Encounters with Jack B. Yeats - The Model, Sligo.

To mark the 150th anniversary of his birth, we are pleased to present Encounters with Jack B. Yeats a series of Podcasts and Radio Plays that explore Yeats’ work through a contemporary lens.

The six-episode series, which is kindly funded by the Decade of Centenaries Programme (2013-2023), launches on Wednesday 6 October and runs weekly thereafter.

The series features rediscovered original audio of Yeats in conversation with curator Thomas MacGreevy; reenacted source material by Yeats’ peer, the writer and activist Dorothy Macardle; alongside contemporary responses by artists Ruth Clinton & Niamh Moriarty; Seamus Harahan & Owen Kilfeather; theatre practitioner Isabel Claffey; and actors, Peter Broderick, Ultan Burke, Bob Kelly, Ciarán McCauley and Yuji Shimobayashi.

The music for the soundtrack, 'no man's land' was composed by Karen Power.

The series is curated by The Model's Artistic Director, Emer McGarry and writer-researcher, Lara Byrne.

Funded by the Decade of Centenaries Programme (2013-2023)

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For this, the final episode from the podcast series, ‘Encounters with Jack B. Yeats,’ The Model, home of the Niland in Sligo, presents the new musical composition, ‘Sarabande 77’ arranged and executed by Seamus Harahan and Owen Kilfeather. The musical composition ‘Sarabande 77’ is an adaptation of the fourth movement Sarabande from the keyboard suite in D minor by Georg Friedrich Händel (1685-1759).

Episode Credits:

The two sound clips used in the episode are from the archival radio interview with Jack B. Yeats and the curator, Thomas MacGreevy, recorded in 1947 and broadcast on BBC Third Programme in May 1948. This archival recording is part of the Sound & Moving Image Catalogue in the British Library (T7655R/1 C1) and was sourced with the help of John W. Purser.

‘Sarabande 77’                        Harahan & Kilfeather © all rights reserved.
Seamus Harahan:                   melodeon, synthesizer, electroacoustic & tape treatments
Owen Kilfeather:                    electric guitar, electroacoustic & tape treatments

Arranged and executed by Harahan & Kilfeather in the Model, Sligo, Ireland, during August of 2021.
Mixed by Owen Kilfeather.
Engineered and mastered by Daniel Bannon.

Artist Bios:

Seamus Harahan – artist, filmmaker, musician

Owen Kilfeather is a composer, improvisor and filmmaker from Sligo. Broad range of musics from classical, rock, avant-garde, jazz, metal, choral, noise, gamelan, folk and barbershop to sound art, including decent stretches as house composer/producer for Barcelona-based new-music label Discordian Records and theatre group Tiamat Teatre, as well as crewing for experimental Super 8 collective Gui Collec. Has been involved in the composition, production and/or performance of some forty recordings. Currently writes for/plays with Miss Foreign Affairs and Gulpt, and in post-production on his debut film Organic Shrapnel.

Series Credits:

Episodes introductions: Isabel Claffey
Sound Engineer: Daniel Bannon
Sound Editor: Colm Condron
Soundtrack to Podcast series: Karen Power, ‘no man’s land,’ (2020) commissioned by The Model, funded by the Arts Council’s Music Project Award
Transcriptions: Lara Byrne
Producer & Researcher-Writer: Lara Byrne
Curated by: Emer McGarry

This series is kindly funded by the Decades of Centenaries Programme (2013-2023), and supported By Sligo County Council

Acknowledgements:

The Podcast series Encounters with Jack Butler Yeats was commissioned by The Model home of The Niland Collection in 2021 to commemorate the life and work of Jack Butler Yeats (1871-1957) on the 150^th anniversary of his birth. It took shape through a series of conversations over a several months between Emer McGarry, The Model’s Artistic Director and Writer/Researcher, Lara Byrne.

