An art exhibition’s “queer ecology” draws inspiration from tales told by Irish children almost a century ago

A light rain fell on Friday evening and Niamh Coffey took shelter under the corrugated roof covering the staircase in the Pallas Projects/Studios’ courtyard.

They had just completed a video shoot for Siúnta, the second iteration of their first solo exhibition. 

The show had launched in the Dublin 8 arts space the previous day.

The exhibition takes its title from the Irish word for “seam” or “joint” and Coffey’s idea was to look at the idea of metamorphosis of humans into nature, they said.

They stepped into the brightly lit and echoey exhibition room, and passed under a couple of tall swans, made from wood and wool, their necks bent to form a heart-shaped arch.

Throughout the room were surreal characters. 

They were made of acrylic wool, clay, paper stitched together with thread, and sketches within collages made from fabrics and furs, all blurring the lines between the human and natural world.

Eyes sprouted from gooseberry bushes. Worms crawled out of toenails. Heads emerge from lakes and flower beds – some bald, others with long locks tied into weaves which creep up wooden trellises like ivy.

Coffey had created a “queer ecology”, they said. “It’s not something binary or fixed. It’s this idea of humans not being a top-of-the-hierarchy thing.”

A chief inspiration for the show was a trove of folktales given to the National Folklore Commission by primary school pupils up and down the country between 1937 and 1939.

Many of these accounts, derived by the children from tales told by relatives and neighbours, have absurdist mythical qualities that break down the binaries between the natural and unnatural, Coffey said. 

“When you look at the archive, these stories had a more fluid relationship with nature,” they said. “It seemed to flow between these two things more easily.”

Imagined ecologies

A dozen or so pieces of paper, cut out in the shape of eggs, are fixed to one of the white walls in the corner of the exhibition space. 

They’re a mix of big and small, and on each of them is the sketch of a face. Many of them have closed eyes and flowing hair.

These cutouts were the starting point for the exhibition, Coffey says. 

They had been hot-desking and it was a small space. Hence the smaller items in the exhibition. Sketches are something more doable in a small space, they say. “I liked the idea of people hiding in their hair, and all of this grew out of that.”

Throughout the room, and hidden behind collages are other sketches. Human and bear arms that circle one another. Tiny hedgehogs huddled up in the corner of a frame.

As Coffey teased out these figures from their imagination, they encountered the Irish Folklore Commission’s archive of histories, tall tales, superstitions and songs, they say. “I was kinda making work like it anyway, and ran out of ideas for these imagined ecologies.”

“So when I read the archive, there were so many of these images that I could really mine and collage,” they say.

The commission’s project is known as “Bailiúchán na Scol” or “The Schools’ Collection”. 

Over two years in the late 1930s, it gathered together folk stories from more than 50,000 pupils in 5,000 primary schools, says Dúchas, the National Folklore Collection’s website.

Pupils came up with roughly 740,000 pages of folk tales and local histories, as well as prayers, riddles, recipes and some impressively thorough surveys of birds in villages and towns nationwide.

In Garristown, locals suffering from ringworm could be cured by a woman in possession of a “blessed ring”, according to a pupil in Ballyboughal.

A Lusk pupil told the commission that the village’s patron saint, St MacCullin, died after jumping from a round-tower. 

Only the fall didn’t kill him. It was his attempt at jumping back up that did. “He struck his face off the wall,” the pupil wrote.

Coffey was taken by stories of witches becoming hares, they say. “And stealing cows milk, so people tied bows on cow tails to stop this, as good luck.”

From anecdotes about holy wells curing sore throats to cruel landlords, the stories were often passed down to the children from parents, grandparents or neighbours, according to Dúchas.

But, as they are being handed down, they are going through the lens of a small child’s imagination, says visual artist and primary school teacher Erin Roche. 

“Obviously, if they are repeating something, their imagination takes hold of what they’ve heard before,” she says.

“So it’s really lovely to see how Niamh has translated these stories into such beautiful pieces of art, and through this queer lens too, which is interesting,” Roche says.

Echoing an archive

Coffey’s approach to interpreting the archive is loose. Their own imagination overlaps with those in the School Collection.

On one wall, a gaping mouth made from acrylic wool reveals inside two frog ponds, and another mouth from which more amphibians emerge.

The gums are filled with teeth. But some teeth have been replaced by molar-shaped frogs.

Titled “Incisor Imposter”, the work was based on a folk cure for toothache, they said. 

“If you have a sore tooth, you hold a frog in your mouth until it shrieks, and it’s also based on this story of people drunk, falling asleep near this boggy land where frogs jump into you,” they said.

Coffey merged that with their own experience of visiting the dentist and a fixation on how Surinam toads give birth after the male implants the eggs into the female’s dorsal epidermis, they say. 

“They keep their tadpoles in their back, and when they are ready to pop out, they shoot out. It’s horrible.”

Roche, the artist, says the exhibition  is a testament to Coffey’s ability to capture both the beauty and ugliness of the human body and how it fits into nature. 

“There is just this great sense of magic in their work, and attention to detail,” she says.

The exhibit also echoes the archive in the number of ideas Coffey has managed to cram into the space.

Installations like a hedgehog with five thick spines, titled “Uggo”, stand beside an oversized blackberry.

Around each corner, and behind many of the works is another idea, or story, easily overlooked at first.

As with the primary school stories, each dive in brings up something new, Roche says. “The magic flows when you keep going back, and little things come to light that you didn’t notice before.”