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Jennifer Cunningham Cathy Hayes
'Abode’, An exhibition by Jennifer Cunningham and Cathy Hayes
Previews Thursday 5th August at 6.30pm- to be opened by Gary Jermyn at 7.30pm.
Continues until Friday 5th September
Work is on view in Overend's Café. Free Admission. Open Monday- Sunday 10am-5pm. A list of prices is available on request from
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or on site.
Airfield was the former home of Letitia and Naomi Overend, they lived here their entire lives and enjoyed working on the farm and gardens. Prior to their death they set up the Airfield Trust, leaving this unique estate for educational and recreational purposes. Today Airfield is a place of escape, discovery and learning which celebrates farming and gardening through a range of exciting learning and cultural programmes.
Letitia and Naomi Overend in particular had earned quite a reputation in Dublin and further a field and are remembered vividly for their spectacular motor cars, their love of the outdoors and also as a symbol of, I suppose what one could term, the old world (i.e. the world of the landed estate house, or even, the gentry class)
When having the show with Cathy we decided to use the theme of home as a starting point. I was doing research at the time on the uncanny or the unheimlick. I also enjoy the outdoors and when out walking discovered Moore Hall, a large landed estate house in Co Mayo. I was so struck by the place I immediately decided to make work on it.
A lot of my work is to do with the loss of innocence and youth. I am also influenced by myths and fairytales, and literature, as you can see from some of the titles of the work like the Go between, Playing pilgrims progress, which I read about in Little women, and The Oak, the ash and the Bonny Ivy Tree, which is the title of an old English ballad about a maiden who moves to London.
"A North Country maid up to London had strayed,
Although with her nature it did not agree.
She wept and she sighed, and so bitterly she cried,
"How I wish once again in the North I could be!
Oh the oak and the ash, and the bonny ivy tree,
They flourish at home in my own country."
Moore Hall 1909 Moore Hall 2009
Artist Statement.
‘Of course thanks to the house, a great many of our memories are houses, and if the house is a bit elaborate, if it has a cellar and a garret, nooks and corridors, our memories have refuges that are all the more clearly delineated.’
The poetics of Space, Caston Bachelard
This body of work is based around Moore hall, a ruined house with a very interesting history and the surrounding woodland. Moore hall was built in 1795 and was burned down by the IRA in 1923. Only the shell of the house now remains, though one can still see traces of the old Italian plaster work.
Forests too are rich in connotations, throughout history they have acquired the characteristics of a spectre, with the stories of Red ridding hood, Goldilocks, Snow white and the seven dwarves, to the more recent Blair witch project
A young girl wanders alone through the forest, she encounters herself. The work deals with heterotrophic space, the viewer is left uncertain as to whether events have taken place in the past or are happening currently.
The show is about my own subjective perception of a strange place and deals with a hidden substrate of the visible world. It looks at how a place can take on aspects of the people who once lived there and in a way can be construed to represent ones persona, which is invisible at first glance to the outside viewer. Jennifer uses the media of painting, print and video to explore landscape as a backdrop for the psychological inner struggle of her subjects. Time and form are subverted and reinvented through structural fragmentation which is used to amplify the sense of the uncanny.
Special thanks to Timothy Acheson and Sile O Sullivan