Image: The Red Flag by Emma Stroude
Glimpses of Escape: your monochrome, my techincolour is an exhibition of works by women artists from the Kildare County Council Municipal Collection. Curated by Vera McEvoy and the Making Marks with Markievicz group.
This group of thirteen women were connected by an interest in exploring, viewing and discussing artwork by women from the Municipal Collection. They also researched women trailblazers who have impacted Irish life and creative culture over the last 100 years.
The exhibition includes works by artist Evie Hone (1894-1955), Sandy Kennedy, Bernie Leahy, Norah McGuinness (1901-1980) Ann McKenna, Carly McNulty, Niamh O’Malley, Amelia Peart, Dorothy Smith and Emma Stroude.
The exhibition showcases the collection’s most recently acquired artwork The Red Flag by Emma Stroude.
Included in the exhibition is a newly commissioned essay Impossible Witness: a sequence on wholeness by writer, Sue Rainsford in response to the project.
Excerpt:
The resurrected body will always bear some trace of its passage; the dark smear of soil along a hairline, the lipstick smudge of a resuscitative mouth. ‘Sappho’s poems were once shredded and used as stuffing in mummified royal crocodile carcasses’2, and to read her poems now—no matter how long they’ve been rehabilitated into book-form—is to smooth out and reconfigure those torn slivers. Alongside their original images, rhythms and sensations, Sappho’s words will always connote the hollowed belly of a crocodile.
Compromises of this kind might be what we speak of when we speak of things the female artist, in her myriad experience of marginalisation, cannot help but know.