Kara is Director of Editorial & Partnerships for Cookstr, a technology company based in Manhattan that focuses on the intersection between food, lifestyle and health. She does freelance food journalism and is an award-winning fiction writer. Kara graduated from Sarah Lawrence College in 2009, where she studied creative writing and completed her undergrad thesis on technoethics.
Kara Rota
Hi. I’m curating an exhibition for Bernard Canavan titled; Theocracy at The United Arts Club, Dublin in November and thought the subject matter may interest you?
Bernard was taken from his Mum, Helen Power [and his Dad; Tom Lochard] when he was three days old and was institutionalised by the nuns at St. Partrics, Temple Hill, Dublin. He never saw either of them again. It was the De Valera/McQuaid period of the mid-40s when adoption didn’t even exist in the Irish Free State, and so Bernard spent his first four years institutionalised through no fault of his own before being acquired by a decent middle-aged, childless couple from county Longford who took care of him.
Too ill to go to school his new mum encouraged him to read while he adapted to being Bernard Canavan, and, to cut a long story short, as an avid reader Bernard ended up at Ruskin [Oxford, UK] in the 60’s before going on to study PPE, Politics, Philosophy, and Economics there.
While he had become an immigrant in the first days of his life; Bernard, like so many of his generation, took the boat to Holyhead [with his Dad] at the age of sixteen, and while he didn’t live the stereotypical lifestyle of most of his peers, later in life he began to paint from memory that world of the emigrant which he had been subjected too – on the double.
In 2018 our president; Michael D. Higgins acknowledged Bernard for his contribution to Irish culture in the UK.
I’m based in London and last year curated “Canavan-In-Carrick”, – sort of a coming home show for Bernard back in Longford.
In that exhibition, one-third of his paintings focused on his experience of being an orphan, Catholicism, and the team of sin. For, as he says himself – he signified sin – to those in St. Particks and spent a great part of his life questioning its meaning. The work engaged a lot of attention and as a result, Bernard has concentrated his time developing a body of work on the theme of theocracy.
The exhibition is exclusively autobiographical in so far as Bernard is both the canvas and the painter. It will be opened by the President on November 9th. and is being supported by Ireland’s prime music paper; Hot Press.
Now in his late 70’s Bernard remains erudite on the subject of identity and belief and as an Irishman has much to say on both matters, so for this reason, I thought you may find it of interest in terms of it’s cultural uniqueness.
Should you require any further info/images on Theocracy I’d be happy to facilitate and look forward to hearing from you.
Regards.
John O’Hora