Pioneering Eileen Gray inspires Festival show

Arts Week with Judy Murphy

The life and work of Wexford-born architect and designer Eileen Gray, a key figure in modern design, will be celebrated in Invitation to a Journey, a new show premiering at this year’s Galway Arts Festival.

Invitation to a Journey merges drama, music and dance to give a glimpse into “moments of the life of this very private person”, says theatre director Jim Culleton of Fishamble: The New Play Company who is directing the piece. He’s working alongside choreographer David Bolger of CoisCéim Dance Company, which is providing the dance element of Invitation to a Journey. Music is courtesy of Crash Ensemble with an original score by Deirdre Gribbin and musical direction by Kate Ellis.

“We all work in different art forms but we’re all dedicated to new and original touring work,” says Jim Culleton of the three companies involved in this show, which is a co-production between them and Galway International Arts Festival.

Over the years, Fishamble, CoisCéim and Crash Ensemble had joined forces for successful Culture Night events, and these inspired their collaboration on this major Festival show which will visit Dublin’s Project Arts Centre after its Galway run. They felt that Eileen Gray, “a hugely influential designer and architect, one of the first modern architects, whose influence can be seen today in Ikea’s furniture” would be a perfect subject, not least because her private life was also eventful.

“We were interested in celebrating her life, and because she worked in different art forms, we had the idea of bringing the three groups together,” Jim explains adding that the project has been in gestation for a few years.

Born in 1878, and educated in London, where she was one of the first women to be admitted to the Slade Art School, Eileen Gray moved to Paris as a young adult and lived in France until her death in 1978. There, admirers of her work included such influential modernist figures as the architect Le Corbusier – although he wasn’t above interfering with one of her famous house designs. E.1027, Gray’s villa on the Côte d’Azur, was the first modernist building completed by a female architect. Her wish that it be a decoration-free zone was later flouted by Corbusier who painted garish murals of naked women on its walls, including one sporting a swastika.

For more, read this week’s Connacht Tribune