Galway is a place of magic in artist’s eyes

Lifestyle - Artist Jennifer Cunningham sees Galway in a different light to most and her rose-tinted, nostalgic look at the city, and its iconic buildings, forms one of the highlight exhibitions of the Galway International Arts Festival.

The Hangar, Seapoint, O’Brien’s Shop in Salthill, Heneghan’s Nurseries in Mervue, the Corrib Great Southern Hotel – iconic Galway buildings are central to the paintings of city artist Jennifer Cunningham. But while they’re instantly recognisable because Jennifer is a brilliant draughtswoman, the Galway she has created is also very different from the one we encounter every day.

Her rose-tinted buildings are either under construction or falling apart and some have images of fairground and circuses juxtaposed on the landscape, while young girls populate many of the works, evoking a different, otherworldly place.

After the Future, Jennifer Cunningham’s exhibition for this year’s Galway International Arts Festival is in the Festival Gallery, sited in the former printworks of the Connacht Tribune.

In addition to 20 paintings, she has also created a video installation and nine model pieces, depicting funfairs, and woodlands. These are playful and fun and show meticulous attention to detail.

In person, Jennifer is pretty precise, too. Warm and happy to explain her artistic process and the ideas behind her work, she can trace her love of art back to her childhood.

Home for Jennifer as a young child was in the now-demolished Rahoon Flats, before her family moved to Castle Park and then to Newcastle when she was a teenager. These days, she lives in Tuam with her husband, Tim Acheson, also an artist, and their three-year-old daughter, Emily, but Galway city and its deserted buildings continue to inspire her.

Her English-born grandmother had been awarded a place in art college but World War II put paid to herdream. Jennifer’s mother, Marie, inherited that talent, and graduated from GMIT with a Fine Arts Degree as a mature student. Jennifer’s maternal grandfather, meanwhile, was an engineer who was involved in designing Merlin Park Hospital in the 1950s, while her late father Pádraig was a highly skilled carpenter, who loved stories and music – stories are a vital element of her work.

Jennifer won her first art competition aged six and still has her prize of a teddy bear. After that, she entered the Galway Advertiser Christmas Art competition, winning a watercolour set which she still uses. A prize that has endured, she says with her warm smile.

And she sold her first painting – a Connemara landscape – for twenty pence when she was nine to a neighbour across the road.

So, it was no wonder Jennifer opted to study Fine Art at GMIT where she specialised in print-making and her tutors included the renowned UK artist Norman Ackroyd. His attention to detail and precision were incredible, she says, and he was a big influence.

She loved college and was there from 10am-10pm every day.

“For me, it was my Utopia. I knew I had found my tribe of wonderful eccentric people and I could be as eccentric as I wanted to be. A lot of them are still very good friends today.”

Jennifer graduated in 2002 with First Class honours and won several awards for her etchings, including the Taylor Art Award at the RDS. She used the money from that to set up a print studio in the garden shed of her family home.

For more, read this week’s Connacht Tribune.

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