- I only try to give new life to forms I've seen.

I must feel an exaltation to the very bone to rise up and master that inert mass of clay.

(intense ethereal music) (intense ethereal music continues) - Helen Hooker is really an independent person, and being able to be an independent person and seeing what somebody has done with that, you know, it's actually a very challenging thing, you know, personally, to actually say, here's somebody who was free, and what did she do with it?

- One of the reasons to look back at Helen's career and life now, is that, I mean, like many women, she was neglected, or she's seen as part of somebody else's story.

I mean, she's very much been seen as part of Ernie's story, in terms of an Irish context.

But of course, in reality, she had a very long, and very interesting, and very multifaceted, I suppose, career in the arts.

- It's very important to actually recognize the contribution of Helen Hooker O'Malley in the arts scene in its entirety, not just from being an artist, but also being a collector and a supporter, because so many artists would not have existed without her patronage, or without her support.

- Her personality, her presence, her expertise, her feelings for people, for landscape.

You know, and Ireland meant so much to her, and she understood it, you know, that was the extraordinary thing, that she had an instinctive intuition about Ireland.

It comes across in her photographs in particular, for a wider audience, if you like, but specifically for young artists like myself, it just said the door is open here.

- It was extraordinary, really, Helen, that you, the daughter of a well-to-do, old established Protestant family, I suppose, and Ernie, the Irish revolutionary and IRA man, should have come together in the first place.

What did your parents think of him?

What did your father think of him?

- Well, they were horrified, absolutely horrified.

I ran away, I had to marry in London.

Father banned him from the house that night, he said, "I don't ever want you to see that young man again."

I said, "Father, you can't do that."

And I went around the world, around China, Russia.

(melancholic jazz music) (melancholic jazz music loudens) (melancholic jazz music continues) - So first on photography, a lot of which has been seen in the two exhibits here, she came with a modern camera, and her, Ernie had his own camera, and my uncle both supported her in her efforts to go around, tackle the issue of archeological sights.

- She views them very carefully as artistic objects of cultural value and importance.

And when she photographs them, she photographs them in a very sympathetic and a very artistic way, which allows Irish people to view those artifacts, those objects, and indeed those people, with a different perspective.

- They went on this five-year program to try to take photographs of medieval Ireland.

It never fully succeeded, but the point is that we have the evidence of what they did, and there's fantastic images that they created.

(piano hip hop music) (piano hip hop music continues) (piano hip hop music continues) (piano hip hop music continues) - My mother's relationship to the theater started in 1944, 2 blocks down from us, or two houses down from us, in Clonskeagh, in Dublin, lived Liam Redmond, who was a brilliant actor, and she and Liam, and Gerald Healy and Eithne Dunne, Gerald's wife, all the theater people were involved with the Abbey, and they were not being given the opportunities that they wanted.

So, Mother was able to financially produce theater, and they did a season in Cork, they did one at the Gate Theater, in Dublin subsequent seasons in London.

(gentile violin music) - Siobhán, I had been interested in as an actress, I saw her just in the Abbey, and in three minutes I sent a note around backstage, said I'd like to interview her for the Players Theatre.

Her father wouldn't let her join a wild group of, he wanted her to be conservative, so we didn't get her in the Players Theatre, but she was impressed that I judged her so quickly.

- She had these remarkable small theater sets.

I almost felt like I was in a Bergman movie when I would go there.

"Fannie and Alexander" is a classic example, where in "Fannie and Alexander", by Bergman, he would go into this kind of puppet's workshop, and everything started to come alive.

While with Helen and Ireland, she was able to paint a picture verbally and with visual accessories like the stage sets that she had created, the stories of theater, the stories of poets like Yates.

And friends of hers that actually had, maybe they were older than her, had met people like Yates.

(melancholic violin music) - [Helen] Maud Gonne was a glamorous figure that I knew about from my girlhood through W.B Yeats' poems.

And when I found myself in Clonskeagh, in Dublin, and heard that Maud Gonne was living just up the road, I inquired around, and was asked would I like to go and meet her.

So we went for tea, and I was absolutely bewitched, and she was then 85.

- I had the privilege of seeing her in her studios when Cormac was three years old, doing a portrait of him, and the care with which she would mold tiny pellets of clay to soften them, and then put them on a form, usually a wire internal structure, and then she'd build it out, working very quickly and very intensely, usually over a 72-hour period, without even sleeping often.

Mother was not a poet, she considered herself, that was her venting journal, but she did have a way with words.

We should be in constant readiness to build the form, all art follows from inner vision.

My obligation is to relate people to the universe again.

So these quotes find the humility of her that interactions with people didn't always reveal.

(laughs) - [Interviewee] She introduces a contemporary way of looking at Irish life, Irish landscape, or physical landscape, but also the people in the landscape, and she views that landscape with a very contemporary eye.

- She was more interested in intimate portraiture, rather than kind of official portraiture, which is a very specific thing, it's inclined to have a dead hand on it sometimes.

You can see it in her photography, the way she's interested in people, different people, in this recent book that's been published, which is a wonderful piece of work.

The one thing that comes across are interesting people, different kinds of people, their character, their attitude, the way they carry themselves, their bodily directions, the way they project themselves, yeah.

