“Thicket” | Summer 2024
The Ballinglen Museum of Art
“Thicket" notes and artist statement:
The Ballinglen Museum of Art
Ballycastle, Co. Mayo, Ireland
notes: Summer 2024 - first impressions
It seems to me that the museum honors the surrounding traditional dwellings in Ballycastle. I think of smallish boats in a sea of lush green damp. A balanced asymmetry rules…
Balance is kept within a system of point/counter point, and I define the interior rooms by the moving shadows of light and dark just as much as their use. The light is shifting and diffuse like the landscape outside and it comes into the building as a shafts or a pooling of soft circles causing the walls to be every shade of white over short periods of time. This is much like what I experience when I look at the sky, cliffs, fields and ocean outside.
The architecture is human scale and grand at the same time. Maybe it is based on the reach and proportions of the human body and the real need to shelter from the frequent wild storms coming from the near by North Atlantic Ocean. I experience the interior of the museum as having a fine tuned sensibility built on sheltering, care, intended use and a collective wisdom coming from the people that live there.
Gail Grinnell
Artist Statement for THICKET: a temporary site specific installation created for The Ballinglen Museum of Art, Ballycastle Ireland
Summer 2024
It was shortly after my mother died that I first came to Ballinglen for a residency. I experienced the bog lands as beautiful - both dark and bright at the same time - with generous distant views always subject to the changing weather and patterns of light. The harvested peat in the fields held my own sorrow – soaking it up like a sponge. The heat from the peat fires warmed me and the ever-growing moss produced the soft turf that I navigated during my daily walks. The vast tracks of mounded Sphagnum Moss, that gave form to the landscape, were punctuated with wild hedgerows of entwined and vigorous plant growth bursting with all manner of life. I imagined that these impenetrable places where joyful intrusions from the forests of the distant past recalling the primeval forests that once covered the land in Ireland as they did in North America. I’ve been back to visit and work several times over the years and I continue to think of these dense thickets as points of intersection where a variety of plant species can thrive together and where the possibility of a new forest comes into being.
My line contour drawings of these plants co-mingled with memories of my mother’s pattern making and her copious use of thread to create her works in fabric have provided inspiration for more than a few large-scale works completed since my first encounters with the local landscape in 2008. Sorting out the particulars of translucent cut-to-shape line drawings keeps my love of detail exercised. Assembling the layers of these drawings into a suspended site-specific installation grounds the work in the physical particulars of the building - back and forth until the sculptural form settles in for its stay at the host site.
A thicket is a descriptive word that refers to a massing of like things. It can be most anything – a dense collection of ideas, emotions, shafts of light or the layering of entwined vines and trees. Each has its own eco system in nature and in human culture and it is in this spirit I offer this installation at The Ballinglen Museum of Art.
Gail Meyer Grinnell
2024