Enniscorthy bypass leads to art exhibition
‘Safe-Hold’, a solo exhibition by the artist Christine Mackey which was funded from the Enniscorthy by-pass road allocation, will be officially opened by the author and journalist Paddy Woodworth in Wexford Arts Centre on Friday, February 28.
The exhibition organised in association with Wexford County Council will run from February 22 to March 21.
It’s one of the elements of a public art commission under the local authority’s Per Cent for Art Scheme arising from the M11 Gorey to Enniscorthy PPP road, whereby a number of sites with pollinator-friendly plants were sown in Gorey.
Mackey worked with local communities to engage in solutions to combat habitat loss and transform under-utilised sites into pleasing and environmentally sustainable safe-holds that serve as pollinating pastures for bees to inhabit and for native wild flowers to take hold. Further plantings are due to take place in Enniscorthy in the spring.
As an artist, gardener and seed-saver, Mackey has a strong interest in agricultural practices with much of her work focusing on the relationships between plants and all living organisms.
In response to the planting of the sites, she developed a body of unique drawings made from directly from the Herbarium Collection of the National Botanic Gardens in Dublin.
The seed mix used for the plantings prompted her to source the various plants as pressed specimens in the Botanic Gardens.
The drawings are presented in the gallery as Risograph prints from which members of the public are invited to ‘adopt a species’ by claiming a print.
Notes on plant specimens in the Botanic Gardens, describe the habitats from which the plants were found in their living form. Many of them have disappeared or are under stress.
Mackey used the habitat descriptions to build a large screen print in list form where the text is ordered beginning with the date, followed by the habitat description, the oldest of which began in 1803.
The artist who has an interest in new media in social and public contexts, also developed a workshop programme with participants from Gorey Youth Needs, exploring key environmental and climatic issues relevant to the young population.
This resulted in the documentation of an unofficial seed planting exercise in a local Sitka forest and written work concentrating on the poetic use of language as political slogans. Works from this series are presented in the upper gallery of the of the Arts Centre.
Her engagement with the young people led Mackey to develop new works for the exhibition, including one related to the Mud Pond Snail (Omphiscola Glabra) which is categorised as a ‘Threatened Species: Regionally Extinct’.
She discovered a collection of 14 Mud Pond Snails had been found in New Ross in 1928.
There were repeated visits to the site over the years by ecologists but no more were found there and the original habitat was destroyed.
Mackey discovered that 12 of the collected species from 1928, were brought to the Liverpool History Museum with two remaining in the Natural History Museum in Dublin. Working directly from photographs, she presented the species in cast glass.