Adam's IMPORTANT IRISH ART 31 MAY 2023

57 HUGHIE O’DONOGHUE RA (B. 1953) Memory of The House - Barraduff Oil on canvas, 105 x 155cm (41¼ x 61”) Signed, inscribed and dated 2009 verso € 15,000 - 25,000 Hughie O’Donoghue’s paternal grandfather moved from Co Kerry to Manchester in 1911, to work on the railways. His mother, from a rural community in North Mayo, emigrated reluctantly to England in the late 1930s, out of economic necessity. She maintained close ties to her family in Ireland, and the young art- ist spent many happy summer holidays in Mayo. He heard of many stories linking local families to the Irish diaspora, myriad echoes of his own family’s experi- ence, stretching back to the Great Famine, and of the drastic disadvantages of the marginalised commu- nities, culturally rich but desperately poor. All of this shaped his interest in place, identity, memory and hu- man agency in the face of vast, impersonal forces of politic and economic developments. His Memory of the House project addressed the sto- ries that lay behind the numerous abandoned houses that dot the western seaboard. His immediate links to his father’s family’s home were that much more dis- tant. They were from the small townland of Barraduff, inland on the Kerry side of the Beara Peninsula. The artist has spoken of his working process as a kind of archaeology and he visited the area to see at first hand the family dwelling. His painting incorporates a photograph of the house from a gable end, and a floor plan. The elegiac image encapsulates a story fa- miliar to numerous Irish families. Memory of the House arose from an invitation to create works in response to poet Simon Armitage’s translation of 12 of Virgil’s poems celebrating farm- ing life, The Georgics, in a publication ultimately ti- tled Tract. O’Donoghue’s approach was to bring the subject literally close to home, reflecting a history of hardship and departure rather than contented labour and abundance. O’Donoghue now divides his time between his homes and studios in Erris, Co Mayo and London. Aiden Dunne, April 2023