MY CULTURAL LIFE
Susan McKeown, musician
Grammy award-winning and BBC Folk Music Award nominated vocalist and songwriter Susan McKeown is one of three musicians appointed as musician-in-residence at dlr LexIcon Studio and Library, culminating in a series of free concerts at the venue (musicnetwork.ie). Susan is the executive director of Cuala Foundation, a non-profit organisation that promotes cultural well-being. She and her daughter, Roisin, divide their time between Dublin and New York. She will be joined by collaborators, Ger Kiely (guitar) and Trevor Hutchinson (double bass), on Thursday, September 6 at dlr LexIcon and will perform a series of songs about her experience as a woman living in Dun Laoghaire-Rathdown today, taking inspiration from her own life and everyday encounters with people in the town as well as the pier, the Forty Foot, Killiney Hill and beyond.
Film: Deargdhuil: Anatomy of Passion
Deargdhuil: Anatomy of Passion (2016) (right) is Australian documentarian Paula Kehoe’s exquisite portrait of the poet Maire Mhac an tSaoi. Kehoe’s intimate work allows us to experience Mhac an tSaoi’s passionate emotional language against the historical backdrop of a State where expressing such emotions was taboo.
Album: Miss America
I distinctly remember three times in my teens when I heard a voice singing on the radio and I hurried to turn it up: the singers were Mary Margaret O’Hara, Michelle Shocked and June Tabor. Miss America is Canadian Mary Margaret’s only full-length album and formed the soundtrack to my early years in New York. She and I ended up becoming friends and we performed together there in the 1990s.
Book: Woman on the Edge of Time
Once there were a lot of bookshops in New York, and I spent a lot of time in them. Early on, I discovered Marge Piercy’s Woman on the Edge of Time (1976), a creative, complex work about social transformation told through the story of a woman living in poverty in 1970s New York, who gets unfairly incarcerated in a mental institution. It looks at her situation in the context of institutional corruption and was ahead of its time in terms of what we now know about how reducing misery, and tackling unhappiness for the worst off, increases wellbeing for everyone.
Design: God’s Eyes
Before I left Ireland (in 1990) there was a trial piece from Wood Quay, a carving on a piece of bone, that I used to go and see in the Treasury when it was on Merrion Row. This summer, I’ve been working with young women and girls in Rialto, Donegal and Monaghan on a cultural well-being programme I’ve developed called ‘Express Yourself ’ and I think our making God’s Eyes (versions of the Bridget’s Cross) is what’s bringing it back to my mind because they are similar.
Art: The Black Queen
I didn’t know about Tamara Madden, or her art, for long before she died of cancer last year at the age of 42. I enjoy her portraits, with her rich use of colour and texture, especially gold. The influence of Klimt is particularly strong in The Black Queen (2010) (right). I found her work healing to look at, before I learned the story of how she used art to heal herself. It’s clear she honoured her subjects and she spoke of her workspace as a sacred space.