At Liscannor near the cliffs of Moher on the west coast of Ireland there is a holy well. Around 1829, the antiquarian George Petrie painted Pilgrims at Saint Brigid’s Well, Liscannor, County Clare, a delicate watercolour later bequeathed to the National Gallery of Ireland. Quaint now to our eyes, and probably even then, it shows women in shawls with children and babies kneeling and crossing from the lower to the upper bank of an abundant, meandering stream. It’s a painting that offers a documentarian’s pseudo-romantic vision of one of Ireland’s ancient curiosities, a place filled with mysterious earthy wisdoms; still, a precious place. People have made pilgrimage here for centuries. In 2025, on a wall outside the now much-altered well, a message for visitors reads: All that is tangled will be unravelled.
Unravelled is a weighty word, double edged. It means untangled and also undone; made neat, but also pulled apart.
The well was determined not to let me find it on the day I visited. At her home-studio, the artist Mary Fahy had just been showing me her paintings of the objects visitors have amassed at this place. Afterwards, she set me on the road with, You know where you’re going? Yes, I said. I put the coordinates into the maps app, attached my phone to the dash, and left. Three times I put the coordinates in, and three times I was brought to different locations where the well was not. Finally, via a single-car backroad over stonewall-bound fields, I arrived to find the well clearly marked and visibly present at a junction on the main road. Dabhach Bhríde or Brigid’s Bath is not hard to find, but the first three times I drove by, it simply was not there. There’s no explanation for this. The digital map led me to a narrow dead end, to a triangular turning place, and to a kind of nowhere before depositing me at the well. At first, I thought the well did not wish to be visited that day. Once there, it felt more likely that the place simply wanted this visitor to have to work hard to find it, to really want to get there.
Inside, too many faces line the walls. I walk in and walk straight back out.
Mary Fahy first started painting at Liscannor’s Brigid’s Well in 2019. Today, its pooling water is contained at the end of a stone-built corridor filled to the roof with objects that pilgrims and tourists have left: toys, mass cards, rosary beads, medical paraphernalia, personal memorabilia, and many, many photographs of lost loved ones. Sitting and painting there for hours at first, the artist was filled with a strong sense of what she calls 'object memory’: All of these are private moments that people have had. Everything that’s left there is charged with that emotion, in that place. Around 2022, the paintings began to form a distinct body of work.
In these paintings, layers of beads choke statues of the artist’s namesake, the Virgin Mary. Broken statues are laden with notes and trinkets. There are items peeling, damaged and mouldering. The sound of constant water trickling into the well is at once calming and at odds with what looks on arrival like a mass of human-made detritus. Raised Catholic, Fahy’s earliest experience of art was of the statues and imagery she saw at mass. She studied icon painting in Greece as part of her fine art degree. She feels conflicted about religion now, but when she speaks of her connection with and attraction to the well and this work, she talks of memories enmeshed with traditions, some long gone: going door to door as a child looking for money for Bridget on Brídeóg Eve; the island women of Inisheer who would come to this well on the Feast of the Assumption to keen and pray; pattern day traditions which continue now; and spiritual affinities even more ancient than all of that.
The Virgin is meant to have the gift of foresight. In Seer (2023), Fahy has painted her almost blinded by blue plastic rosary beads, the blurred faces of two children in images wedged into the cowl of layered offerings around her neck. She is draped and adorned in the weight of the gifts of others seeking her spiritual intercession, acknowledgement, mercy, help. In Pleas (2022), Mary appears gagged by the mounting layers of beads and medals draped over her shoulders. Her mouth is covered by the most recently placed item, her lips pressed to it. Her hands wide in welcome and love, the openness of her stance is drowned and muffled in the weight of the supplications of visitors. She is burdened with their need and want, and yet she stands, eyes lowered in vacant looking sorrow.
For Fahy, these works have become a conduit for thinking about human nature, humanity, death, illness, faith, and the world beyond the well. Watch (2022) was painted on 27 March 2022, as Russian tanks rolled into Ukraine while the world watched on TV. Recent work addresses Israel’s war on Gaza. In Peek-a-boo (2023), the Child of Prague offers a one-eyed stare, his crown replaced by a hole in the top of his infant head. The incongruity of children's toys next to medical devices at the well, the juxtaposition of religious iconography with human stuff, and reminders of the daily thresholds between life and death are everywhere in this work. Fahy is interested in ritual, rites and the significance of leaving objects as much as in the objects themselves. What they’ve left is their feeling and their intention, she says, that’s what’s left. Artistic influences include Christian Boltanski, Kathy Prendergast, Louise Bourgeois. Some of the paintings are assembled still-life works made beyond the well. A vase that belonged to her aunt Evelyn and a statue given to her by her aunt Patricia, both of whom were nuns, appear in Peace Lily and Child of Prague with Severed Hand (2025). The artist is just visible in a blurred reflection in Self-Portrait with Jesus, Donald and the Claw (2023).
Ceangal (Tie) - Child of Prague (2023), with its almost absurd garlanding and slightly manic look in the statue's eyes, points to the visual overwhelm of it all. Quieter works, including Ag Fanacht (Waiting) (2023) and Lean (2024) offer tender moments painted in more muted tones. As the weathered Virgin cradles her infant god-son, there is a feeling of the two travelling together, companions in interdependent unison. Where a statue of Mary has fallen against the back of another, entangled in beads and threads and tethered to this place and to each other, they emerge like a pair of weary beacons in the darkness of the cave-like route to the well. And the work keeps getting better. Miraculous Medal - Sending Prayers (2025) has a painterly rigour and gestural and compositional directness that Fahy has been refining since this project began.
At the well, objects jostle and crowd almost as a distraction from the spiritual heart of the place. It’s hard to look and hard to really see. The layers of detritus contain endless strata of human stories. What Fahy is doing is trying to really look, to really see, and to connect with the place and the spirit of what’s going on here. What can paintings of broken and worn religious statues weighed down with the pleas of human hurt tell us about ourselves? That we are bad at letting go, and we are good at it. That we know individual loneliness and seek community. That ritual is part of grief and pain, and certain places hold presence and memory, and draw people to them. That hope, solace and connection are profound human needs, and although the world might keep changing that much does not.
Well is at the OPW Portumna Castle Gallery in Galway until 31st July 2025.
