Art By Maria Healy

Maria Healy

Look and Then Look Again

Previous Work

About the Artist

My name is Maria Healy and I am a local visual artist working in various mediums, in photography, glass, ceramics and textiles. Sometimes I combine mediums when required. In my current body of work, I am focusing on our beloved and beautiful Gearagh area. It exudes an atmosphere of the sublime and of absence present. It is a deeply layered terrain of remains, memories and histories, which take on another reality with the knowledge that this area hides a submerged village. 
		
Using my own photographs as a starting point and combining them with old photographs from a family who lived in the Anahala area during the 1930’s and 40’s, I digitally manipulate them to produce a juxtaposition or double exposure of then and now.
		
Everyday life in all its vibrancy and essence was being lived out there. Children playing, family picnics, men ploughing fields, thrashing and harvesting, visitors posing for a photo, potatoe pickers pausing for a break and girls chatting by a car. Ordinary life in everyday living. But in October 1957, all this was to change forever. These precious images are some of the few remaining to show us the life that was.
		
So now when you take a walk in the Gearagh, look with the deeper knowledge and reflect on what happened here because all around you are fleeting glimpses of the life which once thrived here. Hopefully it will not be consigned to the history archives but will live on in our imagination.

Ploughing Through Water

Cottage Reflection

Picnic in a Watery Field

Catchup in the Reeds

Playing in the Trees

Playing on the Port Road

Thrashing

View of a Submersion

Wave House

I am a visual artist concentrating mainly in glass and textiles but sometimes in ceramics. Using my own photographs, as a starting point, I manipulate them digitally and this helps to drive the creativity. My current body of work is about a local area which exudes an atmosphere of the sublime and of absent present. I find that the traces, layers and fragments evoke a response in me. I am hoping to translate these subtle traces through my art.

It is a deeply layered terrain of remains, memories and histories, which take on another reality with the knowledge that all this area is actually a submerged village. I am trying to create something tangible from an otherwise fleeting memory. I am using glass as a metaphor for water. I love the translucent quality of it. I am working with textiles, using threads as a metaphor for connections, weaving past into present with all its colours and textures. Also, by combining glass and textiles I want to depict the water which hides a fragile unravelled fabric of life past.

I am piecing together the fragments to weave a narrative. I experiment with the visual fragments dismantling them and then reforming them again in another narrative which echoes what happened on this site in the past.

I am using the idea of mise-en-abyme, a condition in a work of art where a fragment replicates the entire composition. One of the techniques I use is Pate de Verre which is fragments of crushed glass, pasted together in a mold and fired in the kiln. This process lends itself well to my theme of fragmentation and the resulting work is very delicate and almost ephemeral in quality.