A collection of my photography will be featured in the Saci Perere Art Gallery's inaugural Pop Up Art Exhibition which will be held in Sligo town over this Easter weekend.

The exhibition is entitled: ‘For the love of art…’ and will be Popping Up at the old PJ Coleman Electrical store on Stephen St from Fri 29th March – Mon 1st April.

Opening hours:

Friday 29th March:     7pm – 9pm
Saturday 30th March:     10am – 6pm
Sunday 31st March:     11am – 6pm
Monday 1st April:     10am – 6pm

All Welcome!

Last weekend I got to shoot somewhere I have always wanted to photograph – Leap Castle, Ireland’s most haunted castle.  I was there to get a shot as part a series of photographs I have been commissioned to take by an American author for inclusion in a new Irish ghost stories book (more on that to follow…)

The launch of my new revamped website was picked up by The Irish World - The Voice of the Irish Comminuty in Britain who featured the site revamp on thier website.

Closer to home, the re-launch of the site got great coverage in the Sligo Weekender, Sligo Champion, Western People and Short Breaks magazine (see photos below). 

The Made In Sligo Craft group featured on TV3’s Ireland AM programme which was broadcast live from the Glasshouse Hotel in Sligo on 28th July 2011.
 
As a member of Made In Sligo, my Dusk at Strandhill photograph featured in the broadcast (at appox 2mins 50 seconds in)

In conjunction with the Yeats Summer School and as part of 2011 the year of crafts, members of Made in Sligo held an exhibition which focused on individual interpretations of chosen works by William Butler Yeats.
 
I entered three photographs into the exhibition:
 
1. Tobernalt Rag Tree
2. The Glen
3. Heaven's Gates
 
All three photographs invoke the imagery of Yeat’s poem  ‘He Wishes For The Cloths Of Heaven’
 
Unfortunately, after posing as sentries to the Glen for probably more than two centuries, the gates featured in the Heaven's Gates photograph were stolen in July 2011,  just before the launch of the exhibiton

I am delighted to announce that an extensive collection of my photographs is now on display in The Roundabout Gallery and Craft Loft in Collooney. The Roundabout is a great new gallery which specialises in fine art and high quality local craft. It’s an ideal place to browse for that unique gift for a special person. It is just upstairs from the Gourmet Parlour coffee shop in Collooney.

Sligo Hurling Board chairman Tom Brenan presents "Beaches & Mountains of Sligo", a Ciaran McHugh Panorama photograph, to Kilkenny All-Ireland Hurling championship manager Brian Cody at a gala function in the Clarion Hotel in Sligo on Saturday night, November 1st.

The function was held to celebrate Sligo hurlers winning the Nicky Rackard cup for the first time.

Commandant Fintan Dunne (right), Officer Commanding the 58th Reserve Infantry Battalion, Finner Camp, made a presentation of the Beaches & Mountains of Sligo, a Ciaran McHugh panorama photograph, to Lt Col John Andonie of the Fighting 69th infantry division in New York on behalf of the Irish Defence Forces. The 58th Battalion were in the US as part of the St Patrick's Day celebrations and marched in the parade with the Fighting 69th, who have lead the New York parade for more than 150 years.

The Fighting 69th have strong Sligo connections through General Michael Corcoran who was born in Carrowkeel, near Ballymote, Co Sligo. Corcoran was a close confidant of President Abraham Lincoln and he led the 69th regiment into action at the Battle of Bull Run during the American Civil War. On August 22nd 2006, The Mayor of New York City, Michael Bloomberg unveiled a bronze monument to the Fighting 69th in Ballymote as a tribute to the legacy of General Michael Corcoran.

Former Irish Football International Johnny Giles was presented with "Coney Island Causeway", a Ciaran McHugh photograph, at the Sligo Weekender Sports Star Awards.  The awards ceremony was held in the Clarion Hotel in Sligo on the 26th February  and Johnny was the guest speaker.

Alan Dukes, the former leader of Fine Gael, was presented with 'The Glen', a photograph by Ciaran McHugh at the Sligo Chamber of Commerce annual dinner at the Castledargan Hotel on Friday 17th October 2008.

Alan was the guest speaker at the Chamber's annual dinner and was presented with the framed photograph by the Joe McCann, president of Sligo Chamber and Anne Gallagher of the VHI.

The novelist, playwright and poet Dermot Healy opened the exhibition:

"It's wonderful to see such a practised eye abroad on the landscape, going up the Glen and Crossing the causeway at Coney Island. And I'm glad to be here to look around with this man as my guide.

Ciaran's Sunset Over Knocknarea is a gem, one hill is topped by another rounded slope. There is great width in the view. Always the sky is rounding off the earth below. And sometimes to the fore of the photographs there is a group of solitary stems standing upright, like the tall flowers at the front of Ballisodare Bay, or the reeds in Scarden- they set the scene, on guard at the entry into the distance, and yet are set, quietly and obtrusively, into place.

