Gorta by Lilian Davidson. . . . one of the paintings in the Great Hunger Museum’s exhibition.
Creative writing PhD student Maeve Bancroft has been awarded a writing residency at the West Cork Arts Centre in Skibbereen to coincide with a major art exhibition, Coming Home: Art and the Great Hunger, on loan from the Ireland Great Hunger Museum in Quinnipiac University, Connecticut. – https://www.facebook.com/ComingHomeIGHM/
The Quinnipiac collection is the world’s largest Famine-related art collection and features work by some of the most eminent Irish and Irish-American artists of the past 170 years, including Daniel McDonald, Lilian Davidson, Paul Henry, Jack B Yeats, Dorothy Cross, William Crozier, Brian Maguire, Hughie O Donoghue, Alanna O’Kelly and John Behan. After showing in Dublin Castle, the exhibition moves to Skibbereen in July for four months.
Maeve’s PhD project is an historical novel based on the flight of the Famine Irish to Grosse Ile, Canada. As part of her residency, she will engage with the community through talks, readings and workshops. She also hopes to collaborate with other artists-in-residence. (One of the artists featured in the exhibition, Alanna O’Kelly, will develop a live, site-specific performance at Schull workhouse.)
Maeve presented a paper at Children and the Great Hunger International conference at Quinnipiac last year in which she discussed her research methods, including drawing on particular paintings and sculptures for inspiration. She quoted Stephen Marcus’s 1963 essay, Hunger and Ideology which described the Famine as the moment at which “an important truth emerges: that however mad, wild or grotesque art may seem to be, it can never touch and approach the madness of reality”.