No Irish artist has placed the Ogham so centrally to their work as Brian O’Doherty / Patrick Ireland, the source behind Brian O’Doherty’s conceptual drawings and structural plays currently on view in IMMA. Damian McManus Professor of Early Irish in Trinity College, Dublin, explores the rich history, Irish heritage and social functioning of this 1,500 year old language. Learn more about the history of the Ogam script from its inception down to the present, its writing systems, its distinctive linear characters, rhythmic motifs, and inscriptions as well as its importance within the context of the history of the Irish language today
This talk is programmed in the context of National Heritage Week and IMMA’s national collection of modern and contemporary art.
Damian McManus is Professor of Early Irish in Trinity College, Dublin. He is author of A guide to Ogham (1991) and co-editor of the history of the Irish language, Stair na Gaeilge (1994), to which he contributed the chapter on Classical Modern Irish. He directed the TCD Bardic Poetry project which provided a digitized database of all surviving Bardic poetry as well as publishing the largest collection of medieval poems ever published in Ireland, A Bardic Miscellany (2010). He has published widely in the areas of Primitive Irish morphology and phonology, Latin loanwords in Early Irish, the history of Ireland’s oldest writing system and Classical Irish grammar, metrics and poetry. He is a member of the Royal Irish Academy and co-editor of its journal of Irish philology and literature, Ériu.