Mary Patterson, Ballina Arts Centre, 10 November – 31 December 2016

Arriving at Ballina Arts Centre on a wild November morning and seeing the River Moy in flood, the logic of Mary Patterson’s exhibition seems very clear: to try to find responses to nature through art. The appropriately named ‘Paper Trails’ features a series of works on paper created through a formidable range of drawing and printmaking processes. Patterson’s use of diverse techniques forms part of her quest to identify a medium and a language that can convey the beauty and complexity of nature. The artworks that feature in the exhibition are displayed in the open-plan landing space that curves out towards the adjacent River Moy. This light, airy space provides an ideal setting for the works in close proximity to nature.

‘Paper Trails’ encompasses a range of methodologies evident in collographs, charcoal drawings, drypoint intaglios, monoprints and a series of finely-detailed pen and ink works. Patterson depicts a broad selection of imagery, from small natural forms like lichen and stones to sweeping landscapes. There are animals too – hares, goats, frogs and fish – depicted in various contexts.

The collograph High Summer is a visually rich work that features intense yet naturalistic colours, with an unconventional ‘all overness’ to its composition. A sense of imposed order on the chaos of nature is also prevalent in two groupings of highly-detailed pen and ink drawings that form the most persuasive and eloquent subsets within the broader collection of artworks. The drawings are small in scale and use circular compositions to move away from the conventional pictorial structure of landscapes

The drawings are presented in two sets, and centre around the artist’s locale of Foxford, County Mayo. The first group of four images contains two distