For this, the final episode from the podcast series, ‘Encounters with Jack B. Yeats,’ The Model, home of the Niland in Sligo, presents the new musical composition, ‘Sarabande 77’ arranged and executed by Seamus Harahan and Owen Kilfeather. The musical composition ‘Sarabande 77’ is an adaptation of the fourth movement Sarabande from the keyboard suite in D minor by Georg Friedrich Händel (1685-1759).

The two sound clips used in the episode are from the archival radio interview with Jack B. Yeats and the curator, Thomas MacGreevy, recorded in 1947 and broadcast on BBC Third Programme in May 1948. This archival recording is part of the Sound & Moving Image Catalogue in the British Library (T7655R/1 C1) and was sourced with the help of John W. Purser.

‘Sarabande 77’  Harahan & Kilfeather © all rights reserved.

ARTIST BIOS:

Seamus Harahan - artist, filmmaker, musician

Owen Kilfeather is a composer, improvisor and filmmaker from Sligo. Broad range of musics from classical, rock, avant-garde, jazz, metal, choral, noise, gamelan, folk and barbershop to sound art, including decent stretches as house composer/producer for Barcelona-based new-music label Discordian Records and theatre group Tiamat Teatre, as well as crewing for experimental Super 8 collective Gui Collec. Has been involved in the composition, production and/or performance of some forty recordings. Currently writes for/plays with Miss Foreign Affairs and Gulpt, and in post-production on his debut film Organic Shrapnel.

Seamus Harahan:   melodeon, synthesizer, electroacoustic & tape treatments

In the fifth episode of ‘Encounters with Jack B. Yeats,’ The Model home of the Niland Collection, present a one-act conversation piece, The Green Wave, written by Jack B. Yeats, and adapted for this podcast as a short radio play. The parts of the two main characters are performed by actors, Ciarán McCauley (1st Elderly Man) and Bob Kelly (2ndElderly Man). The Green Wave was initially intended as a companion piece or prologue to Jack’s last full-length play In Sand, which was written in 1943,[1] during the period of the Second World War, when Jack was 72 years old. The Green Wave was never performed during the artist’s lifetime.

[1] John W. Purser, ‘The Literary Works of Jack B. Yeats,’ 1991, pp.20-21

For the fourth episode of ‘Encounters with Jack B. Yeats,’ The Model, home of the Niland Collection presents ‘The Visitor.’ A radio play directed by Isabel Claffey, with the roles of the visitor and the artist, played respectively by Yuji Shimobayashi and Ultan Burke. This short radio play was adapted from an essay by Shotaro Oshima (1899-1980), a Japanese scholar-poet and later professor of English Literature in Waseda University, Tokyo. In this essay, Shotaro described a visit to Jack B. Yeats’s studio in Fitzwilliam Square on a rainy summer’s day in 1938.

Jack B. Yeats in his Devon home, c.1900, with his dog, Hooligan. Image courtesy of the National Gallery of Ireland, ©Yeats Archive. From the late 1920s, Jack’s artistic style was to change radically, and Jack compares these changes to the similar wayward revolution in the use of language by James Joyce. During the inter-war years, the artist’s line becomes subsumed within a torrent of rich impastoed paint. He was drawing in colour, even though he had begun his artistic career as a draughtsman, earning his living as a comic artist and illustrator from the 1880s, where he used the pseudonym, W. Bird for the cartoons he drew for the satirical magazine ‘Punch'.

Two years before the interview with Shotaro, Jack painted a series of visionary works underpinned by mythological themes: ‘California,’ ‘A Race in Hy Brazil’ and ‘Helen.’ This latter work is discussed in the interview with Shotaro, as is another important oil painting by the artist, ‘Death for Only One,’ which the writer, revolutionary fighter and close friend to the artist, Ernie O’Malley purchased after seeing the work in the artist’s studio. The composition of ‘Death for Only One’ suggests the civil war period in Ireland, and was possibly one of the reasons, why Ernie O’Malley was initially drawn to this darkly painted and emotive work.

The stylistic changes that took place within Jack’s work during these years were out of step with French and English trends, and as the art historian, E.M. Gombrich wrote, they were ‘…irrigated neither by the Seine nor by the Thames.’ Jack was going his own way – carving out his own path, as his work became increasingly experimental and expressionist in the application of paint and in his way of capturing light, but he never goes towards complete abstraction, as the figure always remained ‘somewhere’ within the perspectival plane, whether ephemeral, temporal or rooted in the landscape – these figures of blasted humanity were subsumed within flares of quavering electrified colour, where the artist carried out the high-risk balancing act between representation and materiality, as he described himself, in what sounds very close to a personal manifesto - or a ‘way of being’ - in his radio interview with the young broadcaster Eamonn Andrews in October 1947: ‘There is only one art and that is the art of living. Painting is an occupation within that art, and that occupation is the freest of all the occupations of living. There is no alphabets. No grammar, no rules whatever. Many hopeful sportsman have tried to invent rules and have always failed. Any person or group of persons who tried to legalise such rules do a disservice to this occupation of living. They forget that… that painting is tactics and not strategy. It is carried out in the face of the enemy.’

In the 1938 interview with Shotaro, Jack talks about his work not selling well in Ireland, as it wasn’t until 1942, that his career had a firm foothold within the English art scene, and this was with the joint exhibition between the artist and William Nicholson at the National Gallery in London. By 1945, his reputation as Ireland’s leading modern artist was fully confirmed with The Yeats National Loan Exhibition in the National College of Art in Dublin. By this time, Jack was 74 years old.

In the third episode from the series of podcasts, ‘Encounters with Jack B. Yeats,’ from The Model, home of the Niland Collection, a painting by Jack B. Yeats in the Niland Collection, ‘Communicating with Prisoners’ (c.1924) is contextualised against the backdrop of the Irish Civil War. 

The oil painting is a transitional work from the artist’s career and portrays seven women as they attempt to communicate with female prisoners imprisoned inside the high bastion tower of Kilmainham Gaol. In 1923, Kilmainham Gaol was entirely occupied by female political prisoners and these women were Anti-Treaty Republicans, imprisoned here by the Free State Government during the Civil War period (1922-1923). Some of the women in the painting can be identified from contemporary photographs of the time. The second woman from the right in Jack’s painting resembles the republican activist and writer, Dorothy Macardle (1889 -1958).

In this second episode from the series of podcasts, ‘Encounters with Jack B. Yeats,’ from The Model, home of the Niland in Sligo, artists, Ruth Clinton and Niamh Moriarty present GO WEST, a short story set on a westbound train, where a wistful young artist shares a cabin with a stoic bureaucrat. The artist is instantly enthralled by the red-haired female civil servant sitting opposite him. Meanwhile, outside the window a magnificent round tower appears in the distance as the train crosses the sea to a remote island.

This radio play was inspired by a painting by Jack B. Yeats, ‘Man on a Train, Thinking,’ (1927) and a grisly ghost story told by the artist at the annual RHA dinner. This surreal comedy plays out between two conflicting projections of Irish national identity as it was being constructed in the early days of Irish Independence. Blending historical research and present-day conspiracies, the train is used as a metaphor for enduring binary debates such as public versus private; progress versus nostalgia; tourism versus conservation and even Dublin versus the rest of Ireland.

Ruth Clinton and Niamh Moriarty are collaborative artists currently living and working between Leitrim, and Sligo. They use performance, video, sound installation and storytelling, along with a detailed research process, to open up spaces of renewed reflection.

Ruth and Niamh's current practice is concerned with Ireland’s complicated relationship with its colonial past. In 2021, they are critically examining our struggle for a sense of national identity as we move through times of great upheaval.

They have recently presented work for Solas Nua, Washington D.C.; the Douglas Hyde Gallery, Trinity College Dublin, and Askeaton Contemporary Arts. This year Ruth and Niamh's work is supported by the Arts Council of Ireland, Leitrim County Council and Fingal County Council.