- Her photographs, probably for the first time in an Irish context, introduce her own cultural archeology, and her own cultural environment, in a contemporary way.

- When I would go to visit Helen, it was almost like going into a parallel universe, and that parallel universe would transport us to Ireland, to County Mayo, to Dublin.

- She had a habit of intensively studying the local culture of wherever she was, and seeking out artists with new visions, Ernie helped fast track that for her in Ireland.

- Ireland gave me the greatest outlet towards creative heaven.

Many friends and hours of creative life are here combined.

- Well, Helen came down to the foundry, she got my address from one of her friends in Dublin, I can't remember exactly who, but anyway, she ended up coming down to see me down in Rostrevor Terrace, where the Dublin Art Foundry was.

And we struck up a conversation, and she told me that she needed some bronze castings, of heads mainly, and I said I'd be delighted to help her.

And Helen struck me as a very formidable but very positive person from the word go.

- She would do a portrait in one fell swoop.

So I saw her in a studio in Burrishole, in Dublin, in Lad Lane.

In London, she had a house at 8 Lanston Place, 1953 to '54, and there she did Eileen Hurley, and Jose Greco, a full figure of Jose Greco, her sculpture was her focus.

- Helen brought something new and fresh into Irish portraiture, because she'd seen the world as it really was, and she traveled, and that was there in the work, that came across to me very strongly, and that's what lent to its great character.

Yes, Helen had that dynamic, the earth force, if you like, and it's in all her work, like as I say, drawings, photography, all of that.

And the earth force, the thing coming from the earth, Yeats said something about that, didn't he?

About everything must come from the earth.

And Rodin's work certainly came from the earth, and so did Helen's.

- Sculpture isn't something you can learn, it is born with love, within unconscious mind, and her appreciation of the intuition that one had to be in touch with one's intuition and unconscious in order to create good art.

(meditative music) (meditative music continues) (meditative music continues) - Welcome to Archives.

I have this head set up, something you haven't seen in... Whatever, 1997?

- [Cormac] My goodness, my mother's friends.

After the death of her second husband in 1971, she agreed to have an exhibition hosted by the Irish American Historical Society at her home in Greenwich.

And she called it Helen Hooker Roelofs Retrospective Exhibition of Irish and American sculpture, sketches, Irish stage designs, and photographs of early Irish sculpture.

And so in fact, what we have here is something which is very fabulous, which is the photographs of that exhibit.

- I was at the first Presbyterian Church of Greenwich with my parents, my sister, and my mother spotted Helen and her husband Richard Roelofs, who had escorted my mother in New York to parties in the early '40s.

Helen did look at me and say, "I must sculpt you, I have not sculpted an American teenager."

And what's a girl to say?

Looking back, it was one of the high points of my life, really, to watch an artist at work.

- this is the artist speaking.

Her goal was to have the strength to struggle on, persist, true to intuition.

We wait for months to solve the pose, then wonder why it took so long.

- When she was thinking of going back to the United States, she remarks upon how she had been so acclimatized to Ireland where she had felt fully accepted, and that if she returned to her American background where she was a socialite, a tennis player, joined the social clubs, et cetera, she had no input to the artistic community in America, and so she would become isolated once again.

- It's difficult to explain what an impact the personality and sensitivity of a man like Ernie had on just a young American, (melancholic violin music) and within 20 minutes almost of meeting him, I asked him would he sit for me.

Frank O'Connor's "Guests of the Nation" was one of the first things that Ernie read aloud to me, and I had not read it.

So when I came to Ireland two years later, and met Frank, who was just a young man, he was a librarian at the Ballsbridge Library, and I asked him almost immediately would he sit for me sometime.

It was over in about three quarters of an hour.

In my damp garage, the only place I had, with a steamer rug around him.

And he came for three days, and that was it.

- The joy is limitless if I can endow the clay with meanings of the spirit now, that is part of why it was always within a short period of time.

- One of Helen's great heads, and it's a great story, about the blind poet of Claire, whose name is Henry Blake, she called this Kilbaha Seanchaí.

Seanchaí is the Irish word for a storyteller.

In the presence of a storyteller, few words come to mind.

He has an inner light of spirit, still more awesome when you find he's blind.

- I have seldom met any character in any part of the world more inspiring than this old seanchaí.

(melancholic violin music) He met me at the gate at the stile of the house that we interviewed, I interviewed him, as graciously as though he'd been royalty.

He came in and he, he couldn't see, he'd been blind for 50 years, and I said I wanted to do a head.

He didn't know what a head, you know, what it meant, but I couldn't tell you the imagination, the sensitivity, his diction just had me, if he had been Yeats I couldn't have been more impressed.

- Sculpture isn't something you can learn, it is born with love, within unconscious mind.

- So here we have the exhibit of my mother, "A Modern Eye", at the National Photographic Archive in Dublin, and it really tells the story of her period of the '70s, though she had been here since 1935 when she married my father, Ernie O'Malley, she came back, and this collection of photographs relates to the period 1975, principally.

(hip hop music) (hip hop music continues) (hip hop music continues) - In the act of being an artist, and I think this is true of any good artist in any medium, you have to come at your subject with wonder, and humility, and vulnerability, and allow the sitter, or the landscape, or whatever, to impact you.

(piano jazz music) (piano music changes to hip hop and intensifies) (hip hop piano music continues)