The Podcasts included two new artists’ commissions, a radio play entitled Go West by artists, Ruth Clinton and Niamh Moriarty; and a new musical composition arranged and executed by Seamus Harahan and Owen Kilfeather. The soundtrack to the podcast was created by Karen Power, with music for the second episode composed by Ruth Clinton and Aoife Hammond. For the fourth episode, an original essay by Shotaro Oshima was adapted into a short radio play, The Visitor. Episode 5, The Green Wave, a one-act conversation piece written by Jack B. Yeats was also especially adapted for the series. Both were directed by Isabel Claffey of Shared Light Theatre Company.

This Podcasts would not have been possible without the work of renowned Yeats scholar Hilary Pyle, and the invaluable help of scholar and musicologist, John Purser. The legacy of Nora Niland, Sligo County Librarian (1945-1979) and founder of the Sligo Municipal Art Collection must be acknowledged. Warm thanks are also due to current Sligo County Librarian, Dónal Tinney for his ongoing support of the collection, and for securing the funds to produce this series.

We appreciate the help provided by the staff of Kilmainham Gaol Museum/OPW; IVARO, Dublin; the Yeats Archive in the National Gallery of Ireland; RTE Archives; National Museum of Ireland; and the Estate of Jack B. Yeats. Copyright for the writings of Dorothy Macardle came courtesy of Curtis Brown Group and Kilmainham Gaol Museum/OPW. Copyright for ‘The Green Wave,’ written by Jack B. Yeats, was courtesy of United Artists, and the Yeats Estate.

Actors and voice artists for the six episodes were Peter Broderick, Ultan Burke, Lara Byrne, Isabel Claffey, Ruth Clinton and Niamh Moriarty, Bob Kelly, Cormac MacDiarmada,

Ciarán McCauley and Yuji Shimobayashi. Isabel Claffey created the sound effects for several episodes and introduced this podcast series.
Thanks to all the staff at The Model especially Daniel Bannon, Concepta Boyce, Colm Condron, Zoë Dunne, Noel McCrumlish and Daniel McDonald.

This Podcast series was funded by the Decade of Centenaries Programme and supported by Sligo County Council.

Jack B. Yeats, memorably said in his 1947 interview with the curator, Thomas MacGreevy:
Homage and affection, these two things are the foods on which the painter lives and the greatest of these is affection…
Sligo, which is in every way my jumping off place, and is my spiritual home always, and the foundation of everything I paint is Sligo…

This series was created as a homage to Jack B. Yeats and was made with the greatest affection.

In the fifth episode of ‘Encounters with Jack B. Yeats,’ The Model home of the Niland Collection, present a one-act conversation piece, The Green Wave, written by Jack B. Yeats, and adapted for this podcast as a short radio play. The parts of the two main characters are performed by actors, Ciarán McCauley (1st Elderly Man) and Bob Kelly (2nd Elderly Man). The Green Wave was initially intended as a companion piece or prologue to Jack’s last full-length play In Sand, which was written in 1943, during the period of the Second World War, when Jack was 72 years old. The Green Wave was never performed during the artist’s lifetime.

Pen & Ink drawing by Jack B. Yeats: The frontispiece to his one-act conversation piece, ‘The Green Wave,’ published in 1964, as a prologue to his play, ‘In Sand.’

Two elderly men discuss the meaning of the mysterious painting of the title, The Green Wave, which the first elderly man had bought ‘…from a man who sold nothing but pictures …’ ‘Well, he did sell something else, he sold home-made toffee.’

The set-up is simple. The stage directions and the small pen and ink drawing that accompanies the piece, show an apartment overlooking Dublin City, or ‘sky parlour’ as the second elderly man describes his friend’s place, and in the shadow of the room, sits a painting on an easel.

The conversation that ensues between these two men, poses a series of questions, such as art versus commerce… what it means to be Irish? And also, looks askance at ‘ways of seeing’ and representation in life and art. The sea is painted on a canvas or cut from a board, dividing this ‘wall of water’ from the vast and unbonded ocean, and this wave now sits on an easel, delimited by a picture frame in the first elderly man’s apartment. What is the object of this non-figurative work? Could it be turned into a mountain or is the object – water?

