Art and Literature feature at Monasterevin Hopkins festival
Broadcaster and journalist Olivia O’Leary with Sr Ann Scully, her sister Theresa O’Leary and her daughter Emily Tansey. Ms O’Leary’s lecture at the Hopkins festival was “How Poets Contribute to Society”
ART and Literature combined last weekend in Monasterevin for a cultural event which drew a huge audience to the local community centre.
The occasion was the annual Monasterevin Hopkins Festival and the ‘Artists for Peace’ exhibition with the former featuring contributors from Ireland and England and the exhibition featuring hundreds of works of art including paintings, ceramics, sculptures, montages etc.
Opening the event, Irene Kyffin, who lives in London and is chairperson of the Monasterevin Hopkins Society, said that the array of artistic expression and talent was breathtaking and it displayed the remarkable range and diversity of the artists.
She added that the Hopkins Festival has been attracting an international audience for many years and that 2024 reflected a varied and interesting number of lectures.
Irene added that the amount of work involved in getting the Hopkins Festival and the art exhibition organised depended on the contributions of a huge number of people, all voluntarily, which went a long way to making the event such a success.
Sr Ann Scully, based in the Convent of Mercy, Monasterevin, and a native of County Laois, born and reared near the Rock of Dunamase, together with the Monasterevin Knit and Natter group, in conjunction with Blueway Art Studio, organised the art exhibition.
A feature of the art exhibition was a painting class by Jean Ryan Hakizimana who is a painter, art teacher, author, editor, producer and movie maker.
He honed his skills in sketching and painting from an early age and many of his works have been sold nationally and internationally.
National and international media have featured his works and many of his paintings have been used as book covers by eminent authors.
Following the art exhibition there was the annual concert which, this year, was held in the new St Paul’s Secondary School when the guest artist was tenor, Patrick Hyland.
His repertoire included arias from operas, traditional Irish airs, songs from musicals.
Also included in the weekend’s events was an exhibition of drawings by Gerard Manley Hopkins from the Henry Ransom Centre, The University of Texas, Austin.
These were researched by Anni Wilton Jones, PRO of the Monasterevin Hopkins Society.
The first paper on the Friday night in the Hopkins festival was by chairperson Irene Kyffin entitled “The Harlem Renaissance” in which she traced the evolution and development of the Afro-American population following the American Civil War and their migration from the deep south to the north, particularly the Harlem area of New York.
It was a fascinating and detailed history which outlined the hardships and the successes of the Afro American population up to the present day.
The lecture was supported by slides, which in many cases, spoke more than a thousand words.
On Saturday morning the first guest speaker was journalist and author Olivia O’Leary who has presented current affairs programmes for RTÉ, BBC and ITV.
In recent years she presented RTÉ Radio One’s .
Her lecture was entitled ‘How Poets contribute to Society’ in which she outlined the power of poetry and its ability to succinctly get across a message in a minimum of words.
The second lecture was by writer and broadcaster Eoghan Corry and it was on “Emily Lawless, Kildare Poet and Author 1845-1913”.
Eoghan outlined Emily Lawless’s concern for the conditions of native Irish people in post-Famine Ireland and how she communicated her concerns to people in power at the time.
It was an interesting lecture highlighting the concerns of an establishment figure to conditions in the country but her involvement and concerns were really at a distance from the actualities of the situation.
The festival concluded with the open call: ‘My Favourite Hopkin’s Poem’ which was held in Monasterevin House, by kind permission of the Presentation Generalate.
It was preceded by a reading of Rita Kelly’s poems who was unavoidably absent.
This segment of the festival is especially valued by the Monasterevin Hopkins Committee because it was to Monasterevin House that Hopkins, as a guest of the Miss Cassidy sisters, came on vacation on a number of occasions.
