Pop-up village pantry draws crowds in Wicklow
'We had a great turnout even though it was clashing with All-Ireland Sunday, with a good steady crowd throughout the day,' an organiser said.
'There were people from Baltinglass, Hacketstown, and, of course, Rathdangan, so it was a real community event. Some people come for the café. Some people come for the food market.
'Before Covid, we had a community café called The Village Pantry, but we changed to this model of the pop-up village pantry. We do it a few times during the summer, and we still run the café on those dates. We do a Christmas market in November as well.
'All funds raised go to the maintenance and planned redevelopment of the hall.'
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Irish Times
13 hours ago
- Irish Times
Cities of the World: Around the globe in 282 artworks
Because my family seldom throw things away, we still have a copy of the Certificate Atlas for Irish Schools from 1980. It shows a number of countries that no longer exist. Alongside the vast pink mass of the USSR, and hugging the eastern end of the Mediterranean, is Yugoslavia. Casting an eye north, there is Czechoslovakia. Germany is divided into two, with Berlin an isolated halved dot in the middle of the German Democratic Republic, surely an ironic name for the politics of that former Soviet state. Spain and Portugal were not yet members of what is now the European Union. Looking at old atlases is a salutary affair: so much can change in a generation. Kathy Prendergast and Chris Leach, two artists who have had a fascination with the shape of cities and mapping, are showing their work together for the first time at the Butler Gallery in an exhibition that opens during Kilkenny Arts Festival . Prendergast began her City Drawings series in 1992. 'I'm trying to put myself back to when I started,' she says from her London home. 'In a way, all the work I have done since weaves in and out of ideas around it.' Prendergast is endlessly fascinating. Earlier this year her From Abandon to Worry: An Emotional Gazetteer of North America, from 2003, was shown as part of Land, at the Douglas Hyde Gallery in Dublin. In that work she had extracted placenames with an expressive resonance from US maps. There was a lot of lost hope and heartbreak. READ MORE Dublin born, Prendergast is adept at taking ideas that seem simple at their core, and weaving in astonishing depth. From Abandon to Worry tells the stories of early pioneers, echoes with the lost native names their journeys replaced and speaks to current anxieties on that continent. When 90 of the City Drawings were shown at the 1995 Venice Biennale, Prendergast won the best young artist award for Ireland. 'I had thought I would complete it, but then I realised it wouldn't ever be possible,' she says. 'It started when the USSR was dissolving, and all these 'new' countries were emerging. The Berlin Wall had fallen [in 1989], and that opened up a whole new order of things.' Prendergast works from a combination of maps and intuition; her drawings follow the lines of rivers or mountains, picking out the underlying structure of each city in a kind of psychogeography that excludes all the layers of naming. The internet wasn't yet the resource it is today, so she gleaned her information from map shops and libraries. There are no princes, lords, martyrs or megalomaniacs commemorated in street names in her drawings. Instead the shapes emerge from a combination of landscape, lives lived and, in the gridded cities particularly, a strong chunk of civic ambition. 'I'm a real city walker,' the artist says. 'Walking, you feel the layers underneath. In London, within a 20-minute walk, you can feel the age of the city change.' Kathy Prendergast's London, from City Drawings Kathy Prendergast's Mexico City from City Drawings Favourites emerged through the project, one being Yaoundé, in Cameroon. 'It is a set of wavy lines, and I felt that this was like how cities begin: somebody walks from here to there, and then that becomes a habit and a repetition.' This is also the tragedy of cities, as, once set up, they become something to defend, and the idea of defending implies a threatening other, comprising pretty much everyone 'outside' the settlement. On the other hand, cities are also vital gathering places for new arrivals, offering space to find where, and who, you want to be. Prendergast says her work is outside politics, but it can't help but imply them. Her Black Map series, which blacked out everything save the bigger human settlements, can either be seen as a levelling erasure of borders and boundaries or, as we edge towards ecocatastrophe, a poem to our fragility. Of course, when such an interesting artist follows an idea, it will always bring us to interesting places. Prendergast's City project concluded at 113 drawings, deliberately unfinished. 