Helen Comerford, an artist and her legacy – curated by Catherine Marshall

Helen Comerford (1945–2024), the artist and her legacy.

An exhibition presented in two parts.

The first part of this exhibition, Helen Comerford the Artist, is a solo show of work across a range of disciplines by Helen Comerford who died very suddenly on March 24 th last. Comerford’s long career, lasting up to the day before her death at the age of 78, embraced sculpture, painting and installation, all of it inspired by her deep study of anthroposophy and her humanity as much as by her total commitment to art. This show, contrary to our earlier notice, will focus on the last big body of work made by Helen, a series of large
paintings in oil and encaustic called The Nineteen, a group of which will be shown here. She was a founder member of Na Cailleacha, the collective of 8 older women artists, and during COVID 19 she was featured in a short documentary on TG4. Her work has been shown in places all over the world, including solo shows in Germany, Greece, The Netherlands, The USA and Wales and is included in the collections of the Irish Museum of Modern Art, the Hugh Lane Gallery, the University of Limerick, the Butler Gallery, and Trinity College, Dublin.

Helen Comerford, the Legacy, centres on her inspirational work as a teacher at Ormonde College, Kilkenny and as an important giver to her community. It fleshes out Comerford’s belief that the arts are central to the health of society, which led to her involvement with sculptural symposia, the Kilkenny Arts Festival, the Wexford Arts Centre and the artists support organisation, Visual Artists Ireland. It will bring together work by former students who went on to have professional careers and who have sustained that through challenging times ever since. These will include photography, sculptures and paintings by artists such as Lorna Corrigan, Andrew Pike and the late George McCutcheon who went on to become studio artists at KCAT in Callan, which Comerford did much to shape and encourage in its formative years.

Richard Coghlan, also a student of Helen’s at Ormonde College will show some of his innovative photography and Etaoin Holohan, who curates Fennelly’s in Callan as part of her embedded community practice will be represented by a work in progress, a creative placemaking project, ‘Til now’, developed in collaboration with Eilis Lavelle and the London architectural practice, Studio Weave.

Dates & Times:

• Thursday 12th: 3pm – 5pm
• Friday 13th: 12pm-3pm, 5:30pm-7pm
• Saturday 14th: 12pm-4pm and 6:30pm-8:30pm
• Sunday 15th: 12:30pm-4pm