How history has different perspectives – and truths

Lifestyle – Judy Murphy meets artist Hughie O’Donoghue whose new exhibition looks at 1916 and WWI in unique way

Truth is very much a subjective thing – it’s very difficult to define it,” observes artist Hughie O’Donoghue, whose new exhibition, One Hundred Years and Four Quarters, looks back at the events of 1916 in a unique and moving way.

One Hundred Years and Four Quarters, created for Galway International Arts Festival is a show that draws on Hughie’s own family history to reflect the experience of many Irish families. It’s housed in the former printworks of the Connacht Tribune, an industrial, airy space that does justice to these massive paintings and sculptures.

When it comes to the major events of 1916 – World War I and the Easter Rising – Hughie points out that there are no simple historic truths and that complexity is reflected in his work.

“Memory is how we feel about things, rather than the facts,” he says, explaining that people have their own versions of truth, based on personal memory.

He gives Akira Kurosawa’s 1950 film Rashômon as an example.

“There’s a murder that’s witnessed by four people, all of whom give contradictory evidence about what happened.”

So much for history. Still, there are certain definite facts that Manchester-born Hughie took as starting points for this exhibition.

“I wanted the four cardinal events of 1916,” he explains how this exhibition evolved.

He’s had a long relationship with Galway Arts Festival and that organisation contacted him in 2014 about creating a series of work to explore national identity in Ireland via the Easter Rising and the experience of Irish people in World War I.

The Rising and the Battle of the Somme occurred just a few weeks apart, and as Hughie points out, “larger numbers of Irishmen were involved in the Somme than in the Rising, which is something that was forgotten for many years”.

These contradictory aspects of the Irish story form the first two parts of this exhibition’s four-pronged approach.

Another element is the Battle of Jutland, which “was the most significant battle of 1916”, he says.

In this naval battle, massive ships were firing at each other from such colossal distances, that they were like shadows. Many of the mighty vessels blew up in seconds, taking thousands of lives with them.

Jutland was a pivotal battle which helped turn the war in Britain’s favour but nobody realised that at the time, he explains.

“For a long time after, people didn’t know who had won. Britain lost more men than Germany, but won the battle.”

The final component of One Hundred Years and Four Quarters are those people whose lives “these events passed by” he says about World War I and the Easter Rising.

Those people included his mother’s family in North Mayo’s Erris peninsula, who “eked out a living in very poor land”.

There was a mini-famine in Erris in 1916, he adds. This “harsh and remote” area of Mayo, where Hughie spent much of his childhood is now home to the artist and his wife Clare. It has just one road that leads to Ballina and the larger world outside – back then that was a track.

And, as we walk around the gallery, this quietly-spoken man who graduated from London’s Goldsmiths College in 1982 with MA in Fine Art gives the background to each piece.  It’s a fascinating insight into his method and the humanity he brings to his work.

For more, read this week’s Connacht Tribune.