As I walk through the Ballyhaise landscape regularly, I look, I listen, I wait. I know there are messages to be discovered from deep within the soil.

Patrick Kavanagh  said you could spend your whole life looking in one corner of a field and you still would not know the corner of that field .

I have questions. Did Owen Roe O’Neill sit under the Elm tree on Colonial Hill and admire a robin? How many people sat under the same elm tree since? Did the Newburghs lose this house in a bloody dual on the front lawn? What became of Cathal O’Reilly and Una Maguire after they escaped Coote’s Army at Castle field on a black horse? What about the people that are gone, do they live on in the landscape? How did the townlands gain those interesting names? Can these names give us a clue to the puzzle?

This unique and ancient land has so much to tell us, it has been growing and reproducing for a long time and will continue to do so. Rich with flora and fauna it has provided humans going way back with the food, shelter and medicines we need to survive. It has also provided the sounds, shapes and colours needed to create. Scientists have recently discovered that plants can feel. Can they remember? In this new body of work I look at these questions. I have created worlds for these local characters of old Ballyhaise through digging deep in the local landscape and its lore.

Each print in my Scéalta Dàr dTalún exhibition tells a story.  Landscape and imagination come together to create a series that I call ‘dreamscapes’. I know we can’t be sure what happened here before, but my hope is to create passage ways for the viewer into the curiosities of the river Annalee, the One Tree, the others trees, the harvests, the battles, and the creatures and characters that have previously walked this land.

The texts accompanying each piece of art work in this exhibition have been compiled by me from extensive research both interviews and written sources. I want to acknowledge and thank all those who assisted me, in particular, I acknowledge the interviews and advice from historians Dr Cíaran Parker and Michael Swords.   The creative support of Joe Doherty ,Ann Smith, Lisa O Neill, Catriona O’Reilly and Noel Monaghan and interviews with the staff at Ballyhaise College, in particular Olive Brown and John Kelly.   I want to thank also the people of Ballyhaise who spoke to me and provided guidance and my time with the pupils and teachers at St Mary’s National School, Ballyhaise. I acknowledge the support of Cavan County Council Arts and Heritage offices, Creative Ireland and Heritage Week.  I relied on a number of written sources and these include:  Bridie Smith Brady’s Articles on Ballyhaise published in the Anglo Celt between the years 1922-1928 from the Local Studies section at Cavan County Library, James Duggan’s book “92 Years On And Still Learning in Rural Ireland”,  the 1938 Ballyhaise School UCD Folklore Collection (www.duchas.ie), Ballyhaise Development Associations book “Ballyhaise and Castletara Past and Present and Ballyhaise Agricultural College 1906-2006, published by Ballyhaise Agricultural College 2006.

The art work is my artistic interpretation of these stories, myths and facts.

Jackie O Neill, Artist

August 2017