“Thicket” | Summer 2024
Gail Meyer Grinnell
The Ballinglen Museum of Contemporary Art, Main Street, Ballycastle, Co Mayo, Ireland
Artist statement:
It was shortly after my mother died that I first came to Ballinglen for a residency. I experienced the bog lands as beautiful - both dark and bright at the same time - with generous distant views always subject to the changing weather and patterns of light. The harvested peat in the fields held my own sorrow – soaking it up like a sponge. The heat from the peat fires warmed me and the ever-growing moss produced the soft turf that I navigated during my daily walks. The vast tracks of mounded Sphagnum Moss, that gave form to the landscape, were punctuated with wild hedgerows of entwined and vigorous plant growth bursting with all manner of life. I imagined that these impenetrable places where joyful intrusions from the forests of the distant past recalling the primeval forests that once covered the land in Ireland as they did in North America. I’ve been back to visit and work several times over the years and I continue to think of these dense thickets as points of intersection where a variety of plant species can thrive together and where the possibility of a new forest comes into being.
My line contour drawings of these plants comingled with memories of my mother’s pattern making and her copious use of thread to create her works in fabric have provided inspiration for more than a few large-scale works completed since my first encounters with the local landscape in 2008. Sorting out the particulars of translucent cut-to-shape line drawings keeps my love of detail exercised. Assembling the layers of these drawings into a suspended site-specific installation grounds the work in the physical particulars of the building - back and forth until the sculptural form settles in for its stay at the host site.
A thicket is a descriptive word that refers to a massing of like things. It can be most anything – a dense collection of ideas, emotions, shafts of light or the layering of entwined vines and trees. Each has its own eco system in nature and in human culture and it is in this spirit I offer this installation at the Ballinglen Museum of Art.
Gail Meyer Grinnell
2024