Pages From a Notebook: The legacy of Kilkenny artist Helen Comerford

Just a few weeks after my mother, the artist Helen Comerford died in March, I got a call from Kathleen Leadbetter out in Jerpoint Glass. She wanted to know if we would have any interest in doing an exhibition of Helen’s work for the Arts Festival.
I didn’t know. I thought it was too soon, there’s so much to choose from, how would we do it? The usual stuff really.

David and I made a trip out to Jerpoint to have a look at the space. It’s beautiful, intimate, quiet. We chatted with Kathleen. We loved the connection to Thomastown, to the family bakery where Kathleen and her sister Joan had worked; and it turns out some ancestry from just a few fields away in Oldtown. We thought, okay, why not? How hard could it be?

Turns out, quite hard. For starters it involved actually going into Helen’s studio quite a lot. The studio, which up until several months ago, had seen daily use. She was miserable if she couldn’t make it to the studio.
It’s in the studio that she would still be, I thought.

Comforting

I flit between the idea that it’s very comforting that she is still around because of her artworks, and the idea that they’re daily reminders of her ongoing absence. I have several in my house, and I love them. But somehow, going through the archives of her notebooks, sketches and studies, it’s here that she seems most present. It took ages for us to psych ourselves up to go through the studio shelf by shelf, drawer by drawer.

Helen had a big thing about ‘sharpening your pencils’ – that means preparing your tools, yourself and whatever else you were using.

The slow pace of the process she used in the latter half of her career meant a slow meditative practice to grind the pigments and varnish and combining with the wax to create encaustic paint – in stark contrast to the speed with which she actually had to work as the cooling wax hardens – perfectly suited her. That, and the fact that she never had to wash her brushes, keeping one brush per colour and letting it harden in its tin along with the rest of the wax until the next time she needed it.

In many ways, these studies and drawings and notebooks that David and I selected for the exhibition are stark evidence of her aliveness – some of the pieces may have been made in a few seconds alongside a shopping list or a short mathematical calculation or a note on what was happening globally or personally on that day or month.

Surprising glimpse

With the help of some friends, who wonderfully rallied around us, and the extraordinary support of the Leadbetters, Pages from a Notebook is a beautiful thing – just like the lovely space that currently houses the pieces, it is an intimate, surprising glimpse into Helen’s process – her compositions and thoughts, gestures and marks.
It was harder than we thought, of course. Perhaps, just like anything worth doing.

Pages From a Notebook at Jerpoint Glass Studios offers a fascinating first look at sketches, studies, notes and drawings from the archive of the late Kilkenny artist Helen Comerford. It runs at Jerpoint Glass until August 31. The exhibition is open from 10am to 5pm Monday to Saturday and 12 noon to 5pm on Sunday.