John W. Purser wrote, ‘A wave looks green when the blue of the ocean comes upon the yellow of the sand. For the same reason, yellow and blue, mixed on the palette, will make green. Land and sea combine.’

The Green Wave plays with ideas around representation, and the concept of time is also touched upon, when the second elderly man, says; ‘I like things to mean something, and I like to know what they mean, and I like to know at once. After all, time is important, the most important thing we know of, and why waste it in trying to find out what something means, when if it stated its meaning clearly itself we would know at once.’ Jack’s enduring concern with chance – and the nature of time are set in motion with this piece, as it prefaces his full-length play In Sand.

In this short one-act piece, we are invited into the first elderly man’s sky parlour to talk about the mysteries of time and space, ways of seeing, ways of being, materiality and representation. What do you see… when the green wave spills across the sands? In this short dense piece, there is much to be unpick. First of all – there is the question of the mysterious painting – is it a wave or could it be a mountain – and as the elliptical conversation moves forward, we are left with more questions than answers. Duality and non-binary representation rest on this image – an image that the audience can’t see. There is also the question of the symbolic representation of Ireland as a green wave – as part of a vast ocean. An Ireland in stasis or is it a wave about to break on the shore – mutable, changeable, undefinable?

And this question, posed by the two men’s conversation, … what is Ireland? and what does Ireland represent… and again, this is the perennial question of – art versus commerce – a question that is still pertinent in Ireland today. This series of questions opens up the space for further questionings, and as the curtain falls on The Green Wave, the audience are left with an interesting array of options.

Episode Credits:
Copyright for the one-act conversation piece, ‘The Green Wave,’ written by Jack B. Yeats, was used with permission from United Artists LLP and ©The Estate of Jack B. Yeats, courtesy of the Yeats family.
Sound clip from archival interview with Jack B. Yeats and Eamonn Andrews, 10th October 1947, and used with permission from ©RTE Archives.

Researcher: Lara Byrne
Sound Effects: Isabel Claffey

FIRST ELDERLY MAN: Ciarán McCauley
SECOND ELDERLY MAN: Bob Kelly

Artist Bios:
Lara Byrne is an arts researcher based in the northwest of Ireland.
Isabel Claffey is a founding member of Shared Light Theatre Company – and has worked in the industry since the 2000s as a performer and director. Recent recorded work includes radio plays for The Dock with Old Time Radio and the part of Mag in “Murmur” for Magpie Productions at the Camden and Edinburgh Fringe Festivals. www.sharedlighttheatrecompany.com
Bob Kelly is an actor and writer from the west of Ireland. A regular collaborator with Sligo’s Blue Raincoat Theatre company, he is currently writing a musical adaptation of Breakfast on Pluto for Landmark Productions, and recently shot his second short film ‘Vote Matty,’ a satire of casual racism and the rise of the alt-right movement.
Ciarán McCauley is from Sligo and has been making theatre and working as an actor for 30 years. He is also a lecturer in Sligo IT where he teaches on the Performing Arts BA and the Creative Writing BA.

Series Credits:
This series is kindly funded by the Decades of Centenaries Programme (2013-2023)
Episodes introduced by Isabel Claffey
Sound Engineer: Daniel Bannon
Sound Editor: Colm Condron
Soundtrack to Podcast series, ‘no man’s land,’ (2020) composed by Karen Power
Transcriptions by Lara Byrne
Producer & researcher-writer: Lara Byrne
Curated by the Artistic Director of The Model – Emer McGarry

For the fourth episode of ‘Encounters with Jack B. Yeats,’ The Model, home of the Niland Collection presents ‘The Visitor.’ A radio play directed by Isabel Claffey, with the roles of the visitor and the artist, played respectively by Yuji Shimobayashi and Ultan Burke. This short radio play was adapted from an essay by Shotaro Oshima (1899-1980), a Japanese scholar-poet and later professor of English Literature in Waseda University, Tokyo. In this essay, Shotaro described a visit to Jack B. Yeats’s studio in Fitzwilliam Square on a rainy summer’s day in 1938.

