The Boyne Music Festival is delighted to collaborate for the first time this year with the Highlanes Gallery in the centre of Drogheda. This afternoon event will be equal parts book talk, performance and exhibition tour.
‘Jacksons, Monk & Rowe and the Brodsky Quartet - the formative years’
In her recent book, cellist Jacqueline Thomas shares the extraordinary and unique story of how four young kids growing up in the industrial North East of 1970s England form a classical string quartet. Four decades later, the Brodsky Quartet are still out there. Fans of Elvis Costello will recognise the quirky name in the title - all will be revealed in this talk as Jacqueline reads excerpts and shares anecdotes about their journey.
This event will also feature the Anam Cara string quartet, this year’s Boyne Music Festival Young Artists, performing Mozart’s String Quartet No. 19 in C Major, K. 465 "Dissonance”. These young musicians have been nominated by the Royal Irish Academy of Music in Dublin through a collaboration with the BMF and will receive musical coaching before their performance by Brodsky Quartet members Jaqueline Thomas and violist Paul Cassidy.
Performers
Shane Quinn, violin
Elizabeth Ni Mhaolain, violin
Elena Ryan, viola
Doireann Ni Aodain, cello
Exhibition
Liliane Tomasko
Spell of the Wood
2 July – 20 August 2022
Highlanes Gallery
The title of the exhibition is borrowed from a painting called 'Spell of the Wood' by Irish artist Nano Reid (1900 - 1981), who was born in Drogheda and had a deep connection to the magic and mystery of the ancient Boyne Valley, where the megalithic passage tombs of Newgrange, Knowth and Dowth are located. Her painting (which will be included in the exhibition) depicts a sleeping figure out in the landscape and is the heartbeat which weaves together Tomasko’s ideas regarding the subconscious and dreams, with the mystery of the surrounding prehistoric landscapes and its megalithic structures. For Highlanes Gallery, Liliane Tomasko presents two new large scale wall paintings, made specifically for the space, a floor work, and a series of smaller oil-based works.
Liliane Tomasko’s abstract paintings employ a distinctive, bold lyricism, with an equally unabashed sense of colour. The artist often begins with a study of the personal effects of everyday domesticity such as bedding or clothing to create work that suggests a gateway into the realms of sleep and dreaming; delving into the gulf between what we understand as the ‘conscious’ and ‘subconscious.’ Recent paintings display an increasing vitality and assertiveness, articulating an abstraction that is rooted in the physical realm but attempting a departure from it. Intense colour, subtle tone, shadows and painterly gesture are woven together in such a way that space comes in and out of focus, suspending one’s perception of them and emulating the clarity or lack thereof of dreams and memories.
Liliane Tomasko was born in Zurich, Switzerland, and lives and works in New York and Mooseurach, Germany, and is represented by Kerlin Gallery, Dublin