Episode Credits:

GO WEST Radio Play written and produced by Ruth Clinton and Niamh Moriarty

Series Credits:

This series is kindly funded by the Decades of Centenaries Programme (2013-2023)

In this first episode from the series of podcasts, ‘Encounters with Jack B. Yeats,’ from The Model, home of the Niland in Sligo, you will hear a selection of segments from an archival recording of an interview with the artist, Jack B. Yeats (1871-1957). The seventy-six-year-old Jack flew to London in the winter of 1947. It was his first time on an airplane, as he was to record an interview with his friend, Thomas MacGreevy (1893-1967), for a BBC radio arts show, called the Third Programme. This show was broadcast the following year in May 1948.

Curator and writer, Thomas MacGreevy was a pivotal figure within the Irish arts scene. He was the director of the National Gallery of Ireland from 1950 to 1963 and was a constant advocate for Jack’s work. In this interview, broadcast over seventy years ago, Jack speaks about his development as an artist and the special significance that Sligo held for him.

This archival audio recording is part of the Sound & Moving Image Catalogue in the British Library (T7655R/1 C1). Jack B. Yeats scholar and musicologist, Dr John Purser kindly helped with the rediscovery of this archival audio recording for this podcast series, as there appears to be only one other recording of the artist’s voice in existence, which we will hear in a later episode of this series.

The soundtrack for this series, ‘no man’s land,’ is composed by Karen Power, as a commission by The Model in 2020. This 8-channel sound installation is based on Power’s field recordings, which uncovers and musically highlights the unique sonic profile of the Sligo seaboard.

Credits:

Funded by the Decades of Centenaries Programme (2013-2023)

Researcher: Dr John Purser

Producer & Researcher-Writer for the podcast series: Lara Byrne

Podcast episodes, introduced by Isabel Claffey

Sound Engineer: Daniel Bannon

Sound Editor: Colm Condron

Soundtrack, ‘no man’s land,’ (2020) composed by Karen Power

Curated by the Artistic Director of The Model - Emer McGarry

In the final episode of this inaugural podcast, The Model’s artistic director, Emer McGarry and writer, Tara Bergin continue their conversation on the practice of ekphrasis – discussing the element of rivalry between different modes of representation. Tara interrogates this idea further, by reasoning that a sense of rivalry infuses power into the newly generated artwork - antagonising form into being. Tara also observes that different terminologies from other artforms assist the artist in inhabiting new modes of expression, facilitating the creation of autonomous new works of art. Finally Tara, reads her ekphrastic poem, This Rain - a pared back work inspired by the large austere canvases of the minimalist artist, Agnes Martin.

Two new works are presented in episode five. Rosie O’Reilly’s reinterpretation of Clodagh Emoe’s work, We Are and Are Not, and a reading by Jessica Traynor of her new poem, Milk Teeth, a work inspired by Dorothy Cross’s sculpture, Stiletto II. In her piece, Rosie O’Reilly constructs a pertinent conversation with Professor Fred Cummins, where Rosie plays the artwork and Fred, a professor in computer science, takes on the role of the virus.

In the fourth episode of The Model podcast, Suzanne Walsh performs Our Always is Here - a piece inspired by the works of George William Russell. Russell was a Theosophist, adopting the pseudonym Ӕon (Ӕ), a gnostic term for the earliest created beings, a later printer’s error truncated the word into the initials AE. Inspired by the artist’s visionary works, Suzanne’s audio contains layerings of voices - mingling, fading and re-emerging - as if oscillating between different realms, and intuiting the paranormal. In this experiential auditory work, Suzanne Walsh draws the listener irrevocably into the uncanny, leading us into the sensory field of The Body Electric.

In episode three, Tara Bergin continues her meditation on the practice of ekphrastic writing - interrogating connections with the human condition. Claire-Louise Bennett and Alice Lyons present new poems inspired by artworks in the Niland Collection, both of which explore the tension between artist and sitter. 

Alice reads Battenberg Hat, a poem inspired by John Butler Yeats’ Portrait of Elizabeth Pollexfen – which depicts the artist’s mother-in-law. The podcast closes with Claire-Louise Bennett reading Lobe - a work inspired by the portrait sketches of George William Russell, otherwise known as Ӕ.