'It was a wonderful few years drawing them, but I stopped around 1995. There was a point when I realised that, if I added any more, it just became an exercise to complete.' Fascinated by the legacies and politics of mapping, the Butler's director, Anna O'Sullivan, came across the work of the British artist Chris Leach while visiting a different exhibition entirely. Leach's extraordinary series of miniature paintings of the 196 currently recognised capital cities began in 2012. From Abu Dhabi to Zagreb, his paintings zoom in on scenes gleaned from the internet. And, as with Prendergast's drawings, the works are of a uniform size. Dublin occupies the same space as London, which in turn gets the same attention as Sana'a, in Yemen. Installation view of Chris Leach's Capital Cities at the Butler Gallery 'I couldn't get over the detail in these tiny pieces, and the breadth of the work,' O'Sullivan says. 'I realised that showing it with Kathy's drawings would, hopefully, prompt discussion around geography, architecture and politics: what cities say about us and what they don't.' As Brian Friel 's near-perfect play Translations shows, mapping and naming, while handy for getting where you want to go, are instruments of ownership and control. Translations was first performed in 1980, the same year as my Certificate Atlas for Irish Schools – although, unlike my atlas, it remains completely relevant. Mapping imposes meaning: in the United States, the lands of the different Native American peoples flow under, around and through today's federal boundaries. Look at maps of US states, and of the continent of Africa, and see the straight lines. When a straight line depicts a border on a map, you know it's trouble. 'Any border on a map is trouble,' Leach says. It is fraught. In Prisoners of Geography, his 2015 book, Tim Marshall argues that global geopolitics are still driven by geography: by mountains, minerals and the need for deep sea harbours. On the other hand, Paul Richardson's book Myths of Geography, from 2024, is equally cogent in claiming that it's all constructed in pursuit of empire building. Still, as Leach's work shows, miniatures can put us in our place. All those grand boulevards, castles and palaces are made so small you could almost pop them in your mouth. Yet they exert a powerful pull. Peering in, you can easily get lost in these tiny worlds. Tonga by Chris Leach, with pencil, scalpel and burnishing tool Aside from the astonishing talent and commitment to make the project, there is an underlying intent to Leach's series that makes the work even more compelling since its completion. 'It is a picture of the world,' he says, 'but from a very specific viewpoint and point in time.' The starting point was the aftermath of an exhibition the artist had held at Ballina Arts Centre, in Co Mayo, where he had painted all the capital cities on the equator, and those on the prime meridian, essentially mapping a 'journey to the centre of the earth'. Except it isn't: the Greenwich meridian is an arbitrary construct of colonial mapping, as is our familiar Mercator view of the globe. Dating from 1569, the Mercator system distorts countries to lay them flat on a map, putting Europe firmly at the centre of everything. The project took Leach almost a decade, and its early years encompassed some false starts. 'I got information from the internet,' he says. 'And sometimes I'd realise that Google was wrong, that I was painting the wrong place.' It also involved an intensive look at some of our lived contradictions. 'There are the Diomede islands in the Bering Strait. One is owned by America, the other by Russia, and they're on either side of the International Date Line. So you can stand on one island looking across to the other and see someone who is in the day before.' This, Leach agrees, comes from our very human need to impose an understandable narrative on our lives, marking out experience in both time and distance. Nonetheless, it all stands or falls on the stories we're able to tell ourselves through language – which have been proved, over and over, to be essentially inaccurate. Dublin by Chris Leach 'That is intrinsic to the project,' Leach says. 'There are 196 countries, 196 capital cities, and they're all arbitrary, because we're all part of the world. If I can do one thing, it would be to put forward a picture of humanity, and have people empathise with the greater context of things. 'I mean, from a political perspective, you would imagine that this all has to change at some point in the future. You have to stop looking at nationality as a basis of our own personal journey, infrastructure and story. 'And yet,' he adds, 'nationality is family, and family is close. Family is heartfelt.' Together, Prendergast and Leach's work lay out these ideas and feelings in ways that open up new avenues of thought. Added to this is the permanence of art, versus the seeming immutability of capital cities as seats of power, turned on its head. It is wrenching to see Kyiv and Beirut. The island nations of Kiribati and Tuvalu may not be habitable in a generation, their capitals, Tarawa and Funafuti, lost to rising sea levels. Indonesia is moving its capital from Jakarta to Borneo, as Jakarta itself is sinking. One missing city from Prendergast's series is Dublin. 'I did try and draw Dublin quite a lot, but I just knew it too well,' she says. 'Then, actually, this morning I was thinking, I wonder if maybe I should just draw it now.' Cities of the World: Kathy Prendergast & Chris Leach is at the Butler Gallery from Saturday, August 9th, until Sunday, October 26th. Kilkenny Arts Festival presents a panel discussion hosted by Valerie Mulvin, Cities of the World: Productive Disorder, on Sunday, August 10th, and an artists' talk with Kathy Prendergast and Chris Leach on Tuesday, August 12th
