Archive News
Sacred and banal meet in major exhibition on world famous Bible
Date Published: 18-Jul-2012
People who visit David Mach’s extraordinary exhibition, Precious Light in the Arts Festival Gallery at Galway Shopping Centre can expect to get a whole new insight on uses for the humble matchstick. The same goes for wire clothes hangers and magazines.
It is from these ordinary materials that the Scottish artist has created this major show, which is inspired by the King James Bible, the most famous and influential book in the English language.
There are several giant crucifixion sculptures, made of coat hangers and steel, while matchsticks have been used to create heads of Jesus Christ and the devil. And there is a series of large scale collages depicting major biblical stories.
Through the centuries artists have been inspired by the bible, but in David’s case, it came about by accident.
The idea was first put in his head by a friend in the early 2000s and he thought about creating this show for a good six years before starting to work on it seriously.
“I put forward all the arguments why I shouldn’t. I told myself I didn’t have enough staff, it’d take too long, it’d be too expensive . . . but my work was kind of taking me there.”
So when David found out in 2008 that the 400th anniversary of the King James Bible was coming up in 2011, it seemed like a perfect opportunity.
He had been making collages since he was a child, but in the years before this show came about, the work “was getting more frenzied and epic”, he explains during a break from hanging the exhibition in Galway. He’s having a quick lunch of chicken nuggets and chips, more for fuel than for pleasure and he’s fired up with energy as he explains the background to Precious Light, which cost over a million pounds to make.
“It’s not just about the Bible, it’s also about contemporary living,” he explains. “You turn on the television and there is famine, disaster, killings, mayhem and lust – it’s in your face all the time and you get sick of it.”
Many of pictures in this exhibition explore these themes and while there are echoes of past masters, the work is totally modern. In more than 30 enormous collages David interprets biblical stories such as Adam and Eve, the Great Flood and Noah’s Ark, the Tower of Babel and the Plague of Frogs. He has created these scenes against well-known landmarks in cities such as Dublin, Belfast, Edinburgh, Athens, Paris and Tokyo – some of places the Kings James Bible has reached.
“The King James Bible is the only bible I’ve ever had any experience of, but I’m not a bible scholar,” he says. For him, creating this work was about “using my eyes, my heart, my feelings and my thoughts”, to portray stories which are timeless.
“You listen to the Rolling Stones or Bob Dylan, and there is the King James Bible in their work. We use expressions from it every day.”
Collecting the material for Precious Light and then sorting it and figuring how to use it took him “a good five years”.
“For two or three years I’ve had 30 people working on the show, making the heads, the collages and so on. Nobody funded it, so I was working harder than I’ve ever done.”
Although he has teams of people working for him in several different studios, David is never far away, keeping a close control on how the magnificently detailed collages are being assembled.
For more, read this week’s Connacht 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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