Hoolie, the Yeats’s dog, looking out from a first-floor window at Cashlauna Shelmiddy, Strete, Devon. Image courtesy of the National Gallery of Ireland, Yeats Archive.

From the late 1920s, Jack’s artistic style was to change radically, and Jack compares these changes to the similar wayward revolution in the use of language by James Joyce. During the inter-war years, the artist’s line becomes subsumed within a torrent of rich impastoed paint. He was drawing in colour, even though he had begun his artistic career as a draughtsman, earning his living as a comic artist and illustrator from the 1880s, where he used the pseudonym, W. Bird for the cartoons he drew for the satirical magazine ‘Punch.’

Two years before the interview with Shotaro, Jack painted a series of visionary works underpinned by mythological themes: ‘California,’ ‘A Race in Hy Brazil’ and ‘Helen.’ This latter work is discussed in the interview with Shotaro, as is another important oil painting by the artist, ‘Death for Only One,’ which the writer, revolutionary fighter and close friend to the artist, Ernie O’Malley purchased after seeing the work in the artist’s studio. The composition of ‘Death for Only One’ suggests the civil war period in Ireland, and was possibly one of the reasons, why Ernie O’Malley was initially drawn to this darkly painted and emotive work.

The stylistic changes that took place within Jack’s work during these years were out of step with French and English trends, and as the art historian, E.M. Gombrich wrote, they were ‘…irrigated neither by the Seine nor by the Thames.’ Jack was going his own way – carving out his own path, as his work became increasingly experimental and expressionist in the application of paint and in his way of capturing light, but he never goes towards complete abstraction, as the figure always remained ‘somewhere’ within the perspectival plane, whether ephemeral, temporal or rooted in the landscape – these figures of blasted humanity were subsumed within flares of quavering electrified colour, where the artist carried out the high-risk balancing act between representation and materiality, as he described himself, in what sounds very close to a personal manifesto – or a ‘way of being’ – in his radio interview with the young broadcaster Eamonn Andrews in October 1947: ‘There is only one art and that is the art of living. Painting is an occupation within that art, and that occupation is the freest of all the occupations of living. There is no alphabets. No grammar, no rules whatever. Many hopeful sportsman have tried to invent rules and have always failed. Any person or group of persons who tried to legalise such rules do a disservice to this occupation of living. They forget that… that painting is tactics and not strategy. It is carried out in the face of the enemy.’

In the 1938 interview with Shotaro, Jack talks about his work not selling well in Ireland, as it wasn’t until 1942, that his career had a firm foothold within the English art scene, and this was with the joint exhibition between the artist and William Nicholson at the National Gallery in London. By 1945, his reputation as Ireland’s leading modern artist was fully confirmed with The Yeats National Loan Exhibition in the National College of Art in Dublin. By this time, Jack was 74 years old.

Episode credits:

‘The Visitor’ – a radio play, adapted from an essay written by Shotaro Oshima (1899-1980), originally published, ‘W.B. Yeats and Japan,’ by Shotaro Oshima, published by The Hokuseido Press, Tokyo, 1965, and re-published as the essay, ‘An Interview with Jack Butler Yeats,’ in ‘Jack B. Yeats. A Centenary Gathering,’ (ed.) Roger McHugh, The Dolmen Press, 1971, pp.51-56. Copyright sought but not found.

The Visitor: Yuji Shimobayashi
The Artist: Ultan Burke
Script Adaptation: Lara Byrne
Sound Effects: Isabel Claffey
Director: Isabel Claffey

Artist Bios:

Operating out of Sligo town, Ultan Burke brings theatre to his audience in spaces they feel comfort in and ownership of. His shows ‘An unrhyming life’ (2019) and ‘Self’ were based on mental well-being.

Lara Byrne is an arts researcher based in the northwest of Ireland.

Isabel Claffey is a founding member of Shared Light Theatre Company, and has worked in the industry since the 2000s as a performer and director. Recent recorded work includes radio plays for The Dock with Old Time Radio and the part of Mag in “Murmur” for Magpie Productions at the Camden and Edinburgh Fringe Festivals. www.sharedlighttheatrecompany.com

Yuji Shimobayashi is a student of SRUC. He works on farms in the northwest of Ireland, exploring sustainable ways of living.

Series Credits:

This series is kindly funded by the Decades of Centenaries Programme (2013-2023)
Episodes introduced by Isabel Claffey
Sound Engineer: Daniel Bannon
Sound Editor: Colm Condron
Soundtrack to Podcast series, ‘no man’s land,’ (2020) composed by Karen Power
Producer & researcher-writer: Lara Byrne
Curated by the Artistic Director of The Model – Emer McGarry

In the third episode from the series of podcasts, ‘Encounters with Jack B. Yeats,’ from The Model, home of the Niland Collection, a painting by Jack B. Yeats in the Niland Collection, ‘Communicating with Prisoners’ (c.1924) is contextualised against the backdrop of the Irish Civil War.

The oil painting is a transitional work from the artist’s career and portrays seven women as they attempt to communicate with female prisoners imprisoned inside the high bastion tower of Kilmainham Gaol.

In 1923, Kilmainham Gaol was entirely occupied by female political prisoners and these women were Anti-Treaty Republicans, imprisoned here by the Free State Government during the Civil War period (1922-1923). Some of the women in the painting can be identified from contemporary photographs of the time. The second woman from the right in Jack’s painting resembles the republican activist and writer, Dorothy Macardle (1889 -1958).

Communicating With Prisoners by Jack B. Yeats (1871 - 1957)

‘Communicating with Prisoners,’ by Jack B. Yeats, c.1924, oil on canvas, 46 x 61. The Niland Collection, Sligo. ©Estate of Jack B. Yeats, DACs London/IVARO Dublin, 2021

Photograph of Maud Gonne MacBride, Charlotte Despard and Dorothy Macardle as they inspect the burnt-out ruins of a hosiery factory in Balbriggan during the War of Independence in 1920. Dorothy Macardle is wearing a beret and is holding a bag behind her back. Photograph by W.D. Hogan and published in the ‘American Commission on Conditions in Ireland Interim Report,’ 1920. Image courtesy of Kilmainham Gaol Museum/OPW and ©National Museum of Ireland

In the first part of the episode, a tour guide gives the background and context to Jack’s painting, and this is followed by a reading from Dorothy Macardle’s, ‘The Kilmainham Tortures, Experiences of a Released Prisoner,’ dated 1^st May 1923. This 3-page typewritten account is held in Kilmainham Gaol Archive and was used for this podcast courtesy of Kilmainham Gaol Museum/ OPW and ©Estate of Dorothy Macardle, courtesy of Curtis Brown Group Ltd.

Kilmainham Gaol, Photograph taken by Thomas Flewett, Deputy Governor of the Gaol from 1870-87. Image courtesy of Kilmainham Gaol Museum/OPW.

Kilmainham Gaol: The setting of the oil painting, ‘Communicating with Prisoners’ (c.1924) by Jack B. Yeats. Jack took some artistic licence with the composition, omitting the high stone wall and the windows on the lower level of the bastion tower. Photograph taken by Thomas Flewett, Deputy Governor of the Gaol from 1870-87. Image courtesy of Kilmainham Gaol Museum/OPW.

This is Dorothy Macardle’s first-hand account of a particularly terrifying day endured by the women prisoners in Kilmainham Gaol during the Irish Civil War. Access to archival photographs and material used for this episode were made possible through the kind assistance of the staff of Kilmainham Gaol Museum and Brian Crowley, Curator of Collections of Kilmainham Gaol Museum.

