Poetry and art rooted in place

The works of a forgotten amateur poet is finding new expression in artworks created by Sandra Coote, using only materials produced at her Munterconnaught home farm.

Sandra is best known as the master crafter behind ‘Crafts of Ireland’, where she passes on traditional skills such as embroidery, crochet and knitting from her impressive studios in Knocknaveagh, a rural setting on the stitching of the border of the Breffni and Royal counties.

Hand worked devices to make woolen socks rest at one end of her beautifully lit studio, on a table sits bags of wool of various colours, while a collection of Singer sewing machines are displayed on shelving. It’s a custom made space for a skilled crafts person brimming with ideas, and that most unusual of gifts - the commitment to see them through.

The Celt’s visit to Knocknaveagh during the recent heatwave is prompted by Sandra’s exhibition, ‘Spoken in Fibre’ which opens in Cavan County Museum, Ballyjamesduff in the coming weeks. The work is inspired by the poetry of Charles Coote (1840-1930), a direct ancestor of her husband Alan, who farmed this very same patch of land a century and more ago.

“He was my great-grandfather, Charles, he was seemingly quite good with a pen,” explains Alan.

The span of Charles’ life took in many major traumas and upheavals, from the famine on through to the push for land reform, World War One and the birth pangs of the Free State. His personal life was not without incident either, losing his wife in labour and having his son Sammy seriously wounded serving amongst the Irish ranks of the British Army.

Charles was destined to run the family farm which had been in the Coote family since the 1700s, and even managed to restore the plot to its full size after it had been split for a period.

“He seemed to have done reasonably well,” assesses Alan in measured tones. “He was a tenant farmer until 1903 when he bought it freehold - I still have I have the papers.”

It seems the Coote family had put an emphasis upon education as Charles’ brother was sent to Gilson’s School, the multi-denominational school in Oldcastle before progressing to become a teacher in Carrigallen. Alan and Sandra suspect that Charles, having first attended the local school in Ryefield, later attended Gilson’s too.

“Charles obviously had a grá for the language and poetry,” observes Sandra.

“There wouldn’t have been too many farmers who were poets,” Alan continues.

“I’d say the poetry end was probably more of a hobby to him, but he did publish regularly in The Weekly Times.”

The weekly edition of The Irish Times included a section dedicated to poetry and ran competitions, for which Charles submitted pieces, proving successful on numerous occasions.

Sandra adds: “They published posthumously the last piece that was found in his pocket when he passed away. It was sent in by the family and they [The Times] printed it because he was one of the oldest contributors.”

While Charles’ lifetime may feel quite distant, one of his granddaughters, Evelyn Cassidy, who knew and remembered the poet, only died a year and a half ago. Fittingly Alan read a verse by Charles at her funeral.

Sandra is struck by how well Charles’ poems have stood the test of time.

“In reading through them, most of them are as relevant today as they were when he wrote them.

“There’s some about emigration, there’s some about war, because his son [Sammy] went to war. He lost his wife in childbirth, there’s a number of ones about her - how he met her and there’s ones where he dreamt about her and different things so he expressed a lot of his emotion in the poetry,” she said adding that nature was also a recurring theme.

The Cootes intend to include a few personal artefacts for the exhibition. They have letters from Charles to his son Sammy Coote who served as a rifleman during WWI, and a couple of handwritten samples of Charles’ poems, in addition to typed versions of all the collected poetry.

They will also have Sammy’s army issued New Testament. Typically kept in a jacket breast pocket, the Good News possibly saved Sammy’s life in Ypres when a shell smashed into a nearby wall.

“There’s a piece pushed through like a gate or a door, it’s not missing,” describes Alan of where shrapnel lodged in the book. Sadly Sammy didn’t survive the incident unscathed – he lost a leg and suffered serious wounds to his torso.

“He stayed with us for a week or two not too long before he passed away and he was changing his shirt, and there were pieces missing him here and there,” recalls Alan gesturing toward his midriff. “The flesh, you could see where it was gone.”

Of Charles’ poetry, Sandra describes it as “a very Irish style”.

