1990, Neal MacGregor, an English silversmith and artist, leaves behind on his death in ‘MacGregor’s Hut’, the stone shed on the small Donegal island of Inis Bó Finne where he lived for the final eight years of his life, some diaries, some volumes of illustrated bird notebooks, and three carvings in stone (a salmon, a lobster and a seagull).

2020, Cathal McGinley, an artist from Inis Bó Finne, an island he makes as his studio, works for #singingstones on stone rubbings of these carvings at MacGregor’s Hut, and these works of MacGregor and McGinley become now a shared living archive, a shared ‘working with stone’ between the two artists.

Cathal McGinley’s studio work for the project Singing Stones is included at An Gailearai Gweedore until mid-October 2020 in their project making the gallery a pop-up studio for artists.

MacGregor’s Hut continues, as stone, on Inis Bó Finne.

#singingstones
In Singing Stones the artist Cathal McGinley and the curator/researcher Declan Sheehan are making new work with the stone that is featured in fragments of Irish archives – from maps, to newspapers, to hunger and welfare, crime and punishment, performance and art.
Look out for #singingstones online and onsite in West Donegal, as part of Cathal McGinley’s open studio at An Gailearai in Gweedore from September to mid October 2020.
Research material featured includes:
The fight for bare life on the Olphert Estate, J.R., United Ireland 1889 January 12, in the collection of the National Library of Ireland.
Maps number 3, 4, 9 and 10 from the Bound volume of geological maps, originally held in the Royal College of Science. Volume I., held in the collection of the UCD College of Engineering, Mathematical and Physical Sciences. UCD School of Geological Sciences. Geological Survey Maps. RCSI Maps Vol I.
Information from Sheets of Many Colours: The Mapping of Ireland’s Rocks, 1750–1890. By Gordon L. Herries Davies. Pp xiv, 242, illus. Dublin: Royal Dublin Society. 1983.