Union Hall artist John borrows Spike Milligan’s epitaph for exhibition title

A joint exhibition by Christina Todesco Kelly and her husband John is now showing at the Cnoc Buí gallery in Union Hall.

is the title of the latest art exhibition showing at Cnoc Buí in Union Hall.

Britain’s favourite epitaph is, of course, attributable to Spike Milligan, but John Kelly is the artist who chose it, with good reason, for the joint exhibition he shares with his wife Christina Todesco Kelly.

The exhibition of Christina’s and John’s drawings, as well as two major artworks, opened last week (Thursday August 22nd) at the popular waterfront gallery.

It features art that was created during John’s unexpected nine-month ‘residency’ at Cork University Hospital from August 2018 until April 2019.

John’s artwork is known worldwide, but a lot of people in West Cork may know the couple better for preserving the memory of a community that was decimated by Famine.

The couple have created a lasting memorial on their land – a 13-acre holding at South Reen Farm – where most of the 200 people living on that little peninsula died during the Famine.

Those who did survive went on to work on the famine relief scheme and were fed from a famine pot that is still on the property today.

Bob Geldof, who campaigns to stop starvation worldwide, got to hear of the project and visited South Reen in July 2022.

The campaigner paid tribute to the memorial, describing it as ‘a great work of art.’ Bob said it does what art does best: ‘It enables humanity.’

This will be Christina’s second exhibition at Cnoc Buí. Her first featured a series of etchings made of shoes worn by her son from the time he was an infant until the day he left for university.

Christina’s study of her husband’s illness is equally intimate. ‘It became a distraction for me,’ she said. ‘Drawing John, and all that I saw at the hospital, was important because your world becomes very small.’

When John was brought around after a coma, he was, as he says himself, ‘in another world.’

He, too, began to draw as a way of grounding himself and making sense of the circumstances in which he found himself.

John’s drawings from that time inspired him to create several new works of art.

He said that was born out of an altered state of consciousness, in which he claimed to have heard voices and saw visions.

Similar to Spike Milligan, John, who was born in Bristol, England, but grew up in Australia, before relocating back to England and then South Reen near Union Hall in 2003, is a rascal.

For example, he gets some self-mocking pleasure in recalling that at one point he levitated and his view pixelated into blue.

As it turned out the levitation was not an out-of-body experience but the bed being raised and lowered by a nurse; the blue pixels, the colour of the blanket.

A diagnosis and treatment saw him pass down the hospital corridor, room by room, each time getting closer to the doors.

In April 2019, he said he passed through those doors ‘changed and inspired as a person, but also as an artist.’

• More than 20 interesting and inspired works of art will be exhibited at the I told you I was ill exhibition in Union Hall until September 8th.

There will be a sister exhibition at University College Cork, with different but similarly-themed works, on display from September 20th until December.