WATCH: Women of the Islands -  Meet the West Cork woman who has taken Bere Island to her heart

A FEW years ago, Mary K Sullivan from Bere Island was rushing to make a hairdressing appointment in Ballydehob, quite some distance away. When she finally made it into the salon, catching her breath, she explained the she had just come straight off an island.

“ I come from an island too,” announced another client sitting in a nearby chair.

This was a serendipitous meeting for Mary, as the women turned out to be Majella O’Neill Collins, who lived on Sherkin Island.

Majella is a renowned artist whose paintings adorn the walls of some very well-known collectors, including the actor George Clooney, and as well as being an artist, she is also a facilitator on the BA Visual Arts degree programme, Technical University Dublin, which takes place on Sherkin Island.

With hairdryers humming in the background, the two island women got chatting, and as a result of her conversation with Majella, the idea of doing the art degree course on Sherkin piqued Mary’s interest.

In fact, for a long time she had nurtured the idea of it, but the demands of running a business with her husband, as well as raising three children, not to mention the extra planning it would take to get off one island and on to another to attend lectures, meant that so far Mary had not found the right time to pursue her interest in doing an art degree.

That chance meeting with Majella prompted Mary into considering it again, and now that her three children were practically reared at this point, she decided the time was right - so she applied and was successful and went on to achieve a first class honours degree.

“The Sherkin Island community are amazing and very supportive. 

They are so generous and offer their land and resources to enable the students to exhibit their work. It’s a wonderful course.

Since her graduation, Mary has garnered a reputation as an extremely talented visual and performance artist.

In 2018, she received the RDS Taylor Art Award for ‘At Home At War’. She has exhibited in The National Botanic Gardens of Ireland, The Royal Hibernian Academy, the Leyton Gallery London, and Uillinn West Cork Arts Centre in Skibbereen.

Bere island holds the reminders of a former British military presence, with signal towers and Martello towers dating back to the Napoleonic Wars as well as several gun batteries, the largest of which is Lonehort Battery, where Mary launched her first solo exhibition ‘Breathe’ as part of the Beara Arts festival in 2019. This was an immersive morse-code inspired sound and visual installation which saw over 600 visitors in the course of a week.

In this installation, Mary focused on contemporary anxieties through her series of works installed in the underground rooms of the ex- artillery shelter.

“The sites are potent reminders of our past colonial history and the types of political regimes which existed on the island,” she said.

Her life on Bere Island continues to have a distinct influence on her work, and she remains constantly inspired by her surroundings and the visual impact of both the land and seascape.

She counts herself privileged to have been introduced to an amazing network of artists during her degree programme on Sherkin Island, and this culminated in performing with the unique artist Amanda Coogan, who many will recognise from her work as a sign language interpreter on TV shows such as The Late Late Toy Show.

In December, 2018, Mary, along with 40 other Irish artists performed ‘Floats in the Aether’, Coogan’s large scale performance marking the centenary of the parliamentary vote for women in Ireland, and the election of Constance Markievicz as the first woman to ever be elected to the British parliament.

Having lived on Bere for 34 years, Mary, originally from Bantry, has taken the island to her heart. She originally came to live on Bere when she fell in love with her husband, islander Mike Sullivan, and since then she has fully embraced the island lifestyle with forward planning being the order of the day.

There is nothing she loves better than being out on the water alongside Mike potting for lobster, and the couple work closely together running their marine business.

She has witnessed changes to the environment over the years and says that the purple sea urchins which used to be plentiful and once a popular export to the French market are now rarely to be found.

Mary is passionate about the ocean which surrounds her island home and regularly heads off in her boat to the mainland for various appointments and to do her shopping.

I absolutely love being out on the water. For many of us who live on the island, having your own boat is the same as having access to a car if you were living on the mainland. You need your independence.

Making sure the car is waiting on the pier on the mainland and full of petrol is one of the most important things for the islanders when they land on the mainland and need to rush off to appointments.