Irish Times
a day ago
- Irish Times
Ireland's nature lovers on their favourite trees: ‘I felt I could talk to it, like going to a good therapist'
Think of the trees in your life. A tree you used to climb as a child. A tree your own child climbs now. A tree you're drawn to on your Sunday walk. A tree you huddled under on a first date in the rain. A tree that reminds you of someone. We all have a favourite tree, even if we've never thought about it in those terms. And we all know how we feel better just being in the presence of trees. Despite a very well-curated image, Ireland has one of the lowest percentages of tree coverage in Europe. Across the continent, most countries average 35 per cent forest cover, but here the figure sits at just 11 per cent. Of those meagre forested areas, just over 1 per cent is native woodland , down from over 80 per cent after the last ice age. These are frightening figures, but perhaps it is a mistake to think of trees merely as statistics. In the words of Nobel Prize-winning author and poet Hermann Hesse , 'Trees are sanctuaries. Whoever knows how to speak to them, whoever knows how to listen to them, can learn the truth. They do not preach learning and precepts, they preach, undeterred by particulars, the ancient law of life.' Here, five nature lovers talk about their favourite trees, and describe the influence they have had on their lives. READ MORE 'I always felt it was there for me. It was like going to see a good therapist' Zoe Devlin is a wildflower expert, photographer, and author of Wildflowers of Ireland: A Field Guide Zoe Devlin with her favourite tree, a beech, near the Vartry reservoir, Co Wicklow One of my favourite trees is only a couple of years old. I was looking for something to plant because we lost our son during Covid. I love native Irish trees, and I love the hawthorn particularly, because it is such a giving tree. When it flowers in May the bees all come and it feeds them, it gives shade during the summer, and then berries for the birds. So we thought we would like to put a hawthorn tree, not one from a nursery, but a plain ordinary species, Crataegus monogyna. My daughter has a hedge in Kildare and she plucked one out and gave it to us. At first we thought it wouldn't make it because our soil is so different and so deplete, but it did. It's in its second year now and the leaves are coming on beautifully. I'm very happy to watch that tree as it grows. It's a young tree, so I don't have a long history with it; the one tree I do have history with is a beech tree by the side of the Vartry reservoir. My husband and I have been walking that reservoir for 40 years. We used to bring the kids with us; we used to leave them to play Pooh-sticks in the little ditch beside the reservoir. You wouldn't do that now. We would walk as far as that tree and just stroke her and put our arms around her. We reckoned it had to be female. That was its persona, a kind of Mother Nature tree; there were so many other things living in it, it was so biodiverse. [ Irish wildflowers: Growing your own mini-meadow isn't always easy but the results are magical Opens in new window ] It used to help us too. I always felt it was there for me somehow. I always felt a connection with it. It was like going to see a good therapist. Whatever problems I had, I felt I could talk to it. I went there a few times on my own and I spoke to the tree. I felt better when I came away. I visited recently to take this photograph, hoping the tree hadn't been brought down by storm Eowyn as others had, but it was there, with loads of leaves sprouting from it, leaning towards the water as it has always done. 'The limbs of the tree reach out into space – there's a real power to the tree' Eoghan Daltun is a sculptor, farmer, and author of An Irish Atlantic Rainforest: A Personal Journey Into the Magic of Rewilding Eoghan Daltun with his favourite tree, a sessile oak, on his 73-acre farm on the Beara Peninsula in West Cork It's not easy for me to choose a favourite tree, since there are so many thousands in the rainforest growing on my 73-acre farm here on the Beara Peninsula in west Cork. But if I absolutely had to, it would be a certain sessile oak, a native species that grows wild in the west and other rougher, more stony parts of Ireland – hence its scientific name, Quercus 'petraea'. When I say 'wild', that word is utterly key to what makes this tree so special: it grew from a self-seeded acorn. The tree wasn't planted. And