It Begins With a Vision...

Bringing St. Brigid's Cloak to Life

St. Brigid is credited as a miracle worker, not least of the amazing, unfurling cloak, but she was also an energetic worker.  She started life in the dairy, quite literally, where she is alleged to have been born at dawn at the end of her mother’s milking session. She joined her mother working in the dairy and is said to have excelled at coaxing extra milk to feed the needy and unexpected guests. Hospitality is one of the key elements of Celtic Christian sensibility and St. Brigid embodied that largesse. One story alleges that she made emergency beer from bath water, which is a spin on the loaves and fishes parable for sure.

Bringing St. Brigid’s Cloak to Life began as a notion, an energetic wish out loud by my niece. She plunged into scouring Enniskillen’s charity shops and came home, flushed with potential fabric that could be upcycled for a cloak. A second foray with Morag Donald had the two textile artists in my life beginning to think how it might look and be put together.

Meanwhile, I was emailing a friend in Birmingham about this notion of making a St. Brigid’s Cloak. Pat responded with an image by the artist Sulamith Wulfing, which I forwarded to Morag. This really did begin to spark her imagination.

But as self-employed persons, we need to put bread on our table. In contemporary terms, this meant we needed to find funding.

Creatives are Magicians using Many Tools…

The least of which is the Excel spreadsheet. People who do not work in the creative sphere may imagine that we dabble in studios or walk lonely as a cloud as we compose literary works. St. Brigid is not the matron saint of poets, song writers and all manner of crafts people for no good reason. She was an energetic body who made things – butter, cheese, beer, abbeys – happen. While creatives need their solitude to imagine and envision, they collaborate and, most importantly, make things manifest.

January is the month when the call out for projects to be funded in the new year. A Cavan Arts Office Artist Development grant beckoned. I feel fortunate that we landed in County Cavan because the Arts Office has always offered solid support to emerging artists.  Under the leadership of Catriona O’Reilly, they have exercised a strong ethos of encouraging community arts and the connection of mental wellbeing and the arts.   

And so, Morag and I began to do some number crunching. I had flu, but you can work on a laptop from a sickbed. Deadlines loomed. Zoom calls and phone conferences began to shape the proposal.

It also meant ringing around and getting letters of support. Given that both Morag and I have a track record of delivering projects in the border counties we were able to garner support from the schools we approached and from Cuilcagh Lakelands Geopark, where we act as part-time local guides.

Photo by Christin Hume on Unsplash

Amid this there was a call out from Creative Ireland’s County Cavan Office for Creative Communities.  At a meeting in Dowra Courthouse Creative Space, Sharon Howe began to persuade us that this project could be bigger. Sharon encouraged us to have a more ambitious vision.

Both Morag and I were raised in households of modest means. Morag had two very artistic parents from working class roots in Scotland.  I was reared by a widow with four children who was wizard at budgeting. We both knew how to make a great deal from a single shoestring. Now we had a second shoestring dangled before our eyes.

In a past incarnation I was the business manager of a Leitrim arts centre. Though my Excel skills were a bit rusty, it was like mounting the proverbial bicycle and finding the muscle memory.  However, neither of us had the muscle memory for grand financial budgets. Many anguished hours and research went into the second proposal. I have forgotten how many drafts of the sheets we went through before we agreed that it was ‘good nuf.’

Morag is based in rural Fermanagh. I am based in rural West Cavan. As the deadline loomed, Storm Isha blew over Ireland and knocked out power, landline and mobile signal and, in some places water, in my end of West Cavan. Fortunately, my mother had trained me to be preternaturally early rather than procrastinate.  All the documentation was shared on Google Drive. Morag had power and telecommunications and the proposal to Creative Cavan went off in time.

Then You Wait…

Just before the Creative Cavan application was squirted down the internet, I heard some news. While Cavan Arts agreed in principle to the project, I only received 50% of funds I applied for. What was good was that it meant Morag and I could work in schools, which he Creative Cavan Communities funding would not cover.

There was a period of six weeks where we waited to hear from Creative Cavan. We discussed a very pared down project and began to schedule workshops with the schools.

My mother, perhaps by necessity, was a woman of great faith.  Having that example, I held on to the belief that all would be well. That it would happen. That St. Brigid’s Cloak would be made manifest.

And So It Was

Photo by Nicole Baster on Unsplash

We received news that we got 70% of the funds applied for from Creative Cavan.

Photo by KOBU Agency on Unsplash

This triggered a flurry of phone calls and feverish re-visioning of the budget. Cuts needed to be made. Cuilcagh Lakelands Geopark agreed to fund two workshops that tied in with St. Brigid’s regional heritage and matronage.  We now had three sources of funding to make it happen.

We now could begin the work of Bringing St. Brigid’s Cloak to Life.