The artists who shaped us: A Giant at My Shoulder returns

RTÉ News​

21 hours ago

Twenty-five years ago, an RTÉ Radio millennium series asked prominent Irish people to select the person who has most influenced them - revisit it here.
Below, series producer Clíodhna Ní Anluain introduces the return of A Giant at my Shoulder for a new 10-week series on RTÉ Radio 1, starting on Sunday 20th July - listen to the first installment above.
When Edna O'Brien was asked by radio producer Marian Richardson to choose a person of significance to her for the RTÉ Radio Millennium series called A Giant at My Shoulder, commissioned by Lorelei Harris, she chose James Joyce.
Twenty-five years later, as a new generation reveals the giant at their shoulder, it seems natural that the first edition should feature Edna O'Brien as the giant - the choice of award-winning writer Eimear McBride.
McBride first read O'Brien at thirteen. Years later they would get to know one another well, exchanging books and writing letters. They would meet in person for the first time in Sligo, McBride's childhood county and the setting for O'Brien's celebrated novel, Little Red Chairs, McBride arriving with a bunch of pink roses for her giant. The pair promptly got down to discussing literature.
As soon as the tea was poured, however, as McBride puts it: 'Edna began with a less literary complaint about the shopping available in Sligo that weekend. "Oh Eimear," she said, "casting those amazing eyes heavenwards, I don't think we'll be buying any frocks here!"'
Full of observations, from a deep reading of her work to regard and gratitude for Edna the writer and the woman, Eimear McBride tells us why Edna O'Brien is her giant at her shoulder, in exactly the way you would expect from the author of novels including A Girl is a Half-formed Thing and this year's The City Changes Its Face.
McBride is followed by novelist, critic and anthologist Sinéad Gleeson (27th July). Gleeson's choice is Cuban-American performance artist Ana Mendieta (1948-85); she came across Mendieta accidentally in a gallery in the US, drawn in by an image of a corpse, a self-portrait photograph of the artist. For her it encompasses the cycle of life: the nakedness of birth to death and being placed in a tomb.
Gleeson didn't know then that the image is called Imagen de Yagul and representative of Mendieta's work more generally. Mendieta used natural materials including fire, water, earth and flowers to explore the connection between nature and the body, often capturing the feeling of being uprooted, isolated, disempowered. In 1961, in their teens, she and her sister Raquelin were sent to the US to escape the Cuban Revolution, spending time in an orphanage and in various foster homes. What is so significant for Sinead is how during the 1970s, Mendieta was making her art at a time when there was such resistance to women using the body as she did.
Mendieta features in Sinéad Gleeson's Constellations, her Irish Book of the Year award-winning collection of essays. She was also a major influence on the creation of the artist Nell, the key character in Gleeson's celebrated novel, Hagstone.
Kerri Ni Dochartaigh's giant is writer Virginia Woolf. After many years away from a practice of daily journalling, being with Woolf's intoxicating diaries offered a way back in. Through sitting and being with Woolf's diaries, Ni Dochartaigh realized how, as she puts it 'For some people, maybe particularly for creative women, that the quiet act of placing one's own day-to-day life on the page is transformative, deeply healing work'.
Other contributors to the new series include writers John Connell, Martina Devlin and Mike McCormack, poet and essayist Mary O'Malley, composer and musician Mel Mercier, actor Siobhán McSweeney and award-winning chef, food writer and culinary historian Máirtín Mac Con Iomaire. The giants they have chosen include Angela Lansbury, Federico Lorca, Edith Somerville, Henry David Thoreau and Thomas Pinchon.