Issuu

Visual Artists’ News Sheet | September – October 2024

Columns

Irish Art History: Forgotten Figures

Socially Engaged Practice

More Power to You

Salmagundi

LOGAN SISLEY CHRONICLES THE LIFE AND LEGACY OF IRISH ARTIST SARAH PURSER.

JIJO SEBASTIAN OUTLINES HIS COLLABORATIVE FILM PROJECT CO-COMMISSIONED BY HUGH LANE GALLERY AND CREATE.

SARAH PURSER (1848–1943) was not only

ABOUT 16 YEARS ago, I met with a group

an accomplished portrait painter but also an energetic campaigner for the visual arts throughout her long life. She enabled opportunities to make, exhibit, sell, and see art in Dublin. Patriotic and cosmopolitan, she championed younger artists and modern art movements during a period of dramatic change. Purser was born in Kingstown (Dún Laoghaire) in 1848 and grew up in Dungarvan, County Waterford. While she enjoyed a comfortable upbringing, circumstances changed when her father’s business collapsed in 1873. She moved with her mother to Dublin and pursued a career as a painter. In 1878, she travelled to Paris to study at the Académie Julian. A fellow student, Marie Bashkirtseff, wrote: “Everything about her, even to the quarter in which she dwells, is artistic.”1 Returning to Dublin, Purser built a successful career as a portrait painter. Such was her success in securing portrait commissions that she later quipped that she “went through the British aristocracy like the measles.”2 (The Irish Builder and Engineer trade journal called her “easily the wittiest woman in Ireland.”3) Her sitters included members of the Gore-Booth family, John Kells Ingram, Maud Gonne, and W.B. Yeats. She also produced sensitive studies of unidentified (largely female) sitters, and a smaller number of genre scenes and landscapes. She first exhibited at the Royal Hibernian Academy in 1872. In 1924, Purser was the first woman elected to full RHA membership. Alongside her own practice, she was tenaciously supportive of other artists. In 1886, she cofounded the Dublin Art Club and was on the organising committee of the groundbreaking ‘Loan Exhibition of Modern Pictures’ in 1899, which brought works by Manet, Degas, Whistler and others to Dublin. Frustrated by the lack of acclaim in Ireland for Nathaniel Hone and John Butler Yeats, Purser organised an exhibition of their work in 1901. The exhibition inspired Hugh Lane to establish a gallery of modern art. Purser was supportive of Lane’s broader aims – “more power to you,” she wrote4 – and soon became a staunch supporter of what is now Hugh Lane Gallery. She identified and successfully campaigned for Charlemont House to become the gallery’s permanent home. Purser championed the revival of stained glass in Ireland and founded An Túr Gloine (The Tower of Glass) in 1903. She funded the workshop’s construction and was the driving force behind its success. Notably the studio included a significant number of women: Catherine (Kitty) O’Brien, Beatrice Elvery, Ethel Rhind, Wilhelmina Geddes and Evie Hone, alongside Alfred Ernest Child and Michael Healy. Purser

maintained an active role in the management of An Túr Gloine until she was 93. Purser used her financial resources – gained from portrait commissions and from canny stock market investments – to buy other artist’s works. Her impressive collection of modern art included works by Berthe Morisot, Maurice de Vlaminck, Paul Signac, Louise Catherine Breslau, Jack Butler Yeats and Mary Swanzy, that adorned the walls of Mespil House, which she rented with her brother, John Mallet Purser, from 1909. In 1932, she mounted an exhibition of Swanzy’s work there. Mespil House, and before that her studio on Harcourt Terrace, were the settings for Purser’s celebrated monthly salons, which provided opportunities for artists, writers and others to explore ideas. Attendees included George Bernard Shaw, George Moore, Douglas Hyde, Mainie Jellett, and Mary Swanzy. Purser also saw the need to better support Irish public collections, founding the Friends of the National Collections of Ireland (FNCI) in 1924. At times the FNCI’s donations sparked controversy – such as Christ and the Soldier (1930) by Georges Rouault or Reclining Figure No. 2 (1953) by Henry Moore – fostering debate about the place of modern art in Ireland. Under Purser’s guidance, the FNCI campaigned for the return to Dublin of the 39 pictures of the Sir Hugh Lane Bequest, then held at the National Gallery in London but now shared with Hugh Lane Gallery. Celebrating its centenary this year, the FNCI is one of Purser’s most enduring legacies. Another is the Purser-Griffith Scholarship in the History of European Painting at TCD and UCD, which Purser endowed in 1934 with her cousin, Sir John Purser Griffith. Purser held one solo show in her lifetime, ‘Pictures Old and New’ in 1923, and another retrospective was held at Hugh Lane Gallery in 1974. More recently, there has been renewed interest in Purser and her legacy. The National Gallery of Ireland (NGI) – on whose Board she served from 1914 to 1943 – mounted ‘Sarah Purser: Private Worlds’ in 2023, while ‘An Túr Gloine: Artists and the Collective’ continues at the NGI until 12 January 2025.

