Exhibition Preview + Artist Tour - Alan Raggett - Gort Gortaithe / Injured

Artist Tour + Preview on Friday 7 March - 6.00pm

The land tells us a story and our job is to listen. While researching postcards for my last series of paintings of the Kerry landscape, I was focusing on the notes written on the cards, from people as they interacted with the landscape. This research led me to the stories, history, and mythology of the landscape itself. The Healy Pass, the serpentine famine road then known as Bealach Scairt became of particular interest to me. It was rebuilt as part of the Public Works Scheme in 1847. I have often driven it and hiked up the sides of its hills and mountains. Its peaks named crudely and emotively, including Knockanouganish (Cnoc an Uaignis /Hill of loneliness). You can almost feel the heartbeats of the Irish people who were subjected to freezing temperatures, with scarcely any clothing and even less food as they attempted to work on this road. Many of them perishing and buried by the roadside.

Alan Raggett (b.1977, Kilkenny, Ireland) is a visual artist, living, and working in Kenmare, Co. Kerry. Raggett is a fully committed and energised professional with a strong track record as a practicing artist and arts professional, working for 25 years in the arts industry in Ireland, alongside curators and other artists to bring exhibitions to domestic and international audiences.

Working primarily in oil paint, Raggett’s work is ambitious, original, and distinctive. It deals mainly with the abstraction and retelling of the source image. Images, found and self-documented, are retold by means of collage, rephotographing, cropping and manipulation. These manipulated images become the starting points for his paintings where he explores ideas of repetition, contemporary landscape, and storytelling.

He has exhibited regionally and nationally, and his work is held in private collections worldwide.

Host or Publisher The Regional Cultural Centre