Clúdach: Cover

Abstract

Clúdach:Cover Angela Griffith Click for larger view View full resolution Cover. elke thönnes, glendalough, 2020 carborundum and aquatint Image used with the artist's permission. Nestled in the Wicklow Mountains, Glendalough is one of Ireland's most visited tourist locations. Its name in Irish, Gleann da Locha, rather prosaically translates as "the valley of the two lakes," giving little sense of the area's majestic beauty. In addition to being a site of stunning natural features, it is a place of national historic importance. Its numerous ruins testify to its evolution from a seventh-century Christian hermitage to an ecclesiastical center. It became one of the most important pilgrimage routes in Leinster, the pious drawn to the shrine of its founder, St. Kevin. In the eleventh and twelfth centuries some sought to establish a diocesan see in Glendalough in opposition to Dublin; however, this was not to be. While it retained its importance as a religious site, like other religious settlements across the country following Henry VIII's Dissolution of the Monasteries, by the 1600s the majority of Glendalough's church buildings were in ruins. While church authority had dissolved, the location continued to engage and host the devotions of the local populace. Into the nineteenth century, its pattern day, held on the feast of St. Kevin, June 3, drew large crowds to pray and to celebrate, these activities attracting the interest of artists such as Joseph Peacock and Maria Spilsbury Taylor. From the late eighteenth century, Glendalough and its environs became the focus of a number of artists and those associated with the antiquarian movement. The picturesque landscape with its scattered ruins attracted the likes of Gabriel Beranger, Jonathan Fisher, and George Petrie. Significantly, their work and that of others was produced as engraved prints and as book illustrations whose dissemination ensured Glendalough's fame as a place of historical importance and spectacular natural beauty, recognized both at home and abroad. The artist Elke Thönnes has lived and worked in Ireland for over thirty years and is a regular visitor to Glendalough. Despite the fact that the location—as a magnet for tourists and a place of refuge for near-local Dublin urbanites (of [End Page 157] which Thönnes is one)—can be crowded, the area retains a zen-like quality for her. She is fascinated by its religious history, admiring how Irish monastic founders located their places of prayer in wild isolation, searching for the godly in their relationship with nature. Thönnes believes that in making art, an individual is in search of something bigger than themselves. She argues that there can be limitations to what can be described verbally and that visual expression can be a more effective form of communication. There is a long tradition of Irish artists working in the genre of landscape. These images have been created from a myriad of perspectives, such as the colonizer's idealized viewpoint, as a point of departure for the poetic romantic, as nationalistic metaphors of heritage and identity, as modernist vehicles of self-expression. For Thönnes, despite her years of living in Ireland, the Irish landscape retains its sense of wonder. She is rooted in the country, but there remains a small albeit welcome sense of being an outsider. She has traveled the length and breadth of the island, and she looks to map her own identity within its borders, her childhood voice asking, am I there yet? She seeks to find, and define, her own space within the landscape. For Thönnes, as a city dweller all her life, the landscape, in particular the coastline, is associated with holidays. This pattern comes from her earliest days growing up in Cologne, Germany. Family trips were always centered around nature, and she describes them as magical. Her father, a veteran of World War II, wanted to visit places across Germany and Europe, in particular Norway and Finland, to see and experience landscapes removed from the traumatic contexts of war. Being in nature recalls happy times for Thönnes, times of release and restoration for her parents. Thönnes's method of working includes taking numerous photographs and, at times, making preliminary...