The Source Arts Centre
14 September – 19 October 2024
A friend recommended Debbie Godsell’s exhibition, ‘Flail’, at Source Arts Centre. “It’s about Protestantism and growing up in Ireland and lots of other things related to that,” she said. I’ve known this friend since we were five; her name was inscribed in books passed down to me from the class above in a small, three-room primary school in County Kilkenny that served the local Church of Ireland and other minority religion communities.
In 1980s and 1990s Ireland, Catholicism seemed an exotic religion of Gothic rituals and icons, compared to what I’ve often described as the gilt-less ‘tea and biscuits’ tradition of the Church of Ireland. However, Protestantism’s simpler, more restrained, low-church inclinations come with a complex, layered inheritance.
Godsell’s exploration of her religious heritage began with the National Folklore Collection’s Protestant Folk Memory Project, co-led by Dr Deirdre Nuttall, who also contributed an essay to the exhibition catalogue, alongside art critic Cristín Leach. In 2022, Godsell recorded 14 Harvest Thanksgiving ceremonies in West Cork, contributing over 140 photographs to the Collection at UCD. Godsell returns to harvest rites in ‘Flail’, using them to investigate her relationship with Irish Anglican ethnicity and identity.
Debbie Godsell [L-R]: Inheritance, 2024, screen print; Legacy, 2024, screen print; Kneelers, 2024, screen printed wallpaper; photographs by Roland Paschoff, courtesy of the artist and Source Arts Centre
The installation at The Source Arts Centre conveys a resonant restraint. Each of the nine works has space to sit within its own weight, within sight of each other, in the arts centre’s square, windowless gallery. More works from this series were featured in an earlier iteration at Cork Printmakers Studio Gallery in 2023 and are reproduced in the accompanying catalogue.
History Lesson (2024) is a round tower made of kneelers – some borrowed from a local church, others appliquéd or patchworked with tapestry, tartan, and blanket fabrics, hand-printed or embroidered. Those printed feature archival photographs: bales of hay, manual harvesting, snakes and Saint Patrick, a woman on a horse, a grand house, a bounty of fruits, vegetables, and milk, corn dollies, a coastal smallholding, a tank, a map of West Cork, and a hand holding a grain. The embroidered words “Don’t make a fuss” appear throughout. The structure is adorned with eye-embellished military-style epaulettes, history books, and a roof of oat stems and hydrangea.
Having grown up as part of this minority denomination in Southern Ireland, I used to joke that I had Catholic guilt combined with a Protestant work ethic. Godsell’s work makes me realise I should revise that to Protestant guilt – carrying the weight of prevailing assumptions and misconceptions, being seen as English, wealthy, and unionist – traits that, in my family’s case, we do not possess. This othering sentiment resonates deeply in Godsell’s work, which speaks to the need for quieting oneself. The Church of Ireland’s ‘plainness’ and quietude can also be understood in the context of the historical and social dynamics that have influenced its understated or subdued expression, as the cultural modesty of an isolated minority experience on the margins of Irish society. Namely, downplaying cultural and religious differences to maintain peaceful coexistence, avoid conflict with neighbours in a predominantly Catholic country, and instead focus on community gathering for cultural survival – keep your head down, avoid drawing attention, and don’t make a fuss.
Debbie Godsell, Harvest/Thanks/Giving, 2024; screen print, applique on repurposed tablecloth; photograph by John Beasley, courtesy of the artist and Source Arts Centre.
In Protestors (2024), Godsell conjures the spectre of who our ancestors were, or might have been. Large screenprints depict roughly collaged heads made of straw, sheepskin, hessian, and fabric, with names and titles: Edward, Land Steward; Suzannah, Farmer; John, Skinner; Daniel, Settler; Amos, Farmer; James, Gentleman; Elizabeth, Queen; James, Carpenter; Ann, Servant; and centrally, a hand holding grain – God’s Almighty Hand.
Prayer cushions appear again in Kneelers (2024), a hand-pulled screenprint on recycled wallpaper backing, overlaid by three framed images, titled Inheritance and Legacy (both 2024). In one of the images from Legacy, a woman digs turf. Notably, her right foot is on the tool – a detail connected to Digging with the left, right, left, right, left, a piece leaning against the entrance wall. This repurposed sleán (a traditional turf-cutting spade) features extra footrests, referring to the belief that Protestants dug with their left foot – further reinforcing their sinister association, a word rooted in the Latin for “on the left side.”
Debbie Godsell, Thresh (Framework), 2024; repurposed timber, oat sheaves, Jesmonite, continuous screen print, tassels; photographs by Roland Paschoff, courtesy of the artist and Source Arts Centre.
Another piece, Thresh (2024), features a timber framework adorned with sheaves of oats, tassels, wallpaper screen-printed with grain, Jesmonite casts of apples (some shrivelling), wrinkled-eyed potatoes, and the loaded binary of a hurling sliotar and badminton shuttle cock. In the central screen of the eponymous three-part video, Flail, which depicts both manual and mechanical threshing processes, we see the artist in a long white shirt, her palms upraised as overlayed imagery of grain fills her body.
After viewing the exhibition, I messaged another friend – his choirmaster is married to my parents’ clergyman, a connection that shortcuts our understanding of how we were brought up. “I’m in Thurles at an exhibition that’s making me think about how growing up Church of Ireland shaped who we are. A chat over a glass of wine, perhaps?” Their reply: “A glass of warm sherry, surely.”
Neva Elliott is an artist and writer based in Dublin.
nevaelliott.com
