Roscommon Arts Centre presents Nósanna, a two-person exhibition by artists Eileen Fair and Gary Robinson, curated by Eamonn Maxwell. The exhibition explores how ritual shapes Irish art, memory, and everyday life, bringing together practices rooted in assemblage, performance, and mark-making. Both artists, selected from the Hivernal group exhibition at Roscommon Arts Centre in 2025, present work that probes belief, trace, and transformation.
Eileen Fair’s installations draw on rituals of making and veneration, taking from nature to give back to nature through collecting, cleansing, articulating, and displaying. Her assemblages of bones, natural debris, and found objects become zoomorphic specimens and chimeric hybrid creatures, a liminal menagerie that recalls a bestiary, taxidermy collection, and fossil display. Presented as relics in vitrines and curiosity cabinets, these artefacts operate as memento mori and memento vivere, evoking both mortality and vitality and reflecting our interdependent lives with other species. Her Blind Drawings with animal bones further explore touch, intuition, and the unseen as a form of devotional gesture.
Gary Robinson’s Wind Letter series begins from the belief that the wind possesses a mysterious, invisible language that can be sensed but never fully deciphered. The creation of each Wind Letter is a ritualistic process in which the artist releases intention, allowing asemic transcripts to emerge through action rather than analysis. Developed at the Tyrone Guthrie Centre and during a residency in Los Angeles, the project now focuses on significant sites in the Irish Midlands. Continuing ancient traditions, Robinson burnt Wind Letters at The Hill of Uisneach in Co. Westmeath, offering them to the elements as an act of homage and surrender. Paintings and photographs reflect on communication and interpretation, forming a personal reply to the letters and documenting their making.
Together, Fair and Robinson propose ritual as an evolving practice, inviting viewers to reflect on Ireland’s layered culture of devotion, landscape, and everyday life.
Eileen Fair and Gary Robinson were both selected from our Roscommon Arts Centre’s 2024 Hivernal exhibition.