One time in particular that Mary remembers so well, was when her first child decided to come into the world six weeks early. It turned out to be quite the adventure getting off the island. The tide was low and after the mad dash into the boat and across to the mainland, Mary ended up having to climb up the steps attached to the side of the pier, while in labour, to get to the other side, and just in time to embark on the long journey to Cork to have her child safely delivered.

For her second child, she decided not to take any chances.

“I didn’t want to get caught out this time, so when my second baby was due, I went to my home place in Bantry. I knew that my parents were nervous too of me being stranded on the island in case this baby came early as well.”

In September, 2019, Mary got the opportunity to work within her community as part of the Artist in the Community Research and Development Scheme, and for this she decided to turn her focus onto the lives of the women who lived there.

This artist community award by Create Ireland helped bring to fruition her idea of expressing the hold that the island had upon the women, and culminated in the project named simply ‘The Hold’, a title which had multi-faceted meanings.

Work on the project was stalled due to the death of her beloved mother Bridget, but the process was reignited in September, 2020, when Mary sent a letter around to the women of the island hoping that some of them might decide to participate.

She was facing into a totally different experience of working in collaboration with others because previously she had been a solo artist, and this was going to be the first time she would be working communally to create a piece of work. Mary hoped for a response from at least six or seven women, but when 24 said yes, she was both surprised and overjoyed.

“ The response was overwhelmingly positive and far exceeded my expectations. The women came from a diverse mixture of backgrounds, mothers, farmers, retired people, women from all different walks of life, but the one thing they had in common was that they called Bere Island home.”

Then, in October, 2020, Covid restrictions were back in place so Mary’s initial idea of meeting up as a group was no longer possible. Undeterred, however, she went around to each home of the participants, and from their gardens and with the sound of the ocean murmuring in the background, Mary and the women discussed what aspects of their lives they would like to document.

During their conversations, it became clear to Mary that the island had a very strong hold over each individual woman, whether they had moved there from another place, or whether they were born and reared on the island itself.

Together, they decided to create a patchwork quilt, each woman creating a patch, and each patch marking significant events in their lives.

“This work was a powerful way of seeing the everyday experiences of the women who lived on the island raised to an artistic level,” said Mary.

The extraordinary in the ordinary was captured throughout those lockdown days, as sewing machines whirred throughout the island while each woman worked away on their individual patch.

They stitched in materials from dresses, garments and fabrics redolent with meaning from their lives. Wedding dresses, snippets from clothes belonging to loved ones who had passed, all lovingly sewn into the patches.

“With the second lockdown upon us, each person worked individually from home. A text-only WhatsApp group was set up and this was our only form of communication with one another,” explained Mary.

In the end, what emerged was a beautiful quilt, a tangible legacy of the strange time when ‘normal’ life was suspended, and everything was put on hold.

The creative process of the Bere Island women has been beautifully documented in a book , The Hold, by Mary, in collaboration with Bere Island Women Create.

The poet Paula Meehan wrote the introduction and said: “In the face of a global emergency, one coping strategy was to bring attention to each moment of being, to stay in the now, and not to think too far ahead.”

On Thursday, September 21, as part of the Bere island Arts festival, there will be an exhibition of ‘The Hold’. Through the lens of their quilt making, performance, written words, sound and photography, this exhibition will provide a glimpse into the hold which Bere Island has upon each of the women involved.

On Friday, September 22, there will be an official launch of the book The Hold by Majella O’Neill Collins, who will make the journey from one island to another.

There will also be an exhibition in Uillinn West Cork Arts Centre in Skibbereen, from Friday, November 11, to December 20, of Mary’s work , From the Inside Out and the Outside In. This work focuses on the fragility of the island people, while at the same time highlighting their strength and resilience.

For more details, see bereislandartsfestival.ie and www.westcorkartscentre.com

Next week: Claudia Meloni, originally from the island of Sardinia in the Mediterranean - lives on another island in West Cork now, Heir island, with a population of just 30.