Opening Speech by Dr Lorcan Byrne

A short quote from Uachtarán na hÉireann, president of Ireland, Michael D. Higgins. “Artists…have always invited us to look at our world in new and creative ways…to aspire to be a better version of ourselves…to imagine the possibilities for our futures together… Samhlaiocht, (which means Imagination).  What our culture and our arts give us must never be regarded as something to be enjoyed out of surplus … rather it is that our cultural heritage and practice are at the heart of our identity. It is on the performer and the performative that we rely above all, to encourage the creativity and independence of mind that we need to re-shape the places we inhabit, the dreams we are re-crafting” (Michael D. Higgins, 2019).

Belinda Walsh’s new exhibition ‘Intuition’, and her artistic life as one of Midleton’s most impactful ‘local artists’, gifts us the capacity to understand our local world and wider world in new and creative ways, to imagine new possibilities for our futures together. To be a ‘local artist’, certainly in the case of artists like Belinda Walsh, does not mean to just say ‘someone from the vicinity’, or provincial, as in ‘unsophisticated’, but rather someone grounded, embedded, integrated, belonging, fused; she is deeply rooted within this community (its people and its nature). As an artist, her work engages with both the community and our natural environment in ways that enhance both. It is almost impossible to separate the artist from the person, she is almost always both – she cannot turn it off. She is it and it is she, they are undistinguishable, there just isn’t a word for this union.

This ‘local artist’ makes art about the local, but in a way that reaches out to global issues, she finds the universal in the particularities of her home. Midleton helped make Belinda Walsh, and now, through her art, she helps remake the town, allows us to reimagine new futures in profoundly positive ways. We need her vision, for she sees global warming in a Rathcoursey gully, or the inequities of society in a child’s wry smile, she commits all these to canvas: the universal in the particular, the global in the local.

As an environmentalist artist she works in harmony with the natural environment rather than disrupt it. She deeply considers the impact that she as an individual has on nature and does not sacrifice its health or wellbeing in order to create her art. She uses natural materials such as leaves, flowers, branches, soil, stone, water, etc, as the very basis of her artwork. Her art often seeks to both transform the way that our environment is viewed, she finds the beautiful in the cracks and corners that for most of us go unnoticed, whilst also revealing what was already there. She unveils the wonderous in what we wrongly thought mundane.

As a community artist, her work relies heavily on human relationships, via arts and animation workshops in schools, through her work with ECMP, and the now epic Midleton Arts Festival; Belinda is a founding member and a foundation stone upon which that entire event continues to rely upon. Belinda is instrumental in creating a kind of magical social glue that helps hold our community together. The event at Midleton gate cinema for this year’s festival was extraordinary. About 100 children, from schools across east Cork, (with people literally sitting in the aisles) with their parents and teachers, watching the animations Belinda helped them create on the big screen was magic, and when the prizes we given out the roof came off the place. These are lifetime memories for those families. Under Belinda’s careful curation, art is both elevated and grounded as a medium that re-crafts community, creativity and the bonds that hold us together. This artistic practice also informs her art too. It means Belinda is deeply attuned to people’s feelings and emotions. She often then captures the joys, inequities, injustices, or heartbreaks in a fleeting facial expression that she transposes to canvas. Though probably onto some surrealist creature rather than a human face, but the real lived experience is captured there. People in nature and nature in people.

This current exhibition, ‘intuition’, spans some transformative moments in this artists life, marking, as she says herself some kind of a transition from one stage of life to another, moving from perhaps one version of Belinda to different.  For a person who wears her ‘heart on their sleeve’. Belinda’s art also captures what is in her heart, or what was in her art/heart at the moment she created it. We have all been through a lot recently, covid, wars, Brexits and trump-ity things, rise of racism in Ireland, the culture wars, etc., somewhat souring our horizons. Personal triumphs and tragedies, ups and downs, good time and bad times, similarly shape our moods, and they can be seen so clearly in Belinda Walsh’s works. The woman is an open book. Particularly the Brelingen residency, where Belinda initially creates haunting moon light filled landscapes, and fantastical creatures who inhabit dark worlds. Half way through that residency the dawn breaks and bright healing light chases away those darkened landscapes, then earthen colours, bright skies, joys, love and human connection (with her fellow artists) begin to shape her artistic outputs, as both the artists and her work connect differently with people, place and especially nature. It seems this exhibition captures the end of her blue period, and something else is emerging, She herself isn’t sure what that is yet. 

Belinda Walsh is not the kind of artist who becomes attracted to a theme and then gets that theme to inform the work. It’s not that she isn’t interested in themes and big ideas, it is just not how the artistic process happens for her. For her it is all about ‘intuition’, feel and letting that flow out from within. She literally works it out on the canvas. I don’t think that Belinda has a singular muse, I think her muses are her life, her people, her environment, her family, her friends, her amazing daughter, the children she meets as a community artist and the way the winds blow. It’s not anything, it’s everything and how these things impact her. But we can always see deep meaning in her work. When someone so concerned for the welfare of her locality and the people within it, when someone so attuned to nature and the challenges it faces, when somebody so engaged with the world who is intelligent, thoughtful, and empathetic, lets it all hangout on the canvas, we had best pay attention of what comes out, for in it, we see a mirror.

Her surrealist art is delving deeply into our collective subconsciousness, and capturing fluidity and change, she is especially enamored in that space where the earth meets the sea. There we find fantastical leaf sea creatures, people at thresholds, are movements of transformation, life, death and rebirth, things in nature that are born, grow, wither, and then die as they do in our own lives too. Belinda has similarly passed a few threshold in her personal life; as many of us here have too, Belinda paints as she lives, we feel it through the art in this exhibition. I might see it more clearly than most because she is my pal, but I thank her for her bravery and for letting it all hang out in its rawness.

My Place is such an amazing addition to the community. But when you really think about what Belinda and the rest of the artistic community have gifted this town, it seems like the biggest no brainer that just like Cobh, and many other Cork towns, we need an arts centre. As Michael D says “…arts give us must never be regarded as something to be enjoyed out of surplus … rather it is that our cultural heritage and practice are at the heart of our identity”. It will bring us together more frequently, it will allow us to more deeply reflect on the past, present and future and it will improve quality of life for all of us who live and visit here.

There is a poem, Ode by Arthur O'Shaughnessy, from the book Music and Moonlight (1874), that could have been written about our Belinda, a quick verse.

“We are the music makers,

 And we are the dreamers of dreams,

Wandering by lone sea-breakers,

    And sitting by desolate streams; —

World-losers and world-forsakers,

    On whom the pale moon gleams:

Yet we are the movers and shakers

    Of the world for ever, it seems”.

To end with some final words from Uachtarán na hÉireann, president of Ireland, Michael D. Higgins again. “So let us continue to dream. Let us continue to love. Let us continue to encourage. Let us continue to create. For through our creativity, we live” (Michael D. Higgins, 2019).