Cróna Gallagher

Cróna Gallagher is an award-winning artist and studio holder at Leitrim Sculpture Centre, Manorhamilton where she practices printmaking alongside the written word.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=53WL7tUmhBw&feature=youtu.be

A specialist in Fine art Printmaking, with a particular emphasis on etchings, her work has been widely exhibited at national and international level and is held in both private and public collections including Caddebostan Cultural Centre, Istanbul, Awagami International, Japan and Ginestrelle contemporary art in Assisi, Italy among others.

Triptych etching on copper (multi-layered soft and hard grounds, drypoint) watercolour wash, conté) on Japanese gampi papers bonded to Fabriano with chine collé

Etching on copper (multi ground, hand-shaken aquatint, drypoint, watercolour wash) on Fabriano paper

 
Etching on copper (multilayered soft and hard grounds, aquatint and drypoint) with Japanese gampi papers bonded to Fabriano with chine collé

Drypoint etching on Japanese gampi papers bonded to Fabriano paper with chine collé, water-colour wash, conté, gold leaf detail

Drypoint etching on Japanese gampi papers bonded to Fabriano paper with chine collé, water-colour wash, conté, gold leaf detail

Multi-plate drypoint etching on Japanese gampi papers bonded to Fabriano paper with chine collé, water-colour wash, conté, gold leaf detail

Written material in the form of short fiction and poetry has featured in quality literary journals and anthologies.  Her work has been nominated or shortlisted for a Pushcart award, the South Million award and The Raymond Carver competition, iYeats, The Jonathan Swift award and The Montreal International poetry award.

The Bedroom Upstairs

Just to let you know,
that as per tradition, frosts visit the cottage
every new year to clear away the winter bugs
and keep the place in order.

They thaw and freeze with muscular constriction
until all the bugs are dead on the ground and the air,
free of sickness.

As always, a key is kept under the mat and by the back door
near stone steps down to the garden, you’ll come across the flock
of sheep-hardy snowdrops droving across this cold young year
fearless of the frost.  But pay them no mind.

With a shepherds’ staff in each hand, they’ll stoop past you
on their Turas way with faces, grave as the black faced ram
and fixed to the ground as donkeys looking into the ditch.

Shawls of heavy ice will hang from their shoulders
like wicker creels of eelish wrack, collected from the sea pink
gums of a long-receded shore and strapped to their pioneering
backs, as they walk the long acre of frost-bitten grasses
for the cosy shelter of the crippled orchard with its grove
of bearded apple trees that wait still near the mossy gable
and the lights now not lit, in her bedroom upstairs.

(The Cormorant, issue 2)

Achill 1972

On Winter nights such as this
when iced air is cold as glass
and the blood of the sky a dark galactic ink,
you would take us outside in our bare feet,
point north to the heavens, and instruct.

We used whale bones for stools
as you hedge row taught, pin pointed the stars,
gave co-ordinates, latitudes and meridians,
the mapping terms from lost shipwrecks
that lie still under rock studded seas.

We turned our faces like satellites, up
to find the warrior, to build it up from dots
until a giant of a man with rapier and holster
stood firm in Hibernian firmament.

Rivets and bolts formed an iron - age plough.
We would find the archaeological remains
and dig it out of the dark so it could turn once more
the sods of night sky and a dash of startled milky way
was flung across the blackness
as seeds thrown from a sack.

Then we’d stand in our pyjamas to go inside,
one of us slightly taller than the other, slightly older.
Another, slightly smaller and younger and another again.
This human staircase stepping up towards your lofty world
and you, the rudder on our round blue planet
turning our cosmos, turning every tide.

(Poetry Ireland Review, issue 124)