Landscapes • Legends • Love Stories
Landscapes • Legends • Love Stories
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Landscapes
Landscapes
Landscapes tell us where we belong
Legends
Legends
Legends tell us who we are.
Love Stories
Love Stories
Love stories tell us why and how we are
Core Themes for HeARTlands exhibitions
Core Themes for HeARTlands exhibitions
Landscapes. Legends. Love Stories – We see these as three doors.
Together, these three themes give our artists and creatives enormous freedom.
They overlap. A landscape can hold a legend. A legend can contain a love story. A love story can connect a person to a landscape. One artwork may comfortably belong to all three.
Landscapes, Legends & Love Stories is not a boundary around creativity. It is an invitation into it.
It gives us a shared language through which artists, writers and creatives from Ireland and elsewhere can explore place, story and human experience while bringing entirely different perspectives, cultures, disciplines and creative practices to the conversation.
And perhaps, as our exhibitions travel from the Heartlands of Ireland into Europe and beyond — and as we welcome international artists and their stories here — these three simple words can help us discover something of what we have believed from the beginning:
There is far more that connects us than divides us.
Landscapes
Landscapes
The landscapes we inhabit and the landscapes we carry within us.
The landscapes we inhabit and the landscapes we carry within us.
For HeARTlands, landscape is more than a view of a place.
We invite artists and creatives to explore the physical landscapes that surround and shape us — our fields, boglands, mountains, forests, waterways, coastlines, villages, towns and cities — as well as the changing relationship between people and the natural world.
But landscape can also be deeply personal.
There are inner landscapes: landscapes of memory, identity, imagination, emotion and lived experience. There are cultural landscapes shaped by generations of people, and changing landscapes that tell stories of migration, development, climate, loss, renewal and our evolving relationship with place.
A landscape may be somewhere we call home, somewhere we have left behind, somewhere we dream of returning to, or somewhere newly encountered that changes how we see the world.
Through painting, photography, sculpture, writing and other forms of creative expression, Landscapes invites us to look more closely at the places around us — and at the landscapes within ourselves.
Legends
Legends
The stories we inherit. The stories we tell. The stories we are creating now.
The stories we inherit. The stories we tell. The stories we are creating now.
Every place has stories.
Some have travelled through centuries: mythology, folklore, ancient legends, spiritual traditions, local tales and stories carried from one generation to another.
Others are still being written.
For HeARTlands, Legends embraces the ancient and the contemporary. It might lead an artist towards Celtic mythology, Irish folklore, Christian or pre-Christian traditions, European mythology, folk customs, local history or the stories and traditions of another culture.
But a legend can also be a person.
Our writers, musicians, artists, activists, sporting heroes, community figures, family members and extraordinary ordinary people can all become subjects through which we explore character, memory and human experience. In this way, Legends also creates space for portraiture and contemporary storytelling.
As HeARTlands travels beyond Ireland, we want to encounter the legends of other places too — listening to the stories communities tell about themselves and creating opportunities to share our different cultural inheritances with one another.
Because stories travel.
They change as they are retold.
And sometimes, by sharing them, we discover that stories from very different places carry surprisingly familiar truths.
Love Stories
Love Stories
Love of people. Love of place. Love of nature. Love in all its complicated forms.
Love of people. Love of place. Love of nature. Love in all its complicated forms.
Our understanding of a love story is deliberately expansive.
It can, of course, be romantic love — ancient or contemporary, joyful or heartbreaking.
But love reaches much further.
It can be the love of a parent or child, friendship, family and community. The bond between a person and an animal. Love of the land, a particular place, a language, a culture or a way of life. Love expressed through care for nature and our planet.
It can also explore self-love, belonging, grief, longing, tenderness, vulnerability, separation, reconciliation and loss — because the presence and absence of love can encompass almost every human emotion.
And there are the quieter love stories too: the meal prepared for someone, the garden tended over a lifetime, the neighbour who calls in, the artist who spends months making something beautiful, the person who cares for a landscape so that another generation may inherit it.
For HeARTlands, love is not merely a subject for art.
We are interested in its capacity to connect, restore, build community and encourage us to care — for ourselves, for one another and for the world we share.
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