Duirwaigh is happy to announce prints from our new line: Message from the Muse. This line, created by Duirwaigh owners Angi Sullins and Silas Toball, is devoted to awareness, consciousness and the Art of Being. From the delightful to the divine, our first fourteen prints celebrate the journey of spirit we humans have embarked upon.
Click here to view the first images in our new line!
Message from the Muse is a website offering inspiration to artists, visionaries and waking dreamers. The following is an article written by Angi for an upcoming magazine about MFTM's inception. May it shine the light of insight on the motivating force behind Duirwaigh and its best-friend sister Message from the Muse.
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People laugh when I tell them a roller-disco movie changed my life, charting a map of my purpose, but that’s exactly what Xanadu did. Sitting in a dark theater on International Drive in Orlando, Florida, on a withering summer day in 1980, my eleven-year-old self caught a glimpse into both past and future. I watched the screen intently as a young artist quit working for a record label, deciding to paint his passions instead of rock album covers. After weeks of struggling, he realizes he might starve following his own vision, so he tears up his drawings (and the dream contained within them), flinging them out his third-story window into the dust-moted Los Angeles wind.
Carried across the tops of palm trees, along the edges of the ocean, over the parking lots and apartment buildings of downtown, the broken pieces of his dream finally settle at the feet of nine muses painted mural-style on a back alley brick wall. The sisters magically come to life and dance from the two-dimensional confines of the mural, swinging and swaying with one another in celebration of being alive, called to a new task of inspiration. They then ascend toward the heavens, turning into beams of light. But one stray light falls back down to earth, like stardust, and turns into a human woman. Enter Olivia Newton-John. On roller skates. When she spies the artist walking along a beach-front pier, kisses him, and skates away, I knew he and I both had been kissed by the muse, and would never be the same.
I had no language for it at the time, but I knew what I was witnessing in Kira, the muse, was my own self. Years later, Carl Jung and Joseph Campbell’s books would tell me I had recognized a mythic pattern, that Kira and I shared the same archetype. But the summer of 1980 all I knew, emerging from the blessed coolness of a movie theater on a hot July afternoon, was that I needed a pair of roller skates, a tube of sparkly lip gloss, and an artist. I determined someday, when I grew up, I would be involved with prompting great visions and mending broken ones, while inspiring each blazing hope into manifested reality. (And look fabulous doing it!) At eleven years old, I’d found my life’s purpose.
Fast forward. It’s 2006 and I've embodied Kira by creating Duirwaigh, Inc., an artist agency and gallery specializing in mythic art. We're unique and successful in the marketplace, and while I feel immense satisfaction supporting the dreams of artists I love, inside my soul I feel incomplete, as if the pieces of my own creativity have been torn and scattered from a third-floor window and I don't know at whose feet they've landed. My husband urges me to make films. My family insists I write. Friends encourage me to use my photography skills to take more photographs. All I feel like taking is naps. Lots of them. Often. So I do just that. I allow myself my first non-working vacation in six years and go to a tiny fishing village in Jamaica and there I take long walks, deep naps and lots of breezy hammock rides. Somewhere along the meandering way I decide that I'm finally going to allow myself to pursue Message From the Muse, a website devoted to living an inspired life, using my writing and artwork. It feels selfish. It feels scary. It feels wonderful.
The Message from the Muse blog site is where I allow myself to play, to indulge and delight my senses, and where I encourage others to do the same. I don't have to make budget, make deadlines, or make sense. I just have to make time for my self and my own joy. And what I've found, as I've picked up that brightly colored permission flag and waved it all over my corner of the web, is that living inspired is not a luxury, like the icing on a cake or roller skates on a muse. Living inspired is as much our birthright as breathing oxygen, and as necessary.
The original definition of the word "inspire" means "to breathe life into, to animate." This is how I think we've come to inhabit our bodies. The Divine breathed life into our lungs and inspired us into Living. As breathing creatures, our natural state of being is inspiration. To be in a state of inspiration is to align our divinity with our humanity. But through chaos, crisis and the burden of carrying the rules of right and wrong, we forget. We tumble into the mundane and are grateful just to get through the day.
Message from the Muse is my antidote to the mundane. It exists to encourage a remembering of who and what we are, and of what dream-stuff we're made. It's my way of enticing the muse to stop by for tea and blueberry scones, in hopes she'll leave remnants of divinity among the crumbs and the mark of awe upon my heart, like lipstick stains on the rim of a teacup.
Since I sat in that cool, dark movie theater over twenty-five years ago, dazzled by a muse with great hair, shiny lips and a kindred ability to awaken sleeping dreams, I've learned a few things. Lip gloss doesn't look as good on me as it did on Olivia, and roller skates lead me not to the magical court of Zeus but straight to the land of broken limbs and bruised tail bones. I am not the muse, but I am her messenger. When I clear a space to deeply listen--to do nothing, but be anything--I can hear her melodic voice clearly. Distinctly.
Leap! Soar! Explore! Feel your aliveness! Drink deep from the wellspring of soul to know your incredible, immeasurable, incalculable uniqueness. Then let that awareness spill from your veins all over the page, the canvas, the keyboard. You are, and have always been, the masterpiece. Voice it! Dance it! Live it!
This is her song. This is her charge. This is the Message from the Muse.
Angi Sullins
for Artful Blogging
Spring 2008
Have you seen our latest project? On a recent trip through the world of imagination, I stumbled across an old, forgotten graveyard. The sculptures, stones, moss, trees and leaves were alive, whispering the wisdom of ages. I hope the haunting beauty of their message shines through this film. We're working on a coffee table book of the guardians who allowed me to photograph them and the magic places they call home. 
