The first time I saw Maria Tomasula, she was sitting in a dark room, a headlamp pooling a halo over her hands diligently at work. She didn’t look up when we, a jaunty group just back from a traditional music session, passed by the ground floor window in Kylemore. The Notre Dame Global Centre for the West of Ireland has its base here among a community of Benedictine nuns, and Maria was leading the annual Kylemore MFA Residency Program. Later, I found out she had been working on Ghost, one of the pieces currently showing at the prestigious Zolla Lieberman Gallery in Chicago, in an exhibition titled My Body is a Haunted Land.
One look at Maria’s art and the necessity for such precision becomes obvious. In descriptions of her work, the words ‘meticulous detail’ occur over and over again. But if the details draw the viewer in, inviting us to spend a long time with each of the pieces, it’s what they evoke that lingers long after we have returned to our everyday life. “The superabundance of symbolic references in the picture is made sensuous by that very excess”, says Buzz Spector in his essay, Maria Tomasula's Desiring and Departing Bodies. The artist has not only revealed the insides of the fantastical creatures that inhabit her imagination, she has slipped under your skin, too.
“Her Mexican heritage and Catholic upbringing, though not immediately apparent in her paintings, are undoubtedly the most crucial factors in her art”, analyzes Soo Y. Kang in her comprehensive monograph The Art of Maria Tomasula: Embodiment and Splendor. Traces of the dramatically lit sculptures and images popular in Catholic Mexican churches can be found in Maria’s idiosyncratic yet familiar pieces.
"I was born into a family made up largely of immigrants from Mexico, who settled in and around East Chicago, Indiana, a steel town located on the southern shore of Lake Michigan. This is a heavily industrialized part of the country and we lived in working-class areas. My father worked as a crane operator at Inland Steel for decades before he opened a Mexican Restaurant called El Taco Real. I saw a lot of art growing up, mostly in places like our church and in the form of neighborhood murals (instead of museums). Images were always important to me, they hold such power and are so effective in moving people to thought and sensation."
Maria Tomasula, October 2023
Maria Tomasula - "The House of My Knowing", 2022, oil on panel, 20 x 16 in.
A member of faculty at the University of Notre Dame, Maria fits right in at the Notre Dame Global Centre at Kylemore. Here too, representations of exalted catholicism abound. The grounds of Kylemore Estate house a neo-Gothic church commissioned by Henry Mitchell, the original owner of the castle, dedicated to the memory of his beloved wife; the typical grotesque features of gothic structures such as gargoyles are replaced with delicate flower, bird, and angel features. The natural environment offers its splendors too: a walk along the Fauna and Flora Path will bring the visitor through tunnels of luxuriant green that would not look out of place in one of Maria’s oil paintings.
"I knew Kylemore would be beautiful from photographs," says Maria, "but I am always taken aback at just how stunningly gorgeous it actually is, how fertile the soil is, how lush the growth is everywhere you look. Taking a walk through the forest lanes at Kylemore can be a magical experience, with mushrooms sprouting, birds singing, dappled sunlight falling on the mossy paths. I mean, it's sometimes kind of hard to even believe the reality of the place because it seems to have come out of a fable. The Victorian garden is breathtaking, every time I visit, I'm a little overwhelmed by its combination of exquisite qualities. An art residency can take place anywhere, but the one at Kylemore Abbey features a natural setting so astonishing in its beauty, that the place itself acts as a sort of balm on what a lot of us feel is a sense of being assaulted by the miseries of the world. A lot of care goes into maintaining the site, as well as the quality of the educational and artistic pursuits that take place there."
In fact, The Marvellous Language, pictured, might have mushroomed from one such stroll through the Kylemore woodlands. Nestled in the perpetually misty mountains of the Connemara region, the estate exudes autumnal vibes at all seasons.
"I was, after all, in a swoon over all the mushrooms at Kylemore while I was working on The Marvellous Language. I saw new ones -- that would apparently grow overnight -- on my daily walks through the paths at Kylemore. Some were huge, like the shelf fungi growing in big, banded, semi-circles on tree trunks, while others were tiny and only came into view when I would kneel close to the ground and peek into mossy hollows."
Maria Tomasula, in conversation, October 2023
The Kylemore Abbey Art Residency provides MFA artists with an opportunity to travel to Ireland and create studio work at the Global Centre located in the awe-inspiring geographic location of Connemara. This curated residency provides opportunities for artists to engage with the local artist's studios, observe the art community in Dublin, Galway and Connemara and immerse the artist in the distinct culture of Ireland.
It is a month-long residency that begins with a week in Galway and Dublin where residents will meet artists and writers, visit museums, galleries, exhibitions and attend art festivals. Awardees experience Ireland’s vivid culture and heritage. Residents travel to Kylemore, in the West of Ireland, where they are given a studio and the time and space to create or work on current art projects.
Lucy Plowe, 2023 Residency Awardee, during a group outing to local Renvyle beach
Guided by Maria Tomasula, the awardees have had the opportunity to interact with the other art residents from around the globe, as well as with local artists. Residents have the opportunity to form relationships within this artistic community. The residency is modelled on a seminar where each art resident will present their work to the other residents and engage in critical dialogue with them; these discussions are led by Notre Dame faculty. There is also ample opportunity for residents to spontaneously and informally discuss their art work with each other as well as to spend time making artwork in the studios, to which they have 24-hour access.
Maria says: "I love working with students, the entire process from first learning what their interests are, to talking about better ways of giving their concerns visual form, to interpreting the finished artwork. Each artist brings their own life history and ideas to their artwork, so working with art students is a challenging and newly fresh process every time. The Kylemore Art Residency has so much to recommend it, but for me some of the most memorable moments are what happens when residents present their work and ideas to the rest of the group. The conversations that develop from that process, where an audience comments and interprets the artworks before them, often helps the artist presenter understand their own work, and its effects, in a deeper way. That knowledge informs what they do in their studio next time, usually resulting in better artworks."
"During my time at the Kylemore Abbey Residency, I had the amazing opportunity to meet Maria Tomasula. It was wonderful to have her presence during our time in Ireland. She generously shared her work and knowledge with us, offering new perspectives and thought-provoking questions that enhanced our personal artistic practices. I found a strong resonance with her art and was moved to discover that we shared many similarities in terms of our subject matter."
Antônia Bara, 2023 MFA Residency Awardee, New York Academy of Art
Each resident makes a formal presentation about their studio work to the group, which is followed by a critique and discussion. During the last week of the residency, there is a public group exhibition at Kylemore to showcase the artwork created there.
The Kylemore Art Residency offers an opportunity to create artwork in a spectacular setting within a supportive community, to meet people from varying backgrounds and to immerse oneself in Ireland’s rich culture. Awardees have gone on to great success around the world, exhibiting in international art shows and exhibitions.
Exhibition launch for "Illuminations", the 2023 residency exhibition which saw several pieces by local and MFA artists sold
I've taught in the Department of Art, Art History & Design at the University of Notre Dame for over 25 years now. During that time, I've gotten to work with incredible colleagues and very bright, talented students at both the undergraduate and graduate level. Being an educator is the best job because you get to immerse yourself in the discipline you love. Our students are so smart; the cliché about learning as much from students as they learn from teachers is so predictable because it continues to be true! Their experience of the world is ever new, so while I'm able to bring them my experience, they bring their novel understandings.
Maria Tomasula, October 2023
The Academic Director of the Global Centre at Kylemore, Lisa Caulfield, speaks of how the programme came about: "The success of the MFA Artist Residency is a result of community and connection. A graduate of both the Notre Dame Art Program and the New York Academy of Art, Jaclyn Dooner recognised the potential of the Global Centre at Kylemore to be an ideal location to send artists. She also had the incredible foresight to put me in touch with the faculty from Notre Dame who inspired her, Maria Tomasula. Without the introduction and connection this Art Residency would not have been possible - an artist herself, Jaclyn experienced what the Connemara region had to offer both in terms of opportunity and its challenges. She put me in touch with Maria and we have not looked back since, bringing amazing people to this program for the last four years. Our hope is to make this residency a permanent fixture in our summer programming demonstrating our commitment to the fine arts and our partnerships both local and international. The support of Jaclyn the first few years made it a reality. My sincerest thanks extended to both of these extraordinary women and artists in their own rights. Maria for help shepherding it through the years, and Jaclyn for having the courage to share a dream."
Jaclyn Dooner is the Founder/Director of miriamgallery.com
For 2024, we are looking for past graduates of the Notre Dame MFA program working in the medium of paint, drawing or sketching to apply to partake in this residency. We will be awarding four placements for current and past pupils of the MFA program at Notre Dame. Please apply here.