Art at The Park Hotel, Kenmare: The Tate Gallery of Ireland's hospitality world
Artist Dorothy Cross pictured beside some of her works at the Park Hotel in Kenmare, Co Kerry. Pic: Domnick Walsh
The artist Dorothy Cross smiles and gives a little sigh when the question of the desiccated, 2,000-year-old remains of a certain Egyptian gentleman crops up in conversation.
Sitting in the serene surroundings of the Garden Rooms of the Park Hotel in Kenmare, Cross recounts the latest updates to her Kinship project, which revolves around her attempts to return a mummy stored at UCC to his birthplace.
A highly publicised project following on from her well-received Heartship, produced in conjunction with Cork’s Sounds From a Safe Harbour festival in 2019, in which a preserved, lead-encased human heart was carried up the River Lee aboard the LÉ James Joyce, accompanied by the song of Lisa Hannigan, Kinship has become a protracted saga, mired in the red tape of international logistics.
“I was thrilled about two weeks ago, because we got the final signature necessary from Egypt, all through the hard work of the Irish ambassador,” she says.
“We all met on Zoom, thinking we’d get a date to move the body, five years nearly to the day since I had the idea. But during the conversation, we discovered that the crates he is packed in, in UCC storage, are too big to put on the regular flights from Dublin to Cairo. So now we’re waiting on an agreement with the airline for a bigger plane to make one flight to bring him home.”
In the meantime, Cross has produced a film piece on the project, which involved covering the crate containing the anonymous mummy’s remains in gold leaf, and a book is going to print, with contributions from nine writers responding to themes of death and displacement.
“The book is going to be gorgeous, so that is helping me feel that he is going to get home,” Cross says. “It has been up and down, and I did get very dark about it for a time, because I felt that it should have been so easy.”
For an artist whose site-specific projects can be so ambitious in scope and scale — Ghostship, in 1999, involved her painting a decommissioned lightship with phosphorescent paint and mooring it in Scotsman’s Bay in Dun Laoghaire for a month — maintaining a certain philosophical approach can be important.
With Kinship, which she says has consumed much of her creative energy for the past five years, remembering the passage of time has given her perspective.
“Look,” she says with a laugh, “he was buried 2,000 years ago, he’s been in Cork for 100 years, and I’ve been working on it for five years. When he has gone back it will be a weight off my shoulders. Because I’m kind of in love with him, and horrified that he is kind of stuck.”
Cross is in the Park Hotel at the invitation of its new owner, and she is very much a guest of honour today: several of her pieces are amongst 52 artworks that entrepreneur and art collector Bryan Meehan has installed in the Park Hotel since he purchased the five-star hotel for an undisclosed sum from hotelier brothers John and Francis Brennan in 2023.
It’s an impressive and eclectic collection based on Meehan’s personal tastes and life trajectory, featuring everything from an Andy Warhol print to large bold textured canvasses from Chicago artist Theaster Gates, to a gorgeous seascape of Martha’s Vineyard by Japanese photographer and architect Hiroshi Sugimoto, to works by homegrown but internationally renowned artists including John Minihane, Michael Craig-Martin and Seán Scully.
And, of course, Dorothy Cross. The hotel now holds five of her works, including 2007’s Erratic, a black and white photo in which the artist poses nude against a glacial erratic, a large boulder left by a glacier at the shoreline near her home in Connemara many millions of years ago.
The print now graces the hotel’s dining room: how does it feel to see it here?
Cross laughs. “It’s quite small and grainy, so I don’t feel anything about it particularly. If it was a huge nude it might not be quite appropriate for the dining room. To be invited to somewhere that someone has hung your work is really unusual, and it’s lovely.
“It’s gorgeous, and so unusual, to be able see the context and where the work lives. Because Bryan isn’t getting an adviser in, to say, buy a Rothko, buy a this, buy a that, which is a plague in the art world, instead you get to see an individual’s vision and how something sits next to something else. It will be great to see how this place grows, because his heart is very much in the right place.”
Changing the artworks and shipping his own private collection from San Francisco has been something of a shake-up at the Park Hotel, Meehan explains as he gives a tour of his impressive collection of both Irish and international artists.
“I used to stay here, and one of the things that always struck me was how many gold-plated frames there were of landlords and landladies staring down at you: I found it a little creepy, to be honest with you,” he says.
“It was maybe appropriate for a hotel that was built in 1875, but I felt like the hotel needed a shift in energy with a new owner.”
Meehan, Dublin-born but mostly based in California, is well known for having sold a majority share in his trendy coffee roastery, Blue Bottle Coffee, to Nestlè for a reported €400m in 2017, and for having co-founded the Nude skincare range with Ali Hewson before also successfully selling that on.
He has been collecting art for many years, and wants the hang at the Park Hotel to express values of social justice and inclusivity that he says are important to him, his wife Tara, and their three daughters who are now all in their 20s.
“Queen Anne was up on the wall here, and in her place we have Angela Davis,” Meehan says, gesturing to a highly coloured photographic print of the feminist and civil rights icon.
With a daily art tour at 5pm open to all, Meehan is keen to dissolve some of the formality of the five-star hotel setting, remove the sense that it is only the preserve of a certain social class, and to become a place of welcome to the local community in Kenmare, which has already responded by dubbing the hotel “Tate Kenmare,” according to longstanding hotel staff.
“My parents were quite poor and when my mother walked into a fancy hotel, she felt like she wasn’t welcome,” Meehan says.
“It’s just that vibe, in Ireland: it’s very subtle. So I always try to think of how my mum would feel. The feeling when you walk in should be, ‘you are so welcome.’ Not ‘excuse me but do you have a reservation?’ or ‘are you here to see someone?’
“That’s a bit like the atmosphere in some galleries too, where you go in and you see a painting and it doesn’t even say who it is or how much it is. It’s a barrier. It’s unnecessary. For me it also brings up the thing of what does a five-star hotel represent? How, in Ireland, should we think about five-star hotels? Are they for the 1%? Are they for everybody? I’m more of a mind that this is for everybody.”
He’s also keen to get more of the artists in his collection to visit. He’s good friends with Guggi, but as well as Irish artists, there’s a strong transatlantic connection with Irish-born artists such as Michael Craig-Martin and Seán Scully: the latter features so heavily in Meehan’s collection that the dining room has been renamed Landline, in honour of the abstract painter’s 2017 work Landline Edge.
“Seán is coming over, and he hasn’t seen this work in a long time,” Meehan says. “I love meeting the artists, and knowing them, and getting them here.”
With Meehan’s magic touch, eye for detail and endless connections, the Park Hotel could become a trendy destination for the international arts community in years to come: is this his intention?
“Hospitality, community and art are all very important in Ireland. People are drawn to this place for a variety of reasons, and one of those reasons can be to see the art collection,” he says.
“Whether they are artists, musicians, poets, or anyone else, it’s important to us that people get a welcome.”
