‘THE WITCHING HOUR’by Margo BanksGreenlane Gallery Dingle 18th of June 2022 _________ The Dingle Druid Fire Ritual with Julí Ní Mhaoileóin 3:30PM – 4:30PM Fire Ritual capacity limited to 25 people – please RSVP your attendance by email to susan@greenlanegallery.com |
 Julí Ní Mhaoileóin, “The Dingle Druid” |
‘THE WITCHING HOUR’By Margo Banks |
| Margo’s connection to her mother and family-place plays heavily on her work. She tells the many stories of her mother; her childhood, her land and its rich folklore tales. Her drawings are the remembrance and the expression of both these stories and of the changes seen in the landscape of Teeromoyle in South West Kerry – Her mother’s place. Margo returns here often, It is a sort of time-machine for her: sometimes joyous, sometimes oppressive; veined with tragedy and shadows from harsher times. She has said: “Painting the field sometimes makes me feel snug, warm and sheltered; and other times exposed, vulnerable and turbulent.” Accenting her ancestor’s land, its myths and traditions, Margo captures totemic animals particular to her mother’s hillside. There is nothing sentimental about Banks’ ‘beasts of the field’. They shimmer and abound with edgy character; with an elemental, almost mythic aspect. Her signature hares, based on the Irish subspecies, Lepus timidus hibernicus, are pookas of a kind. Glowering, startled or pensive, they dance, skip, careen on their spring-loaded hind limbs, or simply squat, sphinx-like. Embedded in poetry and folklore, she says of these animals’ wild and mysterious presence: “They just have this otherness about them. They share the world with us, but they don’t seem really aware of us”. ‘Pulled by the gravitational force of memory, towards the shadow land of the past, Margo mines the rich folklore of her mother’s community and her intimate affinity with nature.’ Des Kenny, Draíocht. “My mother’s past is my past’… |
