Irish Modernism

Modernism in Ireland was bound up with major social and political factors during the first part of the twentieth century, especially the effects of independence and Partition in 1922 and the role of the visual within national identity. This is an important context for Irish artists’ engagement with the wider development of European modernism; Cubism and Expressionism were particularly significant and, to a lesser extent, Surrealism. In 1910 the painters Paul and Grace Henry traveled from Dublin to Achill Island on Ireland’s Western Seaboard, where they remained until the end of World War I. This move, to some degree, emulated the earlier example of European avant-garde artists—such as Paul Gauguin in abandoning Paris for initially Brittany and then Tahiti—but it was also a sign of the fascination with the West that became an important cultural focus for an independent Ireland. The rural West, Catholic and Gaelic speaking, in many ways embodied the ideologies of the new Irish Free State. In addition to being the subject of Henry’s pastel-toned landscapes it became a major focus for both realist artists such as Seán Keating and modernist painters including Jack B. Yeats and Patrick Collins.

Strain variation associated with the development of a major recumbent curvilinear fold in the Dalradian rocks of NW Achill Island, western Ireland

ABSTRACTThe regionally metamorphosed, Riphean–Cambrian Argyll Group Dalradian rocks of NW Achill Island, western Ireland are disposed in a large-scale, regionally west-facing, tight, recumbent F2 curvilinear fold, with which two ductile shear zones are associated. Clasts in conglomerates within the Dalradian sequence that are deformed by the shear zones preserve evidence for a constrictional overprint of earlier plane strain as the fold became curvilinear, while stretched clasts maintained a constant orientation as the hinge curvilinearity developed. During the constrictional overprint a crenulation fabric, S2b, overprinted a penetrative foliation, S2a, in the shear zones. The S2b has an orientation that varies systematically with that of the fold hinge. It is inferred that, although the S2b surfaces initiated as a dip-slip fabric, there was an increasing degree of strike slip on these surfaces as the fold hinge approached parallelism with the direction of tectonic transport. It is possible that many curvilinear folds have an early history involving plane strain, but that increasing constrictional strain is intrinsic to the later stages of their development.