Remembering the birds and beasts
Two artists have been working with residents of five community hospitals in West Cork to unlock their memories of animals and birds.
The sound of a lion’s roar might not seem like something that would come up while talking to older people in rural Ireland about their memories of animals.
But for the children of Dunmanway, where Duffy’s circus was based for six months of the year throughout the forties and fifties, the exotic animals they grew up near left a lifelong impression.
When artist Tess Leak and filmmaker Sharon Whooley set out to explore the memories of older people in five community hospitals in West Cork, in Dunmanway Community Hospital, out poured vivid memories of Duffy’s circus.
“Some of the Duffy’s circus people are buried in the church yard in Dunmanway, they were so much a part of the community for such a long time,” Tess tells Tripe + Drisheen. “Priscilla the lion tamer married James Duffy and is buried in Dunmanway.”
“The elephants would be brought down to the lake to drink. Children there grew up with exotic animals: there was a lion cub born in Dunmanway. One of the amazing stories about the circus was that someone told us that when she would go to do her shopping, she could hear the lion roaring.”
Tess started working with well-established West Cork outreach programme Arts for Health over a decade ago: the programme sees artists team up with community healthcare providers to bring beneficial creative programmes to the lives of long-term residents of community hospitals and daycare settings.
Both a visual artist and a cellist with the Vespertine Quintet, Tess says that any medium that provokes conversation when working in healthcare settings is of benefit.
“I suppose that over the years, I’ve realised that the most important art form when working with people in hospitals is the art of conversation,” she says with a smile.
“Anything that sparks conversations, whether that’s a song or an object or a photograph, is valuable. I don’t really think about them separately now.”
In early 2022, Tess and her regular collaborator, Baltimore-based filmmaker Sharon Whooley, started their latest project, The Museum of Birds and Beasts. They enlisted the help of The Museum of Country Life in Co Mayo, borrowing items from their “handling collection” to help spark memories amongst older residents of West Cork’s community hospitals.
The Duffy’s circus story is just one element of the resulting exhibition.
What they found was a treasure-trove of lore that is on the cusp of being forgotten, a world where the connection to animals was a part of everyday life.
“These people are genuinely the last with these memories,” Sharon says. “One woman told me they’d kept a fox toe in a jar to draw out thorns. They were so enmeshed, animals and humans. They were all the one, completely connected. For our generation and the generations that come after, we’re so separate from that world.”
The idea for The Museum of Birds and Beasts emerged from an earlier project, The Museum of Song, Sharon explains: “During The Museum of Song we’d come across so much animal lore: for toothache, bite the leg of a frog. The cure for whooping cough was to pass the child around a donkey nine times. Animals were an intrinsic part of every story of everyday life.”
Some moving memories of a favourite animal such as a horse form part of the exhibition, as well as memories of bringing sows into the house to farrow.
As well as bringing objects from the Museum of Country Life to spark conversation, Tess and Sharon enlisted the help of renowned Lough Fooey basketmaker Joe Hogan, who visited community hospitals with them, making donkey pannier baskets.
“Joe came into two hospitals and literally sat down on the floor of the day room and started making them from nothing,” Tess says. “It was magic.”
“People who had never seen them made or people who had were equally engrossed,” Sharon says. “One woman, Mary, told us that her dad had made pannier baskets like them. Joe has a lovely way about him, just literally down to earth. People were firing questions at him.”
One resident, Sheila Nagle, responded to Joe’s basketry by remembering a donkey that had worked with her father in his time at Biggs’ fuel merchants in Bantry.
“The donkey would walk through the back door into the shop and up to the counter, where my dad would give it sugar lumps before it walked out the front door,” Sheila told Tess and Sharon. “This would happen at the end of every working day, after the donkey had finished its deliveries.”
In recent years, in his own arts practice, Joe has been mimicking the nest-building techniques of birds and some of his nest basketry is also featured in the exhibition.
A lot of the embodied knowledge visible in The Museum of Birds and Beasts relates to craft practices that are going extinct in our modern throw-away materials economy. Súgán rope was a particular talking point for participants, with one older person demonstrating how to make a “cat’s paw” end to the rope.
Older people currently resident in West Cork’s community hospitals have lived through an enormous period of technological change, from rural electrification right the way up to digitisation.
In the past, people worked ingeniously with whatever materials were most plentiful in their environment to create the tools they needed for survival.
Amongst the objects borrowed from the Museum of Country Life for the project are lobster pots that Tess and Sharon way were of particular interest in Castletownbere Community Hospital, where maritime lore and memories of fishing as a way of life were common.
“There is such amazing skill and craft in these objects, and they’re beautiful objects to look at as well,” Sharon says.
Sharon, who works with Harvest Films, was not filming or recording during this project but says her deep interest in archiving and preserving cultural memories was a cornerstone of the project for her.
“I don’t know how best to articulate it, but I just think it’s really important to preserve these memories,” she says. “When they’re gone they’re gone.”
The skills and resourcefulness displayed by previous generations is evident in the stories gathered for The Museum of Birds and Beasts, she says.
“Everyone knew what to do: they were a lot more confident in their abilities and were very practical, self-sufficient and resourceful. Everyone had so many skills and had such a kind of natural intelligence.”
“We’ve lost so much. Their lives were so rich. It was tough, but there was such camaraderie and community spirit, People needed each other, needed to help their neighbours, so there was a constant interaction. They weren’t as distracted as we are today.”
The Museum of Birds and Beasts runs until February 23 at the county library, County Hall, Cork. It’s open from 9am to 5.30pm, Monday to Friday.