Splinters

Seven Steps to Birth a Crone

‘What do you do when the life you’ve been building shifts in ways you didn’t expect,

your body lets you know it’s changing, you leave your job and you find yourself in an empty nest?’, wondered Irish poet Mary Kennelly. She spoke to some friends about it and artists Rebecca Carroll  and Susan Hitching, themselves living in the aftermath of serious illness and  profound change in their lives responded to the question.

 ‘Seven Steps to Birth a Crone’ is a strikingly beautiful collaborative work, seeped in the colours and sounds of  Ireland, which attempts to answer the question that plague most of us  at some stage; ‘how do I recast my self given times’s shifting sands?

The title itself was a point of discussion and at times even dissent. Why refer to themselves as Crones? That’s the name given to the third age of womanhood in Celtic mythology. Is that the only choice for woman? Are our choices limited to being either youthful and fertile or wizzened and no longer of use? The male equivalent for an aged man is a hermit, with implications of wisdom and voluntary withdrawal. Why is it that many terms referring to women are so easily made into something negative?

‘Seven Steps to Birth a Crone’ is a shared journey, using image and words, through acknowledgement of change, the use of creativity and imagination to seek out acceptance, the rejection of negative stereotypes. It is a  determination to embrace one’s dance even when the steps have changed.

The exhibition features original artwork, limited edition gyclee prints of blended words and images and limited edition books.

The exhibition opens in St John’s Theatre, Listowel on the 7th October 2023. For further details contact the writer and artists on https://marykennelly.com, https://rebeccacarroll.ie/ and www.susanhitching.com