Memory of the House
Exhibition of paintings by Hughie O’Donoghue
The Hunt Museum, Limerick
Hughie O’Donoghue was born in 1953 in Manchester, England. His mother was born in the Gaeltacht of County Mayo in Ireland and O’Donoghue spent much of his childhood here, learning traditional stories and experiencing the landscape around his mother’s family home.
The exhibition of paintings by Hughie O’Donoghue, Memory of the House, takes as their subject matter abandoned homes, situated in the landscape of Mayo where he grew up, and which has personal significance or resonance. The exhibition shows the artist looking at buildings as places of memory in a semi-abstract way, combining them with rich expressionist colours and texture.
The set of images is a counterpoint to the poet Simon Armitage’s translation of Virgil’s Georgics, entitled Still, and are a rumination on a series of abandoned houses in Erris.
The exhibition features paintings on wood panels that have been made in the manner of note book pages, incorporating drone photography of the buildings and hand written notes, gleaned from the 1911 census, about the people who lived in these houses
