The Centre of Attention

b. 1972, France

On our first visit to Limerick City Gallery of Art, we spoke to visitors about the collection. We hear an odd and remarkable story about a painting in the collection, a painting with apparent miraculous healing properties and a tale of a man’s mother cured of tuberculosis. Is it ‘blarney’ or is there something to it? Our research suggests this is not an isolated phenomenon. For instance, a woman was healed of cancer recently. And a doctor’s assistant on Pery Square used to send patients to look at the portrait in the 1950s. Someone even mentions one injured Munster player visiting the gallery in 1978 who was back to full fitness the next week and able to play the match against the All Blacks.

The painting in question, Stella, has a vague and a mysterious provenance. Little is known to substantiate its attribution to the 17th-century artist Charles Jervas (or Jarvis) or to the sitter as Jonathan Swifts’ lover, Stella. Much later, overpainting is thought to have been done to the features.

Recently the portrait has become something of a shrine. The singling out of one work from the collection forces us as viewers to (re)assess the other works. What do people want from art and excerpt from art? Something other than its own ‘objectness’? Feelings of powerlessness can lead people to invest art with unverifiable qualities and extraordinary myths, hoping that it is not just a dead, inert thing. Stella, The Miracle of Limerick, is a scenario proposal not just to the gallery visitor, but the wider public of Limerick.

(Text: give(a)way catalogue, 2006)