Fiona Kelly (b. 1985)Portable Fairy Tree

Fiona Kelly’s Portable Fairy Tree is an artwork which depicts a large hawthorn tree sitting atop a wooden cart. The work is a reaction to a Fairy Thorn Tree or “sceach”, located in Latoon, County Clare, which caused great controversy in 1999. The tree was situated on the site of a new by-pass that was approved to be built between Newmarket-on-Fergus and Ennis. Eddie Lenihen, a great Irish folklorist and story-teller, began to strongly protest the destruction of the tree, describing it as a National Heritage Site. After much debate, the road was re-routed, leaving this tiny tree isolated by a fenced island, surrounded by asphalt. Like much of Kelly’s work, this artwork speaks of the rapid change that has happened in Ireland since the late 1990s, in which the environment has become endangered through major infrastructure developments. 

Portable Fairy Tree is also part of a series of 4 different prints that Kelly produced in 2012 entitled Follies. These works were shown in the Glucksman exhibitions I Went to the Woods: The artist as wanderer (2016) and Double Take: Collections and Context (2018) and were acquired as part of the University College Cork Art Collection in 2017.