In The Open | Anna Marie Savage & Martin Cromie

Anna Marie Savage was born in 1966 and is a Fine Art graduate of the University of Ulster, where she received a First Class Honours Degree in 2009. Based in Newry, Co. Down, Savage was awarded the Creative Spark/Create Louth Residency Award 2015; Cló Ceardlann na gCnoc Residency Award as part of the Úr Programme, supported by EACEA, Culture Ireland and Arts Council of Ireland 2013; was shortlisted for the RHA Tony O’Malley Studio Residency Award 2011 and recipient of SIAP, Arts Council N.Ireland Award 2012 and 2014/2015.
Savage has been involved in two collaborative ventures, Line: An Ambiguous Journey and The Poetry of Form. Both were co-written curatorial projects that explored the practice of drawing on and beyond the paper source. She is currently collaborating with Dr. Martin Cromie on the writings of his book, The Spirit of the Stones.

Martin Cromie lives in the border town of Newry, Northern Ireland. Following early retirement from Education Administration, he gained an MA and PhD in Creative Writing from the Seamus Heaney Centre at Queens University Belfast. His non-fiction, fiction and poetry have appeared in journals, magazines and anthologies and he has been shortlisted for a number of Short Story Competitions including an honourable mention in the 2017 Fish Memoir competition. His main interest is writing about the landscape of his ancestors' home place in South Armagh and he hopes to have a full length work of Landscape Literature published in the near future.

Spiorad na gCloch (The Spirit of the Stones)

The body of work specifically investigates the significance of ‘stone’ and how it has contributed to the area historically and geologically. It consists of panels of handmade paper painted with ink and oil, individually encased in A3 archival polyester pockets and each sleeve has an excerpt from The Spirit of the Stones attached. Making handmade paper is my own individual reaction and response to the immediate environment and by making this very fragile, ethereal, sometimes translucent type paper it can be conceived as representing the fragility of the environment whilst the archival sleeves suggest a ‘preservation’ and ‘conservation’ of artifacts. The paper is handmade using traditional paper making methods and is formed into small panels.Through the interpretation of strong constitution to place, the pieces explore the physical/material/climatic properties of the location (geology, land mass, vegetation, scale, structure and surface), and the subsequent human environmental impact on, and response to, the locale.