of fellow Indians in suburban Dublin who were unemployed spouses of nurses. I proposed that we could use our free time to make a film. Influenced by low-budget filmmaking methods and motivated by an activist filmmaker from back home, John Abraham, we started from scratch. We learned everything by ourselves from free sources on the internet, bought essential equipment, organised ourselves into a film collective and started filming. We produced a 25-minute-long short film in which most of us played ourselves. It was premiered at Rua Red in Tallaght to an invited audience and distributed online. In the subsequent years, I made several films employing the same methodology. Utilising participatory and collaborative methods of community filmmaking, socially engaged art, and amateur cinema, I have developed a unique practice which borrows from and identifies with many filmmaking movements including Third Cinema, Intercultural, Ethno, Dogma 95, Imperfect Cinema, and Docufiction. In 2015, I received the Arts Council’s Artist in the Community Scheme Project Realisation Award, managed by Create, the national development agency for collaborative arts. This was my first funding to make a collaborative short film; however, I had already made five short films and one two-hour tele-film with no budget, working with the Indian Keralite community in Ireland. Since then, I have been the recipient of the Arts Council’s very first Next Generation Award bursary in 2016 and the Arts Participation Bursary in 2020. Without any art or film school training, I have unintentionally followed the thematic tradition of ethnic filmmakers in Europe. The projects often deal with immigrant identity and belonging by connecting the personal to the cultural. My films are generally docufictions, serving as repositories of personal memory while production-wise they disrupt industry norms and become a site of dissent.

In my later funded films, which were more collaborative in nature, I have experimented with different engagement methods and levels of collaboration, from online story building to improvising without a script. In my current project, Salmagundi, as part of a creative approach to sustainable community building, I have moved to a facilitative role, making the project almost completely community led. Salmagundi is a transcultural collaborative film project, co-commissioned by Hugh Lane Gallery and Create in 2023. The main objectives of the project are to produce a collaborative feature length film and build a transcultural community that will continue beyond the project. Acknowledging collaborative art and community building necessitates a step away from the industrial protocols of filmmaking; informal, compassionate, communal bonding was established early on. Ethical representation, collective agency, empowerment, self-advocacy and co-ownership of the film are prospective outcomes. At the moment, we are a community of over 50 members from at least 16 different nationalities and ethnic groups, including Irish Travellers, with a committee, website, social media accounts and funding applications in place for future projects. Salmagundi is in the final stages of filming, with a planned installation in Hugh Lane Gallery in October 2024. The script, direction and most of the production jobs are being done by the community members and I work mostly as a camera person and editor. The intention in the coming months is for the group to be well established and to determine its future focus and projects without necessarily needing me to play a leading role as the artist. Jĳo Sebastian is a collaborative filmmaker with more than ten years of experience in participatory, collaborative and transcultural filmmaking in community-based contexts. jijospalatty.com

Logan Sisley is Acting Head of Collections at Hugh Lane Gallery, where ‘More Power to You’ continues until 5 January 2025. hughlane.ie 1 The Journal of Marie Bashkirtseff, trans. A.D. Hall and G.B. Heckell (Chicago, 1890) p.610. 2 Quoted in John O’Grady, The Life and Work of Sarah Purser (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 1996), pp. 64-5. 3 ‘Topical Touches,’ The Irish Builder and Engineer, 14 September 1929. 4 Sarah Purser to Hugh Lane, c. 1906, [NLI. MS. 27,759].