Archive News
New horizons for Patricia with Berlin exhibition
Date Published: {J}
Patricia Lambert’s art might be technically brilliant but it is obvious she uses her intuition when she draws and paints.
It wasn’t until she left Belfast about 13 years ago to move to Galway, where her husband Paddy works with RTÉ, that her ‘dark side’ came out and she went through a period working on pieces that she believes were far too personal to exhibit publicly.
She moved into her house in Menlo on the week of 9/11 and that sparked off another series of dark-themed pencil drawings. They are of a blank piece of paper on an easel in a conservatory looking out on a bleak landscape. One of them depicts war atrocities outside the window, images from the Afghanistan war, she explains.
“Those images look like a newsreel, probably because of Paddy being a news cameraman – you know, bullets, bombs and funerals – but I also believe I had to leave Belfast for this dark side to come out. Belfast just poured out of me.”
And a few years after coming to Galway, a dear friend, Dara Bradley from Barna, they had come to know and love died after a short illness.
“And that’s when I really let it out, the grief. His death stunned me. He had been so welcoming, so encouraging, so inspirational, such a lovely person to befriend here in Galway and suddenly he was gone,” she says still obviously upset by the death.
Patricia, who comes from outside Clonmel in Tipperary, admits that she doesn’t draw “things of beauty” as a rule and went through another period of drawing and painting abandoned tractors, boats, rusty gates in overgrown fields.
She most definitely works according to the way she feels but she also needs her work to work on many levels with the viewer.
And indeed between now and Christmas those viewers are in Berlin where a body of her work is exhibiting in the Irish Embassy there, something she is thrilled about.
“Well, who wouldn’t be, to be exhibited internationally? I was delighted but terrified, but it was a great launch, where we were joined from friends and from Belfast to Galway.
“I haven’t thought of what will happen to those paintings afterwards but I might organise an Irish exhibition, maybe in my own native Clonmel.”
And how did Patricia get wall space in Berlin, where the competition between artists for gallery space is huge?
Ann McCormack is the answer. Indeed Ann, who is Patricia’s best friend, is a link in many events of the Tipperary woman’s adult life.
They met when they were both studying art in the Crawford Municipal Art College in Cork and Patricia met her husband, Paddy McEntee, RTÉ cameraman in Galway now, at a fancy dress party organised by Ann.
Patricia remembers that she was dressed as an Indian Squaw but Paddy hadn’t bothered to dress as anything.
At that time Paddy worked as a sound recordist with RTÉ in Cork. After their marriage, they moved to Dublin but Paddy, a native of Monaghan, decided to apply for a job in Belfast at the height of the Troubles.
Patricia refers to Ann again. “We got the notion to move to Belfast after visiting Ann there for a weekend. She did her MA in Belfast. We loved the red brick houses and I loved the way the light shone on them and we could hear someone singing opera through the wall and we were intrigued. I hadn’t even thought of the Troubles. I suppose we were naive, well I was.
“But I never felt threatened there. We made lifelong friends there, some of them travelled to Berlin recently for the launch, and I joined an arts club.”
By now Patricia was a homemaker with three young children (today they are aged 27, 22 and 16) but she kept tipping along with her drawing and sketching which she now believes helped her hone her technical skills.
“It was a lot easier getting out a sketch pad and pencils instead of an easel and paints with young children about.”
For more, read this week’s Galway City Tribune.
People’s living conditions less than 100 years ago were frightening. We have come a long way. We talk about water charges today, but back then the local District Councils were erecting pumps for local communities and the lovely town of Mountbellew, according to Council minutes, had open sewers,” says Galway County Council archivist Patria McWalter.
Patria believes we “need to take pride in our history, and we should take the same pride in our historical records as we do in our built heritage”. When you see the wealth of material in her care, this belief makes sense.
She is in charge of caring for the rich collection of administrative records owned by Galway County Council and says “these records are as much part of our history as the Rock of Cashel is. They document our lives and our ancestors’ lives. And nobody can plan for the future unless you learn from the past, what worked and what didn’t”.
