This blog is a special note sent to the Hooking Our Heritage rug hooking group who traveled over to Ireland in September 2010 with the festival of the Sea. The Five Island Art Gallery would like to send our deepest thanks to all the fine and wonderful people we met in Ireland. We are very excited for their trip to Newfoundland in September 2011. Lifelong friends were made and we are all very grateful for such a fantastic experience.
Great to see the rug hookers and the gallery going from strength to strength! Your wonderful group of rug hookers provided the mainstay and the backbone of the visiting Newfoundland and Labrador delegation to the Ireland Newfoundland Festival in Ireland's South East last September and you have left behind a host of friends and admirers across at least 4 counties. I was so pleased to see that all the enormous research, creative design and skillful craft that all your members put into this wonderful group project received such a positive and appreciative response from the Irish people in the several towns, counties and cities where your exhibition was on display. I know that we on the Irish organizing side probably worked you too hard, with a permanent exhibit in New Ross that had to be ''womanned'' every single day of the festival, whatever else was happening across such an extensive region, with day-long exhibits in such other towns as Dungarvan, Co. Waterford, Carrick-on-Suir, Co. Tipperary and Borris, Co. Carlow and with nimble responses to other unexpected opportunities/demands , such as from the schools in Carrick. But you never flinched and, when one also takes in your musical commentaries and performances, the group truly rose to every occasion.
So it was great that there was such a big turnout for your very special evening in New Ross. There you had many people who would have picked up along the way ,during their lives to date, some inkling of the closeness of the cultural, heritage and plain human links between the Avalon Peninsula, where your forbears settled, and South East Ireland ,whence they travelled across the ocean. But it was wonderful to see how your group's rugs, accompanying book and performances brought the reality home to them - in such a pleasant and enjoyable way - quite HOW close the connections are and how extensive is the scope of the shared frame of reference in looking at life .
Your visit has given fresh heart to all of us in Ireland planning for and promoting Festival 2011 in Newfoundland . We look forward to meeting up on 'The Rock' next September.
Wally Kirwan,
Member and former Vice-Chair, Ireland Newfoundland Partnership Advisory Committee and Board Member, Ireland Newfoundland Connections.
Video from the Hooking Our Hertiage group on their visit to Ireland.
Produced by Bill Coultas from Springwater Productions.
