The Studio at Thoor Ballylee
A new space for making and thinking
You are warmly invited to the opening of The Studio at Thoor Ballylee.
Sunday 28th April 2019 at 3pm
Studio opened by Sister Mary deLourdes Fahy, local historian.
Special Guest Mrs Sabina Higgins.
Featuring Kathy Mooney, weaver; Áine Ní Shioradáin, harpist, Mary O’Malley, poet.
With an exhibition of artwork and craft by Lily and Elizabeth Yeats, with work by Jack B. Yeats, John Butler Yeats, and W.B. Yeats.
Elizabeth Rivers, from Stranger in Aran, Cuala Press (1946)
The new studio, intended as a meeting and workplace for today’s artists and craftworkers, honours Lily and Elizabeth Yeats, their creation of the Dun Emer Guild and Cuala Industries.
We gratefully acknowledge the support of the Department of Heritage, Culture, and the Gaeltacht and the generosity of our private donors.
Please join us as a new studio space opens at the Galway home of the poet W.B. Yeats!
Designed for workshops, exhibitions, craft sessions, youth groups, special events, talks, and discussion forums, it combines work space for artists with educational and workshop facilities. The Studio at Thoor Ballylee forms a cultural hub in the west of Ireland that matches the commitment of Lily and Elizabeth Yeats to art and education.
Thoor Ballylee is now open for the 2019 season 10am-2pm weekdays, 11am-5pm weekends. See our events page for more, including Leaving Cert lectures Tuesday 23rd and Wednesday 24th April.
Stonemason Jetro Sheen of Sheen Stone Works, Gort putting finishing touches to the new slate sign for the Studio. Design probably by Elizabeth Yeats, adapted from the Cuala Press.
The Studio at Thoor Ballylee
The studio is inspired by two extraordinary examples: the work and legacy of the Yeats sisters. As a designer and embroiderer Lily Yeats (born Susan Mary Yeats) studied with May Morris, before setting up as an independent artist and maker of textiles with apprentices of her own. Her sister, artist and educator Elizabeth Yeats (known to the family as Lolly), pioneered the arts in the classroom, creating new watercolour brushwork techniques as a teaching method for children, and coaching young artists from Louis Le Brocquy to Anne Yeats. She became a hand-press printer and maker of books, publishing fine editions of art and literary works including by her brothers the poet W.B. Yeats and the artist Jack B. Yeats. Together the Yeats sisters were the founders of the Dun Emer workshop and then Cuala Industries, a groundbreaking nationalist and feminist collective producing art and providing skills, training, and apprenticeships across a range of applied artistic fields. Determined to revive, improve, and expand the reach of all the arts in Ireland, the example of the Yeats sisters stands behind the vision of the studio, with its emphasis on making of all kinds.
Originally an outbuilding converted to a garage by the Yeats family, the studio faces the Hiberno-Norman tower of Thoor Ballylee made famous by the poetry of W.B. Yeats, who lived and worked there with his wife George Yeats, also an artist and researcher of great ability, and their young family. Its transformation into a studio was made possible by generous private sponsorship and matching competitive funding from the Government of Ireland’s Department of Culture, Heritage, and the Gaeltacht.
To find out more – or see how you can help – see our website donate page or contact yeatsthoorballyleesociety@gmail.
Thoor Ballylee 