“Meet the Artist”

student group news

On Tuesday 23rd October 2018 GSCE and A-Level Art Students attended a “meet the artist” talk at the Strule Arts Centre.   The artist was Omagh native Anne McCaughey, who now lives in Perth, Australia. Her exhibition, ‘Of Weeds and Wilderness’, opened on Thursday 18 October and runs until Saturday 10 November.

Anne showed some examples of her early work and discussed how her passion for art developed during her time at Loretto Grammar school, through her Art College studies, to her career as an illustrator for companies such as Vogue Magazine and her work as a fine artist, exhibiting and selling her own work. She spoke about the broad range of careers on offer in Art & Design and how the creative input of an artist or designer is an integral part of the production of so many of the items that we use in everyday life. The students had the opportunity to ask Anne questions about her ideas, themes and the media, material and techniques that she uses in her work.

Speaking about this exhibition, Anne says ‘Gerald Manley Hopkins remains one of my favourite poems, his wordspin always filling my head with image.

I have lived out of my country for almost twenty years now in the hot dry world of Australia. Visiting home at least twice a year has at least kept me familiar with my own land. This exhibition highlights my love of the small spaces of my homeland, bits of hedge, slices of ditch, fences consumed by ivy. There are some wide scapes here too, some reinvention and a move back to illustration in a series of black and white drawings.’

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