Sheela-na-Gig

Artist Barrie Cooke (b. 1931 - d. 2014)

Datec. 1962-1963

MediumMixed media on board

Dimensions120 x 125 cm

ClassificationsMixed Media

Credit LineCollection & image © Hugh Lane Gallery. Donated by Mack Kile through Sir Basil Goulding Bart., 1976. © The Estate of Barrie Cooke.

Object number1489

DescriptionCooke trained as a painter in America and Austria, and lived in Ireland from 1960. This work is one of a series of paintings based on Sheela-Na-Gigs; medieval stone carvings of grotesque female figures with exaggerated genitalia thought to relate to ancient fertility rituals. Numerous in Ireland, many of them are situated in churches.

Cooke acknowledges the paradox of such sexualised figures appearing in ecclesiastical contexts in a country which had in the past, pronounced sexual taboos. He is especially interested, however, in these exhibitionist deities' ability to embody the force of the landscape in which he situates them, reflecting his continual exploration of key personal themes including regeneration, decay, fertility and sexuality. In Sheela-Na-Gig the figure is roughly modelled from unglazed clay, jutting from a barren, semi-monochrome landscape of smeared concrete and dripped paint onto which rocks are collaged, conveying a raw, primitive energy.

Cooke has expressed an interest in situating mythical figures in real landscapes, but his sculptural treatment of this subject gives it a physical presence rooting it firmly in reality. Headless, its limbs truncated, the Sheela-Na-Gig becomes a universal mother god evoking the more fundamental idea of the mankind's inextricable link to the land, its rhythms and force.

On View

Not on view