Exploring our built heritage
LIMERICK County Council Arts Office resumes its seasonal series exploring our built heritage late this month. A series of five lectures will run January to March, covering subjects such as monasteries, Thomond Park, Plassey’s Living Bridge and our architectural heritage as logged in the national inventory.
As before, all lectures, all by leading authorities, are free and held at 8pm on scheduled dates in Woodlands House Hotel.
First up is Grellan Rourke’s, the conservation architect with Office of Public Works. His theme is The Desmond Castles of West Limerick: investigating the surface and peeling back the years. This takes place on the night of Tuesday January 27, 8pm.
Poetry platform
GENE Barry, who has had poems published in Dark Stream, Emara, Stony Thursday, Irish Examiner USA and the Douglas Post, is White House Poets’ next guest. Barry is putting the finishing touches to his first collection, which will be published later this year. He has read already at the White House and at the Patrick Kavanagh Celebration, O’Bheal, Ruebens and in Holland.
His Limerick date at this O’Connell Street pub platform is Wednesday January 21, from 9pm.
See blog http//:whitehousepoets.blogspot.com and White House Poets acknowledge the support of the Arts Council and Foras na Gaeilge.
The Arts and innovation at Pery Square
PERY Square’s Limerick City Gallery of Art is alive with activity for January. First up, a curator’s talk scheduled for this lunchtime, 1pm Thursday 15, features Arno Kramer on Into Irish Drawing. The exhibition itself opens later that day at 7pm, a joint launch with Clare Langan’s show titled The Ice Above, The Fire Below & Other Works.
Kramer, curator of Into Irish Drawing, will discuss the context of the exhibition, the choice of artists and the relevance of contemporary drawing in Ireland. Free entrance for 1pm talk and mark the date of January 28 into your diary for a 1.30pm panel discussion on his show, the Wednesday 28 date chaired by Jim Savage.
There’s a third launch this Thursday 15 at 7pm. Mayor John Gilligan is on hand to reveal the new gallery website, one that promises to be “fully accessible and searchable, with easy-to-use navigation”.
Beginning this month with events and listings, this Fluidedge designed site will be expanded in to time to offer a database of the gallery’s extensive collection with thumbnails, large images, medium, dimensions, dates and easy to understand introduction to the work.
This database of the gallery’s permanent collection will be fully searchable, providing visual and text information to the public on the important collection.
Onto Thursday 15’s other exhibition launch. LCGA reports:
“Internationally acclaimed artist Clare Langan, presents a major exhibition, the most comprehensive of Langan’s work in Ireland to date, of exceptional video and film installations, including her most recent films”.
The night will premier her latest work, a three screen presentation of The Ice Above, The Fire Below, a film of the sea shot using a high speed digital phantom camera. Anticipate an intriguing “contemporary meditation on the Romantic landscape in its entire, beautiful, haunting and melancholic splendour”.
