Rural Mayo features in poignant new multimedia exhibition

GALWAY City Library is hosting a poignant new exhibition of paintings by contemporary Irish artist Sinéad Burke.

When God Was a Gasúr is a moving series of paintings based on stills from archival family footage filmed in rural County Mayo in 1960.

The exhibition's title draws from a phrase the artist’s father frequently used when reminiscing about days gone by - a saying rich with humour, myth, nostalgia, and the acknowledgement of a vanishing world.

The exhibition opened this week, with its official opening celebrated last night, and it runs until October 10.

The original 1960 film was captured by the artist’s aunt when she returned home from the United States for her father's funeral - she and several siblings had emigrated due to the lack of economic opportunity in Ireland. What began as informal family documentation now serves as a vital piece of social history, recording a specific era of departure, return, and kinship in rural Ireland.

Bringing the archive fully to life, the exhibition features an immersive multimedia display. Original family footage is screened alongside intimate audio recordings of the artist’s father, uncle and aunts reminiscing about the olden days.

The sensory experience is enhanced by a soundscape of traditional Irish music, all of which is performed by many of the children featured in the original 1960 footage, now adults.

The artist also contributes her own later memory of turf-saving traditions through handcrafted turf sods made from used teabags, reflecting on the strong tea served during these expeditions. And on top of this sod rests the very kettle seen in the archival footage.

Burke’s paintings transform these fragmented, ordinary moments - children playing in the hay, men drinking tea in the fields, and families working the land - into atmospheric works that balance memory, myth, and inheritance.

Her father appears throughout the collection as a young man, decades before the artist was born. The artist has also included photo-transfer images from her late grandmother’s notebook, which contains the addresses of her children, who emigrated around the world.

By allowing faces to blur, paint to drip, and landscapes to dissolve into unfinished space, Burke mirrors the fragile, unstable nature of memory itself. The brightly coloured edges reflect the colours of the bloom in the original footage.

Rather than a faithful reproduction of the film, these works capture its emotional residue: the tenderness, distance, and mystery of inherited images.

At once deeply personal and universally resonant, When God Was a Gasúr offers a profound reflection on emigration, storytelling, rural Irish identity, manual labour, and the persistence of family history across generations.