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Join artist Penny Stuart as she leads a tour of her art exhibition of drawings inspired by "The Dead" at the James Joyce Centre.“The Dead” is the final story in James Joyce’s Dubliners , the fifteenth in a collection built around paralysis, memory, and the quiet tyranny of the past. It closes, famously, with the living and the dead pressed so close together that the line between them all but disappears.
Within it, Gretta Conroy speaks perhaps a dozen lines before Joyce hands her the story’s final pages and asks her to carry, alone, the weight of everything he couldn’t say directly. We see a boy in the rain, we hear a name, we witness a grief her husband mistakes for something else entirely. She is the character everyone remembers and no one really hears.
Penny lets Gretta express herself at last. Stuart meticulously studies the female form, and in her hands shape and line become instruments of intense feeling. The viewer is made to experience the shifting energies of a life and the pull and press of a relationship’s power. Joyce’s words are not illustrated here so much as absorbed: they surface in the very texture of these female shapes, and in faces that read as almost masklike, sometimes beautiful, sometimes grotesque.
Throughout the exhibition, Joyce’s words have been beautifully translated into Irish by Irene Duffy Lynch and also transcribed into braille with the support of the library services in Vision Ireland. James Joyce himself suffered sight loss and underwent multiple operations on his eyes during his lifetime.
The tour is free but booking is essential. The exhibition will be held at the James Joyce Centre through November.
The James Joyce Centre is supported by the Department of Culture, Communications and Sport.
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Event venue
35 North Great George's Street,Dublin 1,D01 WK44,IE, James Joyce House, 35 North Great Georges Street, Dublin, County Dublin, D01 WK44, Ireland
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