“His style of poetry is beautiful, there’s a lot of rhyming but his soul was in his work. And yes some of the pieces are challenging because as he got older more of his poems were about later life and death, what happens in the world beyond, and questioning the next world.”

This was an issue for Sandra as she took it upon herself to create a companion piece for each of the poems using felt and wool to create textile art. In creating her own felts and wool, Sandra largely depends on their own flock, a native Irish rare breed called Roscommon sheep and some blue faced Leicester.

“It’s wool from our own sheep we are using. The felt fabric is made from our own wool, or from wool we get from local farmers,” she explains. “I was very lucky that I got support from the Local Enterprise Office to import a machine from America to make our own felt fabric so I could produce something using 100% Irish wool - it’s actually 100% Cavan wool.”

She also dyed the wool herself to achieve the complex of colours and hues needed for the various works. Armed with authentic material rooted in place, she put it to good use, producing a huge variety of work sparked by Charles’ poetry. It blurs the line between craft and art.

“Craft has always been knitting, crochet and anything that was textile, but by doing this type of work you are bringing textile into the world of art. It’s a fine line, but there are crossovers.” The Celt marvels at the amount of work that’s gone into the collection.

“I absolutely love it,” she says confiding she had worked on a piece until 11pm the previous night - “quite happily,” she hastens to add.

“You are testing and playing with the fibre in the sense of how you can combine layers and colours to create effects, and how different colours work when they are blended. It’s that kind of creativity that’s fun, but you are also creating pieces.

“There are challenges, there are times when you walk away and you’re pulling your hair out. Something’s not going right or you’ve reached the ugly stage of a picture before you turn the corner.”

Amongst the dozens of textile works is a most eye catching portrait of a young woman.

“What I wanted to do with this was to push my own boundaries,” she says, The highlights in her eyes and collarbone, and the skin tones combine to for a very convincing portrait.

“I actually dyed specifically for two or three colours to do her hair - I dyed shades that would match blonde hair tones, so I could use them on the picture.

“I wanted her to be a glowing, rosy cheeked female. I wanted her to be from the late 1800s so she fitted the period, and to have that vintage appearance, so it wasn’t a modern take of a female, it was more classical looking.”

To have produced it with wool is some achievement, although she describes it as “playing with” wool fibres and felt fabric.

“Each of the poems are different, so I had to use all different types of techniques - some of them are still lifes, some are landscapes, some are portraits - so it pushed me to test my boundaries.”

She believes textile art is being explored more.

“The reaction to any of the pieces I’ve made and any of the pieces I have sold so far have been good. I think people enjoy that it is a different type of medium – it looks different to other materials, from a distance maybe not but up close you can see all the fibres in it, and see that it’s something painted with natural material.”

The Celt is intrigued by the use of the word painting for a dry medium.

“You are painting,” she asserts.

“Instead of a brush you have a needle, and instead of a box of paints you have bags of dyed wool. So you really are putting those fibres down in the same way,”

She adds that “all the theories of art apply” to textile art in the same way as the a work in oil or acrylic.

“So you are creating a wool painting. Because of the nature of the material, the finish on the pieces is much softer,” she says.

Alan greatly admires Sandra’s work and is heartened to see it bring renewed interest in Charles poems, that aside from a local history book which printed a few of his poems some 30 years ago, have been entirely forgotten.

“It’s nice for his poetry to be seen again, it was published obviously in that section in the paper, but since then it hasn’t been seen public until now, and it’s nice to see it used,” says Alan.

Sandra adds: “When we finally have this done, we’ll have all the pieces together, and then maybe look to publishing them or doing something further with them. But this is a first step anyway.

Asked for his favourite poem, Alan pauses to consider.

“There’s a lot of good ones. I suppose the one that comes to mind is a bit morbid.

‘I’m a child again at 87, too old for earth but not fit for heaven,’ he recites the opening couplet of an untitled poem.

“That’s the last poem they got in his pocket,” explains Alan. Sandra points to a painting of a person looking up to the solar system.

“That’s where the inspiration for that one, kind of looking out to the beyond and wondering,what comes next?”

What comes next for Sandra is the exhibition Spoken in Fibre which opens at Cavan County Museum, Ballyjamesduff on Thursday, July 31 at 7.30pm.