And then it snowed! Not Saturday night, of course, not in Claremorris… but in a series of paintings by Kaye Maahs on the back wall. This landscape that we know, under the unfamiliar blanket of snow and ice, transformed into contrasts—that inky black rath on the ridge, with its line of trees, and the flat grey light of the snow skies, sometimes tinged with green, sometimes a hint of pink. There is a play here with forms and mass, with an unnerving light and a tender palette. And there is a story told, once again with the landscape as the hero and we—as observers—are only incidental.

I turned then, and found Donald Teskey’s two small works ‘Blue Roof’ and ‘Anahalla Lee Valley’. You couldn’t mistake this land for anywhere else. You have walked down a mucky boreen and knocking the heads off a nettle with a switch, you turn a corner and you are there, at the old house. We have come to it at an oblique angle and the forestry casts a shadow at the back, but the gable end has caught the light and that is how we come up to it. The scumbled surface of the painting and the vigorous marks of gate and fence post are sure and confident. We feel the solidity of the house and the years of growth in the woodland, and undoubtedly the strength of the artist’s marks, the scrape and surface and line. He places us squarely at home.

And from looking in and down, suddenly we are looking out and up—with a whoosh! we encounter Emma Stroude’s two paintings of urban skies, with celestial blue and cloud and trees silhouetted against the light, crossed by posts and wires and streetlamps. Emma leaves the land to force our eyes skyward, we are landed in our peripheral vision, in the movement of passing through, in the composition of divided skies.

Within the show there are works that serve as counterpoint, that change the questions others raise about landscape. Jennifer Cunningham’s work sits differently with the viewer. Here we have an inhabited landscape and an averted gaze, an emotional landscape of memory. Jennifer’s prints and paintings carry remnants of built structures, incorporated into the image like subconscious memories of industrial landscape. Her etchings are beautiful and haunting.

Anne Donnelly’s landscapes and avian paintings bring the viewer to the surface to consider method and texture. There is a difference to the light in her works that sets them apart within the gallery.

In 1989 my mother, Patricia Noone founded the George Moore Society and that’s when the real fascination began. The Society would roll out the George Moore Extravaganza, an ambitious program of events to honour the writings of George Moore, of Moore Hall which was located near Claremorris. He was a 19th Century writer ahead of his time, a feminist, writing about transgender, a big influence on James Joyce and for years he seemed another member of my family.

During the month of July our house had a revolving door of literati, academics, artists, musicians, composers, poets, politicians, RTE personalities. We would be moved out of our bedrooms to accommodate them as the Society did not have the funds for accommodation. Writers travelled from all around Europe, and as far afield as Japan and California all celebrating George and the Moores of Moore Hall. Seamus Heaney read to a packed Town Hall. Paul Durcan, Derek Mahon, Tom Kilroy, Anne Haverty, Anthony Cronin, Benedict Kiely, Anthony Coleman, Robert Welch, Brian Moore all came and read and entertained the people of Claremorris and beyond. With their various partners and offspring they’d stay in our house, invariably carousing into the wee hours and expounding literary theories and claptrap over fries the next morning, egos shadow boxing for hours into the afternoon. There were jazz bands on the lawn at Moore Hall, Race Parties in Ballinrobe, poetry readings, plays, recitals and exhibitions in every corner of the town and county.

I was at least ten years old before being entrusted to serve wine at exhibition openings during the festival. Supervalu sponsored crates of it and my friends and I would carry silver trays with fierce concentration as if competing in the “egg-and-spoon”, and all the while people came and went from throughout Connaught; artists, writers, musicians, locals all talking about art, all gossiping, all guzzling – drink-driving being of little concern in those days. A politician would walk in wearing a necklace and people would hush as he’d talk about regional tourism and the exhibition would open. My mother tried to encourage sales for the Society, saying how much nicer it was to look at art on your walls than zeros in your bank account and someone said, “not when there’s only one zero”. Viewers marvelled at the Tony O’Malley paintings and the price of them: at £200, a week’s wages in those days; “Sure anyone could do that”, the most common refrain during gallery invigilation.

Then came the Great Famine Memorial, after one hundred and fifty years. The George Moore Society commissioned thirty-five of the country’s leading artists to engage with the theme. Many of the artists in this show, Wonderment, took part. During the summer of 1995 the big old cold cinema was stripped back to the walls and painted white to function as a gallery. I sat in the space for weeks with these enormous paintings staring me in the face. Hughie O’Donohgue’s famine figure crouched on all fours foraging; Basil Blackshaw’s blighted potatoes, Barrie Cooke’s potato ridges magnified; Michael Farrell’s skeletons and black dogs. Charlie Tyrell’s triptych, “A Spade A Spade” with its solid black cross swimming in a green plain which was hemmed in by two rectangular grey canvases bearing skeletal ribs, hung in sobriety; a metronome to steady the unbridled cacophony of artworks which jostled and simmered all over the walls.

Studio visits were a regular feature in those days. Tony O’Malley’s home was a magical place with artist, Jane O’Malley’s dream room completely in white, a big bare branch with fairy lights working as a Christmas tree in the corner. Tony’s studio was at the bottom of a garden not unlike a scene from a Monet, complete with little water-lillied pond. I was well warned not to touch anything, so I stood back in admiration of the wonderful paintings which, as they were pulled out of drawers, seemed to transport us to the tropics, magical and mystifying to me in their abstraction, their colour, and their scratched rough-hewn surfaces. Hughie O’Donoghue’s studio that afternoon in Thomastown was like an aircraft hanger which dwarfed the enormous canvases that he must have stood on a ladder to paint.