In the village of Dooagh on Achill Island, the cottage-studio of acclaimed Irish artist Camille Souter has remained almost untouched since her death on 3 March 2023.
This month, The Heinrich Böll Association, which has run a residency at Dugort on the island since the 1990s, has launched a campaign to raise funds for the purchase and renovation of Souter's home, with a proposal to establish The Camille Souter Artists Residency, "a funded artists’ residency in her memory where professional artists will be invited to live and work, with financial support for a given period of time".
Souter’s biographer and friend, the painter Garrett Cormican, describes the cottage as "like an embodiment of her character. She lived very frugally but it had everything an artist would need very close to hand, from an array of books on art, philosophy, history, poetry and geology, to her radio/record player, a bed, a small kitchen with a hob, a toilet with a red frog which dispensed toilet paper, and some beautiful, small artworks which she painted, purchased or were given to her by friends."
"Within a few feet of her doorstep, were many of the things she painted: the sea, the rock pools and the shore where many of the creatures she depicted - dead seals, sheep, jellyfish - were washed up. A kilometre or so away is Purteen Harbour where the basking sharks were dissected, as recorded in a series of her works from the 1960s. The Rape of the Achill Quartz Quarry is based on a quarry above the deserted famine village a short distance away. The pub is only fifty or so feet from the cottage. Camille was a daily visitor to it for decades."
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Fundraising is being led by the Association and the local community with a plan to purchase the property at the current market value of €200,000. Renovations, including roof, chimney, bathroom and kitchen upgrades, rewiring, heating, insulation, cleaning and painting are expected to come to €114,000. While funding is accessible for running costs and stipends once a residency is established, there are no state grants for capital costs. The campaign has launched with one large donation of €20,000. The residencies will be open to Irish and international artists.
she was presented with membership of Aosdana by the
then president of Ireland Mary McAleese
Born Betty Pamela Holmes in Northampton in 1929, Camille Souter was raised in Glenageary, County Wicklow from the age of two. She trained as a nurse in London, and lived there, in Italy, and in Wicklow again, was married twice and had five children. She lived on Achill from 1958 to the early 1960s, moving permanently to the island in the mid-1980s, where she remained until her death aged 93.
Souter took up painting in the 1950s, producing a remarkable body of work over almost seven decades, ranging from abstract expressionism to more figurative compositions, usually on a small scale. She held her first solo show in Dublin in 1956 and was chosen to represent Ireland at the Paris Biennale in 1960. She learned how to fly aeroplanes in the 1980s because she wanted to paint airside at Shannon Airport, and to capture the landscape from above. In the 1990s, she travelled to Kuwait during the Gulf War and painted war machinery and oil drilling in the desert. Her themes included flying, war, the circus, and Achill itself.
Souter had a daily studio routine and was known for the signs that hung on the gate and at her studio door: WORKING PRIVATE and WORKING DO NOT DISTURB. Her sense of humour and stoicism was legendary. Curator Catherine Marshall recalls her reply to a question of how she survived the cold and dampness on Achill: "I have a skipping rope." Her home in Dooagh is one of the oldest and continuously lived in cottages in the village and her studio was constructed within the boundaries of an adjacent cottage. These buildings are among the last remaining clusters of original cottages dating to the early 1900s.
Souter never stopped travelling for inspiration. In 2010, she took a field trip to Iceland with the Irish Geological Association. Cormican, in his 2006 biography, described her as "a fish: restless, elusive, and hard to catch". Elected Saoí of Aosdána in 2009, several major surveys of her work were held from the 1970s onwards, including at Dublin’s Douglas Hyde Gallery in 1980 and The Model, Sligo in 2001.
The planned residency aims "to build on the existing tradition and reputation of Achill Island as a creative stimulus for artists" and has garnered support from Irish artists including Alice Maher, who describes Souter as "a meta-presence in the county of Mayo, a matriarch of the art scene". "She belonged to no movement, nor clique, but doggedly followed her own path," says Maher. "Her little house and studio is an absolute beacon of dedication to the artistic life… a national treasure in which her titan's spirit still lives."
The Achill Heinrich Böll Association is a not-for-profit company with charitable status. To make a donation or for more information about The Camille Souter Artists Residency campaign contact hbollachill@anu.ie or go here.
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