if you saw the tree, you'd understand how it would actually be impossible to plant a tree like this. It's growing at the edge of a rocky escarpment, and its roots penetrate down to a cave below, in which you can see them bursting through the rock from above. The stream running alongside turns into a temporary mini lake in high rainfall, making the spot a sheer wonderland. When we've got so few native trees left in Ireland, to even consider wiping out a large proportion of those ... it just boggles the mind The tree itself leaves zero doubt that it's a rainforest tree, being covered in epiphytes. Epiphytes are plants that grow on trees, and an abundance of them, anywhere in the world, says just one thing: 'rainforest'. On this particular tree there are the usual epiphytic mosses and polypody ferns you'd expect in an Irish rainforest, but also a whole bunch of other species. You've got flowering plants like celandine, goldenrod, dog violet, wood sorrel, as well as woodrush, all growing on the tree. Another thing I love about this particular tree is that at the base is an ants' nest, and they've made a kind of a highway running diagonally up its trunk. The passage of millions of tiny legs up and down the tree has worn a deep furrow through the moss to the bare bark. The limbs of the tree reach out into space, because it's on the side of this cliff. The whole shape is incredibly unique and charismatic: there's a real power to the tree. And again, it all comes back to the fact that it's wild, therefore unlike any other tree in the whole forest, all of which are distinct individuals. They're almost certainly directly descended from the first trees to colonise the area after the last ice age. In an age of globalisation – including the plant trade – an oak bought in a garden centre or nursery in Dublin, Amsterdam or Brussels will probably all be genetically identical, domesticated versions of the species. This oak is at the very opposite end of the spectrum, part of a unique, wild population limited to just this part of Beara. [ Ireland needs more wild native forests – not lifeless Sitka plantations Opens in new window ] One of the other things that makes this tree so special is that it's growing very close to a main road: only about 10 metres away. When TD Michael Fitzmaurice said early this year that all trees growing within 30 metres of any road, power or communication line should be cut, I remember thinking of this particular tree and feeling deep, deep anger. I don't know how old it is, but I'd guess it has stood there for somewhere between 150 and 200 years, never bothering anybody. Quite the contrary: it's a pillar of the local ecosystem, providing habitat for thousands of different organisms. When we've got so few native trees left in Ireland, to even consider wiping out a large proportion of those ... it just boggles the mind. 'It makes me smile every day when I pass it. It's a part of my life' Seán Ronayne is an ornithologist, wildlife sound-recordist, environmental activist and author of Nature Boy: A Journey of Birdsong and Belonging Seán Ronayne's favourite tree, an oak tree, in Ballyannon Wood in Midleton, Co Cork. Photograph: Daragh Mc Sweeney/Provision There are lots of great trees that have really impressed me around the country, but it's the local trees that are most important to me, because I grew up with them. There is one in particular. A great big gnarly sessile oak tree in my local wood, Ballyannan Wood in Midleton in Cork. The wood itself is largely modified and planted, but it's an ancient woodland. There's a big carpet of bluebells, there's greater woodrush, there's lots of wood anemone. This tree stands out among it all because it just looks like a wizened old character of the wood. It doesn't conform to the straight lines of the conifers that have been planted around it. It's a natural monument, really. I often look at it and think of the stories it must have heard and the birds and animals it must have seen through time. These days we cut down trees for nothing. We don't give it a second thought. But if you go back to the period of the Brehon Laws, we had a whole series of laws surrounding our trees. There were 28 trees categorised into different values. The oak was the tree of the kings and queens. There are various accounts, but I've read that cutting down an oak tree could impose a fine of nine milking cows. That would have been devastating to someone back then. [ 'My mission is to record all of the bird species in Ireland' Opens in new window ] Because of these laws and because we respected them, we had a lot more trees than we do now. Veteran trees now in Ireland are rare; trees that are a few hundred years old. This sessile oak in my wood is probably from the mid-1800s. I just look at it and it takes me to another place. To the old oak woods that are described in texts from the past. They sound like magnificent places. If one tree like that can move a person, imagine what a whole forest of big old veteran oak trees would have done. Wouldn't it be great if we