MARIA Simonds-Gooding is an impressive sight to behold in her studio in Dún Chaoin. Standing in front of her easel, an electric drill in hand, her gloves, protective apron and helmet donned, sparks flying, she’s a woman with a mission. As she recently started to work on large aluminium sheets of metal, an impressive-looking power tool hangs suspended from the ceiling. Framed by the light, a fine view of An Blascaod Mór at her back, she’s tall, straight-backed, fair-haired, focused and just a little bit frightening.
Having turned 70 some months ago, a celebration of her life's work has just opened in the Blasket Interpretative Centre, down the road from her cottage. The collection, which includes some of these newer pieces, is entitled The Art of Maria Simonds-Goodingor Céiliúradh Mháire Mhaith, which literally translated means a Celebration of Good Maria. Máire Mhaith is how her neighbours often refer to her warmly as she's been based in this part of the west Kerry Gaeltacht since 1968. Her family moved home to Co Kerry in 1947.
If you step into her stone cottage, you’ll be struck by the old-style setting – a settle up against one wall, an old-fashioned thin-legged wooden chair in the corner, an open fire with sparks flying up the chimney. Arched overhead are the old wooden beams of a very old house – all of these rafters were brought over from the Great Blasket Island by Mike Sé ’Faight when he travelled over from his childhood home on the island to build his new home on the mainland.
It was Simonds-Gooding who later bought the empty cottage to bring it back to life and live in it. In one room at the back, her etchings, lithographs, oils, photographs, prints, illustrations and plates are stored and catalogued in custom-made cubby holes and on shelves. Meticulous and organised, her house heaves with the weight of precious materials. As well as her own work, each artefact, which she has collected over the years, is gleaming, preserved and working. Peig Sayers’s crane is over the fireplace at the heart of it all.
And in her front room hang the paintings of An File, Maidhc Ó Gaoithín, who was one of Peig Sayers’s sons. He was in his 60s and a good deal older than the striking, young Simonds-Gooding when they met first in 1968, yet they struck up a rare friendship. He queried her about her work that first day so she gave him some of her paints and paper, not knowing if he’d use them or throw them into the fire. He began painting and drawing and by the time of his death in 1974, he had completed a fine collection of exactly 188 paintings and drawings.
There are naive drawings of seals sunning themselves on rocks, puffins chattering away on cliff edges, the Blasket Island in glorious colours, some powerful portraits of Peig herself, an aerial view of a coffin being carried in a naomhóg to the mainland for a funeral, stormy seas, seagulls in flight or watching from a cliff perch, boats trying to land while waves crash against the rocks.
One drawing in particular, done in pencil and crayon, is curiously significant in that it shows the close camaraderie between the poet and the artist. They are sitting side by side, huddled in close together, their heads leaning in towards one another, and they are framed under a pointed arch of blue. It’s a cosy love nest and underneath, An File describes in Irish how happy they are there together – their hearts bright, their minds at ease. The two shared an exhibition once before in 1974 at the re-opening of Scoil Dhún Chaoin.
When An File died, he’d left all his paintings and drawings as well as the precious relics he had belonging to his mother to his good friend and neighbour Simonds-Gooding. Some of these paintings form part of this current exhibition.
As for Simonds-Gooding’s own work, it is minimalist and spare. It can feature headlands, sheep, the Skellig Rock, field by a bog or a stone place inside a field boundary. They are described as “metaphorical islands”, but are not “about an insular concentration on the local”, according to Dr Yvonne Scott, director of the Trinity Irish Art Research Centre in TCD. While addressing the landscape, she says, “it would be a mistake to read these images as nostalgic, or about issues of regional identity.” Simonds- Gooding’s viewpoint “the birds-eye or mapping view, as though observed from above, revealing an objective coherence of forms and relationships,” says Scott.
Catherine Marshall, of the Royal Irish Academy, who is the show’s curator, reminds us that comparisons are sometimes made between Simonds-Gooding’s work and that of Paul Henry who discovered his artistic identity when he visited Achill for a short holiday in 1911 and stayed there until 1919. But, she adds, “Simonds-Gooding’s commitment to the Blasket Islands and the surrounding area is more sustained.” And, she adds, time spent by Simonds-Gooding in other places “serves only to show the centrality of the Blasket area in her work and life”.
Eibhlín de Paor, of Ealaín na Gaeltachta, and Mícheál de Mórdha, director of the Blasket Interpretative Centre, were both instrumental in organising this major exhibition on the Dingle Peninsula. It runs until
the end of the current tourist season in early October. Lucky are those who’ll get a chance to view this.