Curlew, Donegal Bay, Ireland by Clare O Hagan
SKU: IFA-CUR-7657
Curlew, Donegal Bay, Ireland
Woodcut with oil based inks
Final Framed Size: 70cm x 50cm
Original Framed Price: £650.00
Curlew, Donegal Bay, Ireland
Woodcut, Edition of 12
The lonely cry of the curlew is a sound that has echoed through the ages. On a dun-coloured estuary in Donegal town, the wading bird is caught mid-stride, its beady eye searching the muddy banks of the River Eske. The print itself is a record of its own destruction, made using a “suicide print” method where the single woodblock is gouged away with each new layer of colour.
This large woodcut was born from two weeks of intense work in a deconsecrated church in Groningen, the Netherlands. It was a physical and messy process—camping in the gallery, fuelled by sandwiches and spaghetti, and not considering the health risks of cleaning oil-based inks with white spirit. The work was hard on my hands, but the tools I used—gouging and carving the wood—are not so different from the flint tools used by the Stone Age people who first inhabited this land and heard the same sound of the curlew’s call.
My inspiration came from a photograph I took on the banks of the River Eske, a river that flows from the Bluestack Mountains and out to the Atlantic. This place is the centre of the O’Donnell dynasty, the clan of my maternal grandmother, Mary. She claimed ancestral connections to “Red Hugh” O’Donnell, a chieftain known for his reddish hair—the same colour my granny had before her hair turned white overnight. That’s a story rooted in sorrow: her young son died at age nine because the family was too poor to pay for a doctor.
I often think of that story when I hear the curlew’s lonesome call. It tells us the day is over. But maybe, in this work, it’s her cry I hear.
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