Medicine
by Emily McIlroy
I climb into the ear
of the island–auricle of ash
rising above blue lung.
Lay my bones of water
over black tuff, pin my lean heart
on a kiawe thorn.
Fever folds over stones,
salted and bleached by swell,
Cancerian sun.
August 27 – October 22, 2023
The Art Gallery, University of Hawai'i at Mānoa
Exhibition Opening Reception: 2:00 – 4:00 PM, Sunday, August 27, 2023
Location: Art Building, UH Mānoa
This sprawling survey of painters in our 4,200 square foot main art gallery is an unprecedented exhibition embodying the diversity and energy of contemporary painting in Honolulu today. The show affirms our commitment to living art and the ever-changing and resilient metropolitan Honolulu art community. We can see themes of ecological crisis, sublime natural beauty, urban blight, colonial history, stymied supply chains, and the cultural complexities and contradictions that characterize contemporary Honolulu.
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I was honored to be invited to spend 6 weeks this summer as an Artist Fellow at Chulitna Lodge Creative Residency Program in Lake Clark National Park, Port Alsworth, Alaska. Chulitna Lodge is located on the shores of Qizhjeh Vena (Lake Clark) 180 miles from the nearest road, with fly-in and boat-in access only. Chulitna Lodge Wilderness Retreat seeks to provide the time, space, clarity, and facilities for all forms of creative professionals or researchers to make and meditate. http://chulitnalodge.com/artists
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For more than fifty years, the Art in Public Places Collection of the Hawaiʻi State Foundation on Culture and the Arts has been recognized as one of the most significant collections of contemporary art of Hawaiʻi. This exhibit invites you to engage with a selection of 51 recent acquisitions to the collection from across the islands by 38 artists. The artworks, acquired from juried and curated exhibitions across the state, offer an insight into current trends and themes in the local arts scene and provides an opportunity to see the diversity of works being created in Hawaiʻi today.
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Please mark your calendars and join me for Listening for a Heartbeat, an exhibition of my work at Gallery 'Iolani in Kaneohe, Hawaiʻi. This retrospective installation brings together a collection of drawings and paintings created between 2008 and 2021, presenting a thirteen-year arc of inquiry and transformation. There will be an opening reception on February 3rd, 2023 from 4-7pm, and the work will be on view through March 3rd, 2023..
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“Sitka's Residency Program, October through May, provides artists, writers, musicians, architects and natural science scholars the opportunity to conduct their work while deeply engaging with the environment of Cascade Head. Up to seven residents at a time (up to 50 per year), from different disciplines and stages in their careers, live and work on campus for up to three months, free of charge. All residents are encouraged to perform community outreach during their stay, offering free exhibits and lectures on campus, presentations to area schools or community groups, and/or conducting scholarly research for local educational institutions.”
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paternoster (noun) 1. (in the Roman Catholic Church) the Lord's Prayer, especially in Latin
Paternoster lakes occur in a series down a formerly glaciated valley in small basins scooped out by the glacier as it retreated. The name suggests a similarity to beads on a rosary, and the lakes are often connected to one another by streams that run between them and down the valley.
—National Park Service
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I am out walking among the larches. A cloud passes over the sun. I pause, and it is now that I see the mouth on the ground—wide and white and open. The mouth is crowded with long gray teeth. Rows of ragged tubes with smaller mouths inside each one. Mouths shrunken like squinting eyes. The jaws of the mouth are frayed and full of holes, and so I know the mouth is very old. It has been on this ground for a very long time. I kneel on the earth and put my ear close to this mouth of mouths, and all the little mouths inside the big mouth say, Lay down, come lay down and breathe with us.
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“This Plus That is a show about connecting the seemingly un-connectable and why it matters. Struggle to weave together all of the seemingly un-connectable parts of yourself? Tired of feeling like you can only ever be one thing? Or, sick of being told there’s only one “right” way to be, so you feel like you have to cut off pieces of yourself in order to belong? This podcast is for you.”
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I invite you to visit my exhibition, "The Lilies How They Grow," at the Dairy Arts Center in Boulder, Colorado this March and April.
The works in this series connect the grace, power, violence and delicacy found in nature with internal landscapes of thoughts, memories, and emotions. They are an an attempt to understand and accept an existence that is at once breathtakingly beautiful, unendurably painful, infinitely fragile, and prodigiously resilient. Created as prayers for passage out of all that holds us back, these pieces look towards hope and faith in the capacity to love, and for the possibility of a life aligned with presence, openness and joy.
Thank you for your time, and I hope to see you there.
Please note that all events will occur on Mountain Standard Time.
I invite you to visit my work this season at Emerson Center for the Arts and Culture in Bozeman, Montana.
The works in this exhibition are an extension of my 2018 Artist Residency at Glacier National Park, and point to the enmeshment and permeability of environments, minds, and bodies. Emerging from a process of layering and often subtraction, they attempt to bridge the enduring with the temporal, the visible with the invisible, the prosaic with the poetic.
If you would like to attend the Artist Talk via Zoom, please register here:
https://us02web.zoom.us/meeting/register/tZMkcOigqj8sEtyxckjdaOY04AOPxvO93YQp
Please note that all events will occur on Mountain Standard Time.
If you happen to be in Ohio over the holidays, I invite you to visit my work at Fitton Center for Creative Arts in Hamilton. Eight new drawings and paintings will be featured alongside the sculptures of artist Maria Valente Hupp from December 4th, 2021-January 21st, 2022.
There will be a gallery opening on December 10th from 5:30-7:30pm ETS, followed by a "A Swingin’ Christmas" performance by the Cinncinati Contemporary Jazz Orchestra.
