Remarks by President McAleese on the conferral of Saoi of Aosdána on Patrick Scott Arts Council
Remarks by President McAleese on the conferral of Saoi of Aosdána on Patrick Scott Arts Council, 70 Merrion Square, Dublin 2
Eminent members of Aosdána, honoured guests,
One of the most pleasurable tasks I have as President is that of conferring the title of Saoi on those members of Aosdána whom you, their peers, have selected from among your number. Today, perhaps more than ever, the role played by the Arts in Ireland - in guiding us, in inspiring us, and simply in lifting our minds from our daily toil to dwell on something more beautiful and lasting - is invaluable.
Similarly, the role played by Aosdána in publicly recognising and honouring those who, by their work, have made an outstanding contribution to the arts in Ireland, has never been more valuable. At its best, today’s globalised world offers its inhabitants an unprecedented cultural cornucopia - music, art, dance, film, architecture and literature from the four corners of the globe have never been more accessible or familiar to us, nor have they had such an influence on our own cultural life. At its worst, however, that globalised world presents a creeping, monolithic, universal culture, targeted by focus-groups at a millions-strong, lowest-common-denominator audience which at times threatens to engulf us in a sea of one-size-fits-all mediocrity.
If we are to get the best from this interconnected world, both as individuals and as a society, and if we are to contribute as much as we possibly can to it, then it behoves us as a society and as a country to celebrate our artists, to publicise their achievements, to make their work as accessible as possible to the broadest possible audience, and to nurture their talents. In Patrick Scott, I have to say, we are a little bit beyond nurturing talent. But I do believe that the rest of my statement holds true - the cosmopolitan quality of Patrick’s work, as, for example, with his trademark gold leaf work on tempera but also with his tapestries, displays a multitude of cultural, technical and temporal influences. In essence, Patrick’s art displays what is best in a globalised world.
From the very beginning through to the present day, one of the most striking things about Patrick’s work is the extraordinary breadth of material in which he has worked. Patrick, of course, started his career as an architect, working on mosaic design in Busaras among other buildings. Throughout the 1950s and early 60s, his reputation as a painter began to grow, with his success at the Guggenheim International Exhibition in New York in 1958, with winning the Guggenheim Award in 1960 and with his representing Ireland at the Venice Biennale in the same year before moving into the more abstract, restrained style with which he has since become so closely associated.
Patrick’s gifts were given another outlet at around the same time through the medium of tapestry. Radically different from his more restrained, abstract art, but intimately connected to his earlier architectural design work, Patrick’s large-scale tapestries found a natural fit in the designs of modern architecture whose somewhat clinical interiors benefited from the softening effect that tapestry provides. Tapping into my earlier comments about the globalisation of culture, Patrick’s collaboration in this area spanned the world from county Galway, with his long relationship with the V'Soske Joyce, to Aubusson in France at the workshops of Tabard Frères et Soeurs, to the villages of Oaxaca in Mexico. The techniques and the styles associated with each place infused the artist and his art, just as his own experiences must have infused the work of the artists whom he met in these places.
Not content to be adept in merely three disciplines, Patrick has turned his hand most recently, I understand, to printmaking. At this stage, I’m beginning to wonder when Patrick will be producing his first musical!
Patrick, over the course of your lifetime, you have created an enormous corpus of work which greatly enriches the store of Irish culture. A formidable ambassadorship for art at home, for art and Ireland abroad, your contribution - although it is by no means finished - will last for generations and, in its ease and success with cross-pollination across styles, cultures and disciplines, it helps set the scene for a very different and multicultural Ireland. Although you first achieved recognition in the mid-fifties, you are undoubtedly an artist and a man for this twenty-first century. Your friends and colleagues could not have acted more shrewdly in their choice of Saoi and, therefore, it gives me great pleasure to proclaim the inspirational Patrick Scott a Saoi and to confer upon him this Torc as a symbol of his office, and of the esteem in which he is held.
Go raibh maith agaibh.