Curated by Kathy Rose O’Brien.
This exhibition, the first of MoLI’s many special exhibitions, focused on one of Ireland’s most renowned authors of the twentieth century, Kate O’Brien.
Limerick-born Kate O’Brien was a UCD graduate, journalist, playwright and internationally-acclaimed novelist whose writing spanned 50 years of the mid-20th century. Her biographically- inspired novels Mary Lavelle and The Land of Spices reflect her early childhood years as a convent boarder and her travels in Spain. Both books were banned in Ireland.
Kate’s vision of art is symbolised by the “merciless beauty” of the Spanish bullfight encountered by her character Mary Lavelle, which determined the theme of this exhibition. To step onto the sand and into Kate’s literary imagination is to engage with the politics of passion and women’s inner lives, the struggle between dreams and expectations, desire and traditions, freedom and faith.
The exhibition included a film featuring curator and actor Kathy Rose O’Brien, who is the grand-niece of Kate O’Brien, reading from excerpts of letters between 28 November and 10 December 1936, in which Kate O’Brien and her brother-in-law Stephen O’Mara engage in a forceful correspondence. However brilliantly O’Brien advocates for art and the writer, O’Mara, a close friend of Éamon de Valera, may have had the final word. Just a few weeks later, Mary Lavelle was banned by the Censorship of Publications Board on the grounds of obscenity due to its sexual content. It remained banned for decades.
