Munster in 30 Artworks, No 30: The Way the Fairies Went, Sneem
James Scanlon's Slíghe na Síoga /The Way the Fairies Went, in Sneem, Co Kerry.
If ever there was an artwork that seems to have been magicked into existence, it is James Scanlon’s Slíghe na Síoga/The Way the Fairies Went.
The sculpture, a series of four pyramidical structures, is situated on a patch of boggy ground by the church in the village of Sneem, Co Kerry, and is built primarily of local stone, along with wood and glass. Although it was constructed as recently as 1989, it looks as if it has been there for thousands of years.
Scanlon, a native of Brosna in North Kerry, was living and working in Cork city when he was first approached about the project by Medb Ruane, the then visual arts officer of the Arts Council.
He was best known for his pioneering work in stained glass, and particularly for an installation of icons he had recently completed at Glenstal Abbey, Co Limerick; he knew little about stonework, and certainly had no idea it could be put to such potent use in the creation of art.
Scanlon travelled down to Sneem with Ruane and her partner, the actor Barry McGovern.
He remembers the welcome committee “was like a firing squad, you know; the priest, the school principal, the head of the Tidy Towns committee, and some other do-gooder”.
The village had won the Tidy Towns competition in 1987, and the prize included a new public artwork, to be sponsored by the Arts Council. It had already been decided that Scanlon should get the commission to create it.
The committee took him to lunch, then showed him around the village, where there were already a number of sculptures, including a metal structure installed by Vivienne Roche in 1983; the Israeli artist Tamara Rickman’s Steel Tree, dedicated to the late President Cearbhall Ó Dálaigh in 1985; and the Peaceful Panda, donated by the People’s Republic of China a year later.
It was expected that Scanlon would favour one of the two village greens for his sculpture, but instead he was drawn to the rough terrain behind St Michael’s Catholic Church. Ruane would later describe the site as “hopeless, a lost cause… James loved it.”
At that time, it was unusual for an artist to create a work in situ, and Scanlon had doubts about taking the project on at all.
“I remember my dad asking me, ‘Where are you these days?’ And I said, ‘Sneem.’ ‘Sneem? What has you back there?’
‘The Arts Council gave me a job,’ I said.
‘Ah, God blast it, James. Sneem? They mustn’t think much of you. I wouldn’t go an inch behind Killarney. There’s nothing there but misfortune, and you wouldn’t get a bite to ate.’
“Of course, it was probably fifty years since he’d been there.”
Despite his father’s reservations, Scanlon accepted the commission and returned to Sneem on several occasions, “trying to learn about the place. You’d see fellows cycling in. The land bent them and shaped them, you know. I went walking about, and I used to stop anywhere I saw a drain or a gully. There was some beautiful stonework.”
Fr Michael Murphy was head of the local development committee, and proved to be Scanlon’s greatest supporter.
But when he pressed Scanlon on what he might actually do on site, he could only answer vaguely.
“I said, ‘Oh, I’ll be making these corten steel columns, and there’ll be stained glass in them, and supporting wires, and they’ll be reflected in the pools of water on the ground. That’s what I’m doing'.”
One day, Fr Murphy offered the help of a party of men employed on a FÁS scheme “with nothing to do only picking up papers. Next morning, there were twenty men on site, and the fool standing in front of them with no clue what to do.”
Several of the men were highly skilled masons, but the thought that Scanlon could work with them on making art out of local stone only occurred to him when he visited Staigue Fort, an Iron Age ringfort seven miles out the road.
“The evening I went out to see it, the sun was hitting the stonework, and it stood out like a gold ring against the brown mountain. In Sneem the next morning, I asked a man named Danny about the fort. And he said, ‘the women drew the stone for that in their aprons, and the men built it overnight.’ ‘Erra, feck’s sake, Danny!’ I said. ‘But it’s true,’ he said.”
If his encounter with Staigue Fort was one epiphany, a thought that occurred to him while driving past Ballyvourney one evening was another.
“I pulled over at the top of Coom. I thought about the composer John Reidy, who’d come down here from Dublin and reinvented himself as Seán Ó Riada. He looked around and took what was ordinary and made it magical. And I thought, where in the name of God am I going, bringing corten steel down to Sneem?”
Back on site, Scanlon split the workforce into groups, and made up little mortar boards and clay models. "There was no mention of art or sculpture. No mention of anything but mortar and water and stones. You’d only be insulting people. Annoying them, you know. The lads were gifted at stone work, and I had them working away like a well-oiled machine. I was a labourer, hauling stones in a wheelbarrow.
"Fr Murphy was another labourer and we’d talk about everything except what was going on. Then one day he looked me straight in the face and said, ‘James, there’s no sculpture coming down from Cork, is there?’ I shook my head. ‘That’s what I was thinking,’ he said.”
Scanlon’s father’s fears about his diet proved groundless. “Fr Murphy’s housekeeper, Breda, fed me every day at one o’clock. I was like a bull being fed for inspection in the 60s. Did you ever see that? If he failed he got an 'R' in his ear and they’d sell him for beef, and if he passed he got a shamrock. Well, I was fed like that every day.”
As he worked with the men, Scanlon asked them the names of the local features in the landscape.
“What’s that place over there, I’d say. Doirín an Mhuirigh. The Mariner’s Wood. What went on there? Smuggling. And what’s that place over there called? Gort na Síghe. The Fairy Field.
"The names were enchanting. The people living and working there knew them all.”
Scanlon’s sculpture took a year to complete. As it took shape, it became known locally as the Pyramids.
But its official name, the one Scanlon gave it himself, is Slíghe na Síoga / The Way the Fairies Went, which refers to the sí gaoithe - the fairy wind - he observed many times as a child.
“Did you ever make up hay? You’d be working away, on a fine sunny day. You’d make up a rick, maybe twelve feet high, and you’d put a top on it, and throw a sugán over it. Then this little whirlwind would come along and rip the top off of it. That’s the sí gaoithe.
“It was the same with the structures. It was like the fairies had made these things, and when they were finished, they’d gone out through the hole in the bottom and disappeared back into Gort na Síghe.”
Like so many public sculptures in Ireland, Slíghe na Síoga / The Way the Fairies Went has not been particularly well maintained. Scanlon is disappointed, of course.
“What I’m disappointed with is the lack of respect for art in Ireland,” he says. “They’ll maintain a work if it’s a museum, but not if it’s outside in the landscape.”
He suspects this can be attributed, at least in part, to the lack of a visual arts tradition in Ireland.
“We were a conquered people in this country. What you couldn’t keep between the two ears you couldn’t carry. You had songs, music, poetry, stories… we carried our culture in our heads.”
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