December Issue 2001
DownTownes in Greenville, SC, Offers Works by Donna H. Goodman & Dewey N. Ervin
DownTownes, in Greenville, SC, will be hosting an exhibit of photographs by Donna H. Goodman and Dewey N. Ervin. Entitled Fact, Fiction, & Fairies: Images from Ireland which will be on view Dec. 13 - Jan. 24.
Donna Goodman and Dewey Ervin were extremely fortunate to have been chosen as artists-in -residents to Burren College of Alt in Ballyvaughan, County Clare. They spent the month of July, 2001 exploring and making images of Burren with forays around Galway Bay, County Connemara, and the Aran Islands.
Goodman and Ervin spent the majority of time in Burren - to them no where else in Ireland equals the varied rich concentration of stone monuments, particularly wedge tombs, cashels, twelfth to fifteenth century churches and tower houses. The Burren is difficult to describe. The word is derived from "bhoireann", which means "a stony place." This weirdly beautiful landscape is mainly limestone sheets of bare, fissured pavements with intricate cave systems underground. It is an extraordinary place where arctic and Mediterranean plants co-mingle.
By far, the most rewarding aspect of this trip to Goodman and Ervin was meeting the Irish people and becoming steadfast friends with so many of them. Always smiling, always hospitable, the residents took them to all the special, secret places. They showed Goodman and Ervin the rocks, land forms flora, and wildlife of the burren. "We walked in the prehistoric stone circles, scrambled through the hazel scrub to sit beside blessed wells, and sat in the shade of medieval monasteries," said the travelers.
During all these treks, the two were told the stories and as it has been for thousands of years - in the telling, they, too, came to believe, The people all seem to know the works of Yeats and often end sentences or make a point with his words. Their new Irish friends told them about the "wee people, the Irish Sidhe (pronounced "shee") and Goodwin and Ervin made special side trips to visit where these fairies surely live.
There are a few things to remember as you look at their images: it really is this green (you will never really know what green can be until you see Ireland); living among prehistoric and the medieval monuments is routine; the written word and the oral tradition really does express the voice of the ordinary people; those strange floating sounds of Irish music are "heard in the wind, in the waves, and caught with the inner ear from around the corners of castles and ring forts;" and importantly, there is an intuitive belief that mystic beings just are- influencing, though unseen, every action of life and forces of nature.
Goodman has been a teacher of art for thirty years, and an artist for fifty. She has been a painter and a printmaker and has been working with digital images for ten years. "For me, this medium is the most coherent and the most pleasurable," says Goodman. She is a professor of art and education at Francis Marion University in Florence, SC.
She says, "Most of my images in this show are the Fiction and Fairies. I've always been storyteller and I've always believed in fairies and spirits. It was wonderful being in a country that entirely believes in them too!"
Images have always excited Dewy Nelson Ervin, all kinds of images. He first produced images (like lots of others my age) in my darkened bathroom at home around age ten with a Sears Tower Developing Kit. Yards of film and many cameras later digital imaging evolved. Now "film" is a memory card and the "dark room" is a computer. (Ervin heard Ansel Adams predict this in 1973 and had no idea what he was talking about.) Being able to manipulate color with almost no limits gave a real boost to Ervin's excitement for images. Digital tools make the wall between creativity and hard copy more transparent.
An Orthopaedic Surgeon, Ervin makes his home in Florence, SC.
Ervin says, "I am the 'Fact' part of this show. My pleasure is to display some of what struck me as significant on a month's immersion in the land of the fairies and the people who respect them. There is a component genetic vibration that surfaces being in Ireland, especially for those of us who are Irish and Scotch Irish."
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