Making art among the rolling hills

Ardara, Hill of the Fort, is usually associated with tweed. It has been the traditional centre of the Donegal tweed industry for hundreds of years. Made from plants and mosses, Ardara tweed had a great reputation, but the cottage industry largely died out after the second World War.

A traveller, in 1864, dismissed Ardara as "a stupid little town with nothing whatever of interest save its extremely pretty situation at the wooded base of steeply escarped hills . . ." though an even earlier one, in 1854, conceded that Ardara could boast of "one good baker, of whom we purchased a capital loaf, divided into slices, which the said baker proposed to cut with a hammy knife . . ." Though the hills around Ardara remain as lush and rolling as they did when the fort was built between the 4th and 8th centuries A.D., according to Lochlann McGill, author of In Conall's Footsteps, visitors to the town who drop in to see the weavers in the Heritage Centre, or to have a pint in Nancy's over the bridge, do not expect to find a town alive with contemporary arts. Some never find out that it is.

Jacinta Feeny is a painter from Ardara who recently had a sell-out show in Pyms Gallery, London. Her solo show, 'Bodyscapes', is at the Hallward Gallery, Dublin, this month. She has tried to leave Ardara many times, but always failed. "I emigrated some years ago but never quite left," she said. She began to talk about tweed, and how it relates to the texture of life in Ardara.

The fabric contains extreme beauty and rawness, and makes a reference to the hand. "The human element is always present, sensual, clearly there in the landscape. Nothing is in isolation. Think of the amount of hands required to make the tweed . . ." Jacinta's grandfather was a sheep-dealer, the last one, in fact, in the area. She remembers a photo being taken of him in the house in 1964 for a book called The Last Sheep-Dealer.

"I feel passionately about my village life experience, as it represents a space for me where insularity and expansiveness co-exist. Ardara is a place where both sight and sound are catered for within the landscape, the stained-glass windows and the tradition of tweed making, together with the ever-present experience of traditional music." Roots are of paramount importance, Feeny says. She resists painting in a literal fashion: our culture has narrated too much, she thinks. "Narration imprisons imaginative possibility. I use paint in a poetic, not a prose way. Intense stillness has entered my current paintings . . . a quality that I have absorbed from the beauty of the surrounding landscape."

Yet the colours of Donegal have not come to her pallet - deep blues, pinks, saffron and bright greens in her earlier paintings recall Kandinsky in dream-like images of the sea and some netherworlds of the unconscious, peopled with crosses and strange marine creatures. Her current work has transcended representational painting to abstraction, yet, as she says, "the elements associated with the landscape remain ever present".

Feeny's next show will be opened on August 4th in Ard Bia, the coffee-shop-art gallery run by Aoibheann McNamara, a woman who travelled the world but, like Jacinta Feeny, could never leave Ardara for good. She now runs a film club once a week.

"I wanted to move out of the city to something more real. What is exciting about the arts in rural Ireland, is that you have a virgin audience. The reaction is new and exciting." The month of May saw a collection of traditional Tibetan religious icon paintings, thangkas, hanging on Ard Bia's walls. Bound in silk banners, the mystical paintings blew in the wind when the door opened. June brought Brendan Early, a well-known Dublin artist who has exhibited in Vienna and New York. His work has recently been seen in the group show, Eurojet, at the RHA Gallagher Gallery in Dublin.

Brendan's enormous photos of Dublin's urban dolmens hang in the front of the coffee shop. On the opening day of his show, Melissa McDonnell, another Dublin artist, did a performance piece on the Diamond in Ardara. Blindfolded, in black, she sat for five hours at a desk with a visitor's book - to the puzzlement of many passers-by.

Ard Bia is located at the front of the heritage centre in Ardara. It is here that the tourist comes to find, in this building that was once Ardara's Courthouse, Ruth Kavanagh's silver jewellery. Kavanagh works alongside Colm Sweeny, the weaver-in-residence. Ruth's simple silver pieces make light use of Celtic motifs and are much in demand.

Up the winding road below Woodhill lies the Ardara Artists' Resource Centre, founded in 1998 by John Martin Cunningham. It was his intention to set up a modern arts resource centre for the local community.

In his own words: "You can't reasonably ask what is art and get a reasonable answer, but you can demonstrate what the power of art is." The most recent exhibition was the third of an exhibition series, In Tandem Five. This was the first solo show by Dublin artist Cormac Healy. He has studied the Masters with a keen eye - Rembrandt, Turner, Piero della Francesca, Picasso, Velazquez, El Greco - and borrowed from these not images but light, form and composition. This recent exhibition is mostly inspired by Rembrandt.

The current exhibition at the resource centre is part of the Earagail Arts Festival which continues until Sunday. The work of four photographers - Hugo Brito, Pervaze Mohammed, Gary Trotter and Richard Wayman - form the group exhibition.

There are many roads to Ardara, and many threads in the fabric of its current artistic life. This is the new phenomenon of rural Ireland - small quiet towns becoming an inspiration for art and providing an exhibition space for artists as well as a refuge.

As Jacinta Feeny says, life in Ardara "is not as spoiled as in other towns and cities . . . the pace of life is in keeping with the way the human brain operates . . ."

S∅ofra O'Donovan's report on the Earagail Arts Festival will be published on Tuesday. For information on all events, which continue until Sunday, tel: 074-20777.