Artist Tour + Preview on Friday 7 March – 6.00pm
The land tells us a story and our job is to listen. While researching postcards for my last series of paintings of the Kerry landscape, I was focusing on the notes written on the cards, from people as they interacted with the landscape. This research led me to the stories, history, and mythology of the landscape itself. The Healy Pass, the serpentine famine road then known as Bealach Scairt became of particular interest to me. It was rebuilt as part of the Public Works Scheme in 1847. I have often driven it and hiked up the sides of its hills and mountains. Its peaks named crudely and emotively, including Knockanouganish (Cnoc an Uaignis /Hill of loneliness). You can almost feel the heartbeats of the Irish people who were subjected to freezing temperatures, with scarcely any clothing and even less food as they attempted to work on this road. Many of them perishing and buried by the roadside.
I am extremely interested in the tracks, traces, and scars that these “roads to nowhere” have left on the landscape of Ireland, and on the psyche of the Irish people.
An Gorta Mór has been a part of my life since I was a child. There was a fever hospital in a field at the end of our road and we played inside its ruined walls. It was normal to play inside the ruined walls of history growing up in Kilkenny. We always thought we would find treasure there for some reason, or maybe that was just me.
My first studio space was in an old Chadwick’s building in Kilkenny in 2004. It was earmarked for redevelopment and housed eleven artists for over 2 years. The building was situated beside a workhouse and fever hospital which contained the arts office at one stage and various other civil service offices.
In 2008, after inhabiting several other buildings, we were offered an abandoned workhouse in Callan, Co. Kilkenny as a permanent studio space. Unknown to us, we were to share the workhouse with the excavated remains of 976 famine victims. These sixty-three unmarked graves, the largest number ever discovered in one place in Ireland, were under our first studio from 2004-06. They spent several months there until they were taken for study and returned for a burial ceremony in 2010 and the opening of the Kilkenny Famine Experience at McDonagh Shopping Centre.
Research has also been focusing on the trauma and psychological impact associated with forced displacement and famine. I am interested in the collective healing that must take place in order for a nation to move on after a catastrophic and manufactured tragedy like “The Famine”.
This work has always been in me, it has been research and process led and looks at the “famine roads” of Kerry to attempt to bring their story to a contemporary audience. This scarred land holds the memory of past lives. These reminders are no longer roads to nowhere but pathways into history where we learn about human will and resilience. This exhibition of work is the first iteration of this research and understanding.
Alan Raggett (b.1977, Kilkenny, Ireland) is a visual artist, living, and working in Kenmare, Co. Kerry. Raggett is a fully committed and energised professional with a strong track record as a practicing artist and arts professional, working for 25 years in the arts industry in Ireland, alongside curators and other artists to bring exhibitions to domestic and international audiences.
Working primarily in oil paint, Raggett’s work is ambitious, original, and distinctive. It deals mainly with the abstraction and retelling of the source image. Images, found and self-documented, are retold by means of collage, rephotographing, cropping and manipulation. These manipulated images become the starting points for his paintings where he explores ideas of repetition, contemporary landscape, and storytelling.
He has exhibited regionally and nationally, and his work is held in private collections worldwide.
Exhibition runs from Saturday 8 March – Saturday 19 April