More information can be found closer to the date by clicking on the link below.
https://www.fittoncenter.org/current-upcoming-exhibitions
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Please join me for my upcoming exhibition, The Lilies How They Grow, which will be on display November 18th, 2021-January 22nd, 2022 at Thelma Sadoff Center for the Arts in Fond du Lac, Wisconsin. There will be a virtual artist talk and Q&A at 6pm CST on Thursday, November 18th.
Details on how to attend this event will be available closer to the date by clicking on the link below.
https://www.thelmaarts.org/attend/art/
"Whenever traction becomes weak, when I don’t remember who I am, I consider the lilies. I search for the handholds in the dark. I take the seeds of those life-sustaining flowers and try to grow them, not in little pairs, but in full, feracious fields.”
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A huge thank you to The Woven Tale Press for featuring my work in their summer issue! You can preview the magazine and order print copies at https://www.magcloud.com/browse/issue/2012802?__r=590004.
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A month after my twin brother died, I dreamt I was walking along the edge of a precipitous cliff at night. Fog and mist concealed the landscape. Two half moons illuminated the sky. I slipped, and began plunging through abysmal blackness. Looking around for something to take hold of, I saw two tiny yellow daylilies appear. I seized their soft petals between my fingers, and pulled myself back up into the dream. A pale, smiling character was waiting for me at the top. "Who are you?" I asked. He laughed, "I don't know who I am. Who are you?"
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Please join me in celebrating the completion of The Lilies How They Grow, a body of work which I began nearly three and half years ago, and which will be on display February 14th-June 14th at the Honolulu Museum of Art at First Hawaiian Center, Honolulu, HI.
The Lilies How They Grow
Emily McIlroy’s recent series of large-scale, oil and pastel paintings on paper explores the natural world as metaphor for human experiences of love, loss, grief, and wonder. Organic shapes, richly layered colors, and delicate textures reminiscent of underwater caverns, sea creatures, and plant forms, emerge from a repetitive process of rendering and erasure. -Honolulu Museum of Art
Honolulu Museum of Art at First Hawaiian Center
Honolulu Museum of Art at First Hawaiian Center is committed to presenting exhibitions that highlight the work of Hawai‘i artists and Hawai‘i-based works of art.
Since it opened in 1996, the exhibition space at First Hawaiian Center has been a premier venue to showcase Hawai‘i’s emerging contemporary artists.
A longstanding partner of the museum, First Hawaiian Bank continues to be a leading supporter of the islands' arts and vibrant creative community. Conveniently located in the heart of downtown, First Hawaiian Center's gallery is open during bank hours and is free to the public year round.
CONWAY, Ark. (September 17, 2018) – Ellis Hall, the new home to the Department of Religious Studies and Department of Philosophy at Hendrix College, for the next year is also home to a dozen works of art that ask viewers to ponder how they empathetically engage with the human body as it’s depicted in portrait paintings.
The Body of Empathy opens on Sept. 19 from 4 to 8 p.m., with a guided descriptive walk through the exhibit at 6 p.m. It is an internationally juried show of environmental portrait paintings by six different artists: Donna Festa, Karen Fleming, Nina Jordan, Eva O’Donovan, Emily McIlroy, and Niamh McGuinne. The year-long show is jointly curated by Professor Matthew Lopas of the Hendrix Department of Art, and Dr. James Dow, associate professor of philosophy, director of the Marshall T. Steel Center for the Study of Religion and Philosophy, and chair of the College’s neuroscience program.
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Glacier Welcomes July Artist-in-Residence
Public Invited to July Programs
WEST GLACIER, MONT – Glacier is excited to have Artist Emily McIlroy here July 7th – August 2nd as our second Artist-in-Residence for the year. The program offers professional artists the opportunity to pursue their artistic discipline while being surrounded by the park’s inspiring landscape. Each artist will pursue their work while in the park, and then engage and inspire the public through an outreach program. The public programs will be related to their experience as the artist-in-residence and can be demonstrations, talks, exploratory walks, or performances. Digital images of selected work produced as a part of the residency may be used in park publications, websites and presentations for education and outreach.
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If you happen to be in Cincinnati, Ohio July 14-August 11, my work will be on view in the upcoming exhibition "In Memoriam", at Manifest Gallery Creative Research and Drawing Center. Public opening July 14, 6-9pm.
IN MEMORIAM
Art About Loss
In a larger sense the creation of any art object is a form of externalized memory. Sometimes, however, the direct purpose of the artwork is to serve as a vehicle for a specific remembrance, a totem of loss, or a symbol of transition from a time, place, or state of being that is no longer accessible. As such, these objects become infused with more life—more substance—than they may at first appear to represent. Whether through abstract symbols, illustrations of the memorialized, or poetic conceptualizations of the idea of remembrance, Manifest asked artists to submit works made with these concepts in mind. This project was open to wide interpretation of the theme, and was not restricted to traditional definitions of the term 'in memoriam' (such as may relate to obituaries and epitaphs).
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In graduate school, I once made a scroll from a scrap of linen. Irises, a Greek symbol for the link between heaven and earth, were equally spaced in a long, single row. The flower blossoms, painted in various colors, stood like living monuments against a pale, milky sky. Their roots, etched out of darkness, morphed into corpse-like forms below. The concept was this: We are connected to those who have gone before us. We share our lives with our dead. We carry them, and they carry us. I titled the scroll Prayer for People in Cemeteries.
Two years ago, when we buried my mother alongside my twin brother, I remembered this prayer. I stood as a living body among other living bodies, our feet dense and full of blood on a field crowded with death, and watched her, too, go into the earth. And what now? I asked myself. What of us who had assembled there on the morning frost? What responsibility did we have to this person we were burying? What were we to let go of, and what were we to safeguard within us?
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