CMAT, the Irish pop star Ciara Mary-Alice Thompson, adopts the shopping centre as a central emblem of modern Ireland and generational experience. The Euro-Country album artwork parodies Jean-Leon Gerome's Truth Coming Out of Her Well, depicting CMAT rising from a fountain in Blanchardstown shopping centre beside a giant euro coin. The music video was shot in the Omni retail park, featuring CMAT dancing in largely empty corridors and performing in a vacant shop display. The imagery links out-of-town retail precincts to the hubris and corruption of the Celtic Tiger and the post-recession hardships faced by those without money.
You wouldn't know it to look at the tourist board ads, but the emblem of modern Ireland is probably a shopping centre. And now that emblem has found its bard, in the form of Ciara Mary-Alice Thompson, the Irish pop star and songwriter better known as CMAT. She is a woman wielding a creative energy that is completely her own, but which is also profoundly shaped by her experiences coming of age in a post-Celtic tiger, recession-era Ireland.
The Euro-Country album artwork is a send-up of Jean-Leon Gerome's painting Truth Coming Out of Her Well, with CMAT emerging from the fountain in Blanchardstown shopping centre, beside a giant euro coin. In an interview with the Guardian before her spectacular Glastonbury performance in June, Thompson observed that while Ireland is a little more fetishised and trendy than it's ever been, it's also a really hard place to live, a really hard place to grow up, unless you have money, which we didn't.
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