the edge of the town at that stage, I went to school in the Abbey, where art wasn’t high on the list of priorities, but I was taught by Kevin Reynolds who had high standards and a slightly renegade approach, which was a clear influence on my later development. As a teenager my family moved to North Street flats which I loved. After leaving school I worked in Mournecraft as a screen printer but left when a chance came up to study in Dublin. That was really the last time I lived in Newry, which meant that the mental picture I carried around of the town (I still can’t think of it as a city) is of a particular remembered point in time. The notion of loss and its flipside, memory, are at the heart of most of my work.

Green Green Grass of Home, oil on canvas, mesh, stamp, copper, 2022 Painting of North Street flats produced for the Three Views of a Border exhibition in 2022. Courtesy of Greag Mac a’ tSaoir

I’ve moved around a lot but about a decade ago I moved to Scotland, and I started to make work again. For the first time I realised that my strength as an artist lay in assembling things. My father was a school caretaker and an incredibly practical man who could make things from what lay around. My work is often made of the physical remains of experience, the junk we leave behind and for that reason it tends to be domestic in scale rather than epic. Even my largest work to date is constructed from multiples of a human hand. This human scale encourages a viewer approaching the work to build their own web of meaning based on personal associations rather than having a fully formed narrative imposed.

Three Silenced Bells for Hill Street, lead and wax, 2021 Currently on display in the Newry Artists Past and Present exhibition in Newry & Mourne Museum. Courtesy of Greag Mac a’ tSaoir

A key breakthrough came when I read an article about Irish monastic bells. In the early Irish poem Buile Suibhne, Sweeney silences Saint Ronan Finn’s bell by throwing it into a lake. I began working with the image of a silenced bell when Noah Donohue was killed in Belfast. I subsequently produced further sets of memorial bells made from lead and filled with wax. One of these sets, marking the fiftieth anniversary of Bloody Sunday is in the collection of the Museum of Free Derry while another, made to mark the anniversary of the killings on Hill Street of Robert Anderson, Sean Ruddy and Thomas McLaughlin is in the collection of Newry and Mourne Museum.

by Greag Mac a’ tSaoir

‘Newry Artists Past and Present’ is on show at Newry and Mourne Museum until the end of October 2024.

To view more of Greag Mac a’ tSaoir’s work please visit www.greagpaints.com or @greagmacatsaoir on Instagram.

The Museum is currently offering free tours of the main exhibition galleries on Wednesdays at 2.00 pm. These must be booked in advance by calling our Education Officer at 0330 137 4422.

Newry and Mourne Museum is open Tuesday – Saturday 10.00 am – 4.30 pm. Please call 0330 137 4422 or email museums@nmandd.org for further information.

Visit their website at www.visitmournemountains.co.uk/museums/newry-and-mourne-museum