New exhibition in Limerick city explores landscape, ritual and memory

THE Psyche of the Land, Mo Anam Cara, an art exhibition by Mary Doyle Burke, curated by Maurice Quillinan in Limerick Museum has been officially opened.

Deep into the Psyche of the Land, Mo Anam Cara unfolds as a continuum of gestures: walking, gathering, listening, returning, that echo the deep-time practices embedded in Ireland’s cultural landscape. Mary Doyle Burke’s work emerges from years of embodied encounter with bog, moor, wetlands and field, where materials are not simply collected but received, carried, and transformed through contemporary ceremony. She holds a BA (Honours) in Visual Art from the South-East Technological University.

Cllr Maria Donoghue, deputising for Mayor of Limerick John Moran, said: “It was a great honour to open this exhibition on the Mayor’s behalf. Mary’s work draws from landscape, nature and place; the very materials of her pieces are from nature, as she creates textiles using dyes made from seeds, leaves and plants collected from bogland, with the colours coming directly from the landscape itself.”

“I’d strongly encourage anyone who can to come down to Limerick Museum and see it for themselves before the end of the month.”

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Dr Matthew Potter commented: “This ritual field finds a powerful historical counterpart in the Limerick Museum’s Bronze Age bog sword, discovered by a Bord na Móna worker in a Tipperary bog and dated to roughly 3,000 years ago.”

“Like many wetland depositions across Ireland, the sword was not lost but placed, an offering, a gesture of surrender or transformation enacted at the edge of land and water. The bog, in this context, is not merely a landscape but a ceremonial space, a site where identity, power and memory were negotiated through material acts.”

Deep into the Psyche of the Land, Mo Anam Cara will be on display in Limerick Museum until Tuesday, March 31. Admission is free.