could bring that back? There are some lovely oak woodlands, and to walk in places like that now is a real window into the past. There's one place in Donegal, Ardnamona wood, and it's stunning. I think it's the greatest example of a sessile oak wood in the country. But I'm still happy I've got this one oak. It's something. It makes me smile every day when I pass it. It's a part of my life. When I was a kid I used to climb it. I can vividly remember my father helping me up. And I remember meeting an old friend there, who has passed, and he was a real character of that wood. Iain Hill was his name. A Scottish man, very softly spoken, and he loved nature. The last time I met him was at that oak tree. Just like in music and taste and smells, we have memories in our trees, too, and our natural spaces. This tree is a significant marker in my life in terms of memories. All happy memories. 'I'd be devastated if those two trees were gone' Aoibhinn Ní Shúilleabháin is an associate professor in DCU, biodiversity advocate and chair of the Independent Advisory Committee on Nature Restoration Aoibhinn Ní Shúilleabháin at Fernhill Park and Gardens in Stepaside, Co Dublin. Photograph: Alan Betson There are two enormously tall scots pine trees on the Rua Oileans. The Rua Oileans are two little islands on Lough Corrib. They mean a lot to me because as children we would go fishing on the Corrib on my grandad's boat, which is now my dad's. The first thing you see when you go out in the boat and get past the shore reeds are the Rua Oileans, covered in trees. It's a place where we would stop to have a picnic if we'd been out fishing for a couple of hours. Annoyingly you can't really walk around because there's just so much growth. So it's a real adventure to try and walk around the island. I used to think that trees couldn't grow like this on the hills in Connemara, but now realise the islands epitomise what our landscape could look like. [ Aoibhinn Ní Shúilleabháin: 'We need to look after our bogs, like we look after the Book of Kells' Opens in new window ] Those two trees are my favourites because they mark to me what the Corrib is. They are Connemara. I was out on the boat at the weekend with my kids. We saw the islands ahead of us and I just said, 'Oh, my soul feels better.' My brother was in the boat as well and he said, 'Me too.' Corrib Island in Connemara. Photograph: Art O Súilleabháin That's what those trees epitomise for me; just stopping and connecting. I connect with nature when I'm on the lake, because there's nothing else you can do except watch the water, look at the flies on the water, listen to the wind, look at the trees. And look at the sky. All you're doing is being in nature. That's my connection. Those two trees, those enormous Scots Pines that look like they shouldn't be there. I'd be devastated if those two trees were gone. 'This horse chestnut tree has been a mother tree to me for a long time' Catherine Cleary is co-founder of Pocket Forests , a social enterprise planting native trees and shrubs in urban areas. She is growing a native forest on a former farm in Co Roscommon Catherine Cleary with her favourite tree, a 'big old horse chestnut tree' in a glade at the back of the Iveagh Gardens. Photograph: Alan Betson When we think about favourite trees they tend to be the trees that have been around a lot longer than us, and in that category there's one tree on the farm in Roscommon which is an incredible tree, unfortunately dying from ash dieback. It has been given a life by Kerri ní Dochartaigh, who wrote an incredible poem called The Mother Tree for the documentary that was made about our farm project called The Forest Midwife . It is speaking in the voice of the tree on the farm, this 80- to 100-year-old ash tree, which is struggling to continue with ash dieback. So that's one that's very, very close to my heart. But the one that more people might be able to visit, and one I visit much more regularly, is a big old horse chestnut tree in the Iveagh Gardens in Dublin's city centre. [It is] at the back of the Iveagh Gardens in a kind of wooded area, which is still under threat from development. I will be putting up a tent in there to stop it from being cut down. [ Catherine Cleary: 'I stood in this dripping wet mossy forest and something just shifted in me' Opens in new window ] In that glade at the back of the Iveagh Gardens, you feel like you're just in a tiny fragment of forest. This horse chestnut tree has kind of been a mother tree to me for a long time, in that I have visited it at various tough times. I think it was Thomas Pakenham who once said trees are great listeners. And this horse chestnut is a great listener. About 18 months ago a huge limb fell off it, because it is beginning to come to the end of its days, and it was given a very severe piece of tree surgery – it basically had all of its huge, enormous canopy cut down, for safety reasons presumably. But this summer it is leafing up again; a tiny, much-dwarfed version of itself, but it's still there. It's still keeping on.
Irish Times
a day ago
- Irish Times
My son is clearing out his childhood things – but these items he knew I'd want to keep
My younger son , who finished the Leaving Cert a few weeks ago, has been going through his room setting aside childish things. I see that his purge is overdue; there were games and toys that were almost already outgrown when we moved from England five years ago. We should probably have been even more ruthless in packing, but as we understood the difference between the space we could afford in the English midlands and the space we could afford in Dublin , my husband and I discarded more than half our own possessions. (I acknowledge our good fortune in being able to afford any space at all in Dublin.) We couldn't bear to ask the same of the children. My son is thoughtful and knows that I think more nostalgically of his childhood than he does, full now of the joys of new adulthood. He set aside things he thought I'd want to keep. He was, of course, mostly right; our children know us well. There was some furniture from the dolls' house my grandfather had made for me 45 years ago. The house itself long gone to other lives, but a hand-carved wooden cradle to hold a baby the size of a grape endures, carried as a talisman of my grandfather's love across decades and seas and borders. READ MORE There was a family of plastic squirrels with fluffy tails that will probably be on the planet centuries after humans have blown each other to oblivion. I don't know what I was thinking when I bought them for his third birthday, except that my son would like them. He did, carried them in dimpled fists and small pockets around the park and the shops, handed them to me for safekeeping while he climbed at the playground and fed the ducks. They are so small, surely no harm to keep them though they are neither useful nor beautiful, though space is tight and shipping costly. Take a photo, I tell myself, let them go, but the idea of them lying in a bin – not even recyclable, not desirable second-hand – is too much. And then – I know from the smell before I come to them – there is a box of 64 wax crayons, all more or less used, the pinks, purples and oranges more than the others, the greys and browns hardly at all. They've survived the years because they lived at my grandparents' house, and my grandparents clove to order and neatness, stored things tidily arranged in their original packaging. [ There's a clear difference between those who grew up taking photos of themselves and those of us who didn't Opens in new window ] My brother and I had art supplies at home, in abundance, in constant use. There was a yellow plastic tub that had once held two litres of Neapolitan ice-cream, divided like a flag into thirds of vanilla, strawberry and chocolate, for years after holding handfuls of pencil crayons of different lengths and thicknesses and hardness, the leads broken and ends chewed. 'The crayon box is one of vanishingly few objects I can touch now that I touched in early childhood.' Photograph: Getty Images It was practical enough. We drew daily, which was the point. In adult life I tend much more towards such contained chaos than towards my grandparents' neatness, and my own kids' crafting supplies lived in biscuit tins and shoeboxes. The tidiness was appealing because we loved our grandparents and that was how they were. But because the crayons remained a set, remained in order, separate, they passed from me to my sons. Because I'd taken care of the box, they did, and so here it is, one of vanishingly few objects I can touch now that I touched in early childhood. I look through them, read the names on the labels, the precursors of my adult fascination with the names of paint colours, with words for light. The colours are disordered, juxtaposed in ways I find ugly and I start to rearrange them, rediscover that the crayons I loved most of all are the least used because I saved them for best, for later, for special occasions that never came. I still delight in rose pink and sunset orange and violet, glowing colours that I was taught 'didn't go' and couldn't be worn together. I wear them now, on confident days. I glance down at my lined adult hands, at the scars on the fingers from cooking and rock-climbing and I see the rings that replace the beloved engagement ring I lost last year. The stones I wear constantly now are purple, yellow, crimson and orange, my childhood self still almost in touching distance as my children's childhoods fade.