This series of podcasts is kindly funded by the Decade of Centenaries Programme and supported by Sligo County Council. Listener discretion is advised for this episode.

Writer & Activist: Dorothy Macardle (1889-1958)

Episode Credits:

‘The Kilmainham Tortures, Experiences of a Released Prisoner,’ by Dorothy Macardle, 1923. This 3-page typewritten essay is held in Kilmainham Gaol Archive and was used for this episode courtesy of Kilmainham Gaol Museum/OPW and © Estate of Dorothy Macardle, courtesy of Curtis Brown Group Ltd.

Tour Guide: written and voiced by Lara Byrne
‘The Kilmainham Tortures, Experiences of a Released Prisoner’: voiced by Isabel Claffey
* Researcher: Lara Byrne
* Directed by Isabel Claffey
* Lara Byrne is an Independent Arts Researcher based in the northwest of Ireland.
* Isabel Claffey is the Director of Shared Light Theatre Company. www.sharedlighttheatrecompany.com

Series Credits:

This series is kindly funded by the Decades of Centenaries Programme (2013-2023)
Episodes introduced by Isabel Claffey
Sound Engineer: Daniel Bannon
Sound Editor: Colm Condron
Soundtrack to Podcast series, ‘no man’s land,’ (2020) composed by Karen Power
Producer & Researcher-writer: Lara Byrne
Curated by the Artistic Director of The Model – Emer McGarry

In this second episode from the series of podcasts, ‘Encounters with Jack B. Yeats,’ from The Model, home of the Niland in Sligo, artists, Ruth Clinton and Niamh Moriarty present GO WEST, a short story set on a westbound train, where a wistful young artist shares a cabin with a stoic bureaucrat. The artist is instantly enthralled by the red-haired female civil servant sitting opposite him. Meanwhile, outside the window a magnificent round tower appears in the distance as the train crosses the sea to a remote island.

This radio play was inspired by a painting by Jack B. Yeats, ‘Man on a Train, Thinking,’ (1927) and a grisly ghost story told by the artist at the annual RHA dinner. This surreal comedy plays out between two conflicting projections of Irish national identity as it was being constructed in the early days of Irish Independence. Blending historical research and present-day conspiracies, the train is used as a metaphor for enduring binary debates such as public versus private; progress versus nostalgia; tourism versus conservation and even Dublin versus the rest of Ireland.

Ruth Clinton and Niamh Moriarty are collaborative artists currently living and working between Leitrim, and Sligo. They use performance, video, sound installation and storytelling, along with a detailed research process, to open up spaces of renewed reflection. Ruth and Niamh’s current practice is concerned with Ireland’s complicated relationship with its colonial past. In 2021, they are critically examining our struggle for a sense of national identity as we move through times of great upheaval.

They have recently presented work for Solas Nua, Washington D.C.; the Douglas Hyde Gallery, Trinity College Dublin, and Askeaton Contemporary Arts. This year Ruth and Niamh’s work is supported by the Arts Council of Ireland, Leitrim County Council and Fingal County Council.

Episode Credits:

GO WEST Radio Play written and produced by Ruth Clinton and Niamh Moriarty
Artist voiced by Peter Broderick
Bureaucrat voiced by Ruth Clinton
Additional voices and sounds by Cormac MacDiarmada and Niamh Moriarty
Music by Aoife Hammond & Ruth Clinton

Series Credits:

This series is kindly funded by the Decades of Centenaries Programme (2013-2023)
Episodes introduced by Isabel Claffey
Sound Engineer: Daniel Bannon
Sound Editor: Colm Condron
Soundtrack to Podcast series, ‘no man’s land,’ (2020) composed by Karen Power
Producer & researcher-writer: Lara Byrne
Curated by Emer McGarry

Michele Horrigan; Stigma Damages

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Encounters with Jack B. Yeats; A series of Podcasts