Archivists and librarians are often unfairly regarded as being dry, academic types, but that’s certainly not true of Patria. Her enthusiasm is infectious as she turns the pages of several minute books from Galway’s Rural District Councils, all of them at least 100 years old.
Part of her role involved cataloguing all the records of the Councils – Ballinasloe, Clifden, Galway, Gort, Loughrea, Mountbellew, Portumna and Tuam. These records mostly consisted of minutes of various meetings.
When she was cataloguing them she realised their worth to local historians and researchers, so she decided to compile a guide to their content. The result is For the Record: The Archives of Galway’s Rural District Councils, which will be a valuable asset to anybody with an interest in history.
Many representatives on these Councils were local personalities and several were arrested during the political upheaval of the era, she explains.
And, ushering in a new era in history, women were allowed to sit on these Rural District Councils – at the time they were not allowed to sit on County Councils.
All of this information is included in Patria’s introductory essay to the attractively produced A4 size guide, which gives a glimpse into how these Rural Councils operated and the way political thinking changed in Ireland during a short 26-year period. In the early 1900s, these Councils supported Home Rule, but by 1920, they were calling for full independence and refusing to recognise the British administration.
“I love the tone,” says Patria of the minutes from meetings. “The language was very emotive.”
That was certainly true of the Gort Rural District Council. At a meeting in 1907, following riots in Dublin at the premiere of JM Synge’s play, The Playboy of the Western World the councillors’ response was vehement. They recorded their decision to “protest most emphatically against the libellous comedy, The Playboy of the Western World, that was belched forth during the past week in the Abbey Theatre, Dublin, under the fostering care of Lady Gregory and Mr Yeats. We congratulate the good people of Dublin in howling down the gross buffoonery and immoral suggestions that are scattered throughout this scandalous performance.
For more from the archives see this week’s Tribunes here
Date Published: 23-Jan-2013
SLIGO 0-9
GALWAY 1-4
FRANK FARRAGHER IN ENNISCRONE
GALWAY’S first serious examination of the 2013 season rather disturbingly ended with a rating well below the 40% pass mark at the idyllic, if rather Siberian, seaside setting of Enniscrone on Sunday last.
The defeat cost Galway a place in the FBD League Final against Leitrim and also put a fair dent on their confidence shield for the bigger tests that lie ahead in February.
There was no fluke element in this success by an understrength Sligo side and by the time Leitrim referee, Frank Flynn, sounded the final whistle, there wasn’t a perished soul in the crowd of about 500 who could question the justice of the outcome.
It is only pre-season and last Sunday’s blast of dry polar winds did remind everyone that this is far from summer football, but make no mistake about it, the match did lay down some very worrying markers for Galway following a couple of victories over below par third level college teams.
Galway did start the game quite positively, leading by four points at the end of a first quarter when they missed as much more, but when Sligo stepped up the tempo of the game in the 10 minutes before half-time, the maroon resistance crumbled with frightening rapidity.
Some of the statistics of the match make for grim perusal. Over the course of the hour, Galway only scored two points from play and they went through a 52 minute period of the match, without raising a white flag – admittedly a late rally did bring them close to a draw but that would have been very rough justice on Sligo.
Sligo were backable at 9/4 coming into this match, the odds being stretched with the ‘missing list’ on Kevin Walsh’s team sheet – Adrian Marren, Stephen Coen, Tony Taylor, Ross Donovan, David Kelly, David Maye, Johnny Davey and Eamon O’Hara, were all marked absent for a variety of reasons.
Walsh has his Sligo side well schooled in the high intensity, close quarters type of football, and the harder Galway tried to go through the short game channels, the more the home side bottled them up.
Galway badly needed to find some variety in their attacking strategy and maybe there is a lot to be said for the traditional Meath style of giving long, quick ball to a full forward line with a big target man on the edge of the square – given Paul Conroy’s prowess close to goal last season, maybe it is time to ‘settle’ on a few basics.
Defensively, Galway were reasonably solid with Gary Sice at centre back probably their best player – he was one of the few men in maroon to deliver decent long ball deep into the attacking zone – while Finian Hanley, Conor Costello and Gary O’Donnell also kept things tight.
For more, read this week’s Connacht Tribune.
Date Published: 23-Jan-2013
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