The threatening sky seems to follow the line of the masts of the boats at Ballynakill in Connemara. The photographer has grabbed a rare chance to look at nature and man collaborating for a brief second. The boats are going up into the upper realm. And that brief second is extended into the Misty Morning at Oranmore with the tree, loaded with years of wind and grief, outlined in the shot like a tall musical note in a long silent tune, an air that the cat might be listening to in Andalucia.

 Ben Bulben has been rarely caught to its full extent as it overlooks Sligo Bay as this photographer has done here in one wide filmic sweep. It takes a great stretch of the imagination -and the lens to capture that sight and find the right place in the landscape to stand.

 Then as we look at the stones in Lough Corrib the thought crosses the mind that they might have been the same stones that built Annaghdown castle in the background. Or we could be looking at the water-logged debris of another civilization. Always there is a visual history at work in Ciaran's view of a landscape. He is tracking back and forth through time.

 And in The Glen Panorama the eye sets off on an ancient walk along some secret pathway into the past. Age is being given an airing, old souls are taking a walk together towards some special site.

 The sheep, like a set of models, have stepped up to the camera at Clonbur, and there is a lovely fall and rise in the land that leads down to the sheen of Lough Corrib. Again the photographer has chosen the perfect place to pause, and thereby gives the viewer a powerful sense of distance, and fall, and reach.

 And this is scored deep in the retina as one looks at Tully mountain and Ballynakill Harbour. Here the vastness of nature is set against the few houses dotting the land, that disappear as the as the heights grow wild and ragged. These are a few of the occupied houses in the show; the historian is looking further back, and yet there we are - us , the inhabitant-  with our roofs and windows, aware and unaware of the place outside that we inhabit..

There is a lovely swerve of light and water and stone in Loch Talt. The man and woman of Sligo - Benbulben and Knocknaree - shot from Skreen , sit looking out to sea in armchairs of earth and stone in a long string of photos set together without a line showing in a work worthy of a seamstress, and slowly you again realise the pictorial sense of the photographer when you see that both the left and right of the picture are framed by trees.

 Abandoned places exist in all the landscapes from the hen house to the plough, but there is a deathly white at work in the tombstone at Strandhill, with again the clouds echoing the atmosphere of the graveyard, you're drawn to the dark growing to the to right hand of the frame, then drop down a little, and again the eye settles on one last small beautiful cross captured, alone, away out there in the distance, like a last farewell. This is great stuff, to have caught that final tombstone.

With his ingredient of white he has embroidered Shrule Castle. But that same white darkens the cottages of Maamtrasna and Lenane, and darkens them so much that you feel their emptiness and their rain and you can also feel the weight of the stones that built the houses. And because of this weight the wall and piers outside the abandoned Cottage in Leenane have an uncanny human, and troubled presence.

 The white is rebuilding the structures, then emptying them, and those same stones in the Corrib and in the abandoned houses lead the way to the earliest of structures that houses the Carramore Tomb. There is a sense of stoicism and the balance. It is as if the tomb is about to set sail. And then comes the sense of mushrooms.

 It is another drumbeat, and then comes another, when suddenly we are in another other time as we pass Ross Friary where the word roofless suddenly takes on a new meaning. The past has gone into the clouds. That long abandoned building that housed sinners and saints takes ages to pass by in the frame. The sense of loss travels in a quiet way out to the eye. Again, the photographer is standing in the right place. Sometimes it is not what you see, but where you see it from.

 Lastly, the flowers that were at a distance from us in the landscape hover up close in these works on fauna. The summer Daisy eventually looks like a close-up of the broad white hat a woman might wear as she heads off down the street at a Festival in Brazil. Ahead of her dancing is the Potentilla and the Wild Garlic, a beautiful shot of the flower that we pass daily without looking at it. But not the slugs.    

The Rhodendron is a joy, and great wonder is the Mock Orange at Ransboro. He is homing in on the familiar and unfamiliar, and seeing each for the first time all over again. The daffodil is on her way to the disco and could be standing at the corner of O'Connell street asking for a light from a passerby.  The exotic erotica of the Spanish Butterfly feeding of red and white leaves, is like a small horned dragon, escaped from a garden off Wine Street in another century.

 I was glad to see the Robin here, holding on tight with her claws as she considers whether to get up and go from present times. Beside her the Blue Tit is listening to the tune of The Campanula. And lastly the summer daisy again passes with dots of water on the wings of her hat as they all step forward down the road to the unheard music.

This exhibition is a lovely visual pursuit of the lost and the daringly alive. History and landscape, colour and distance, stone and water, are honed and stitched together through a great generous lens that throws vast light onto a sense of absence and presence.

It's an honour to open it.

I wish Ciaran well in his future as a photographer. He is looking into the core".
Dermot Healy October 2008