The Midir & Etain Mosaic - Our Space 71
As you rush to your Millennium Forum seat, it’s easy to pass without glancing at the long, curving mosaic high on the foyer wall. Drawn by the Portstewart-born artist Desmond Kinney, the mosaic beautifully illustrates the 1,000 year-old story of the fairy maiden Etain and the fairy prince Midir.
From left to right, the long mosaic illustrates in striking colours this complicated and wondrous saga of love and magic and a butterfly and challenges and jealousy and impersonation and magic pregnancy and fairies becoming human and humans becoming fairies and spells that last seven years and a fatal game of chess with a kiss for the prize and - in the final edge of the mosaic - Etain and Midir turning into swans and flying up and away together.
The internet has various versions of this story from the manuscript Yellow Book of Lecan.
Another Kinney mosaic is in the lobby of the Royal Victoria Hospital, Belfast, - a blue panel of a dove in flight. And Limerick University has two large mosaics outside its Concert Hall.
Kinney formerly also had two major outdoor mosaics in Dublin: The Cattle Raid of Cooley - in long-term storage awaiting building redevelopment; and Seamus Heaney’s epic poem Sweeney Astray – but the latter’s support structure became unstable and it could not be preserved.
So our Millennium Forum has one of Desmond Kinney’s largest surviving mosaics. Look at it and give thanks for the grandeur his team created from many, many thousands of tiny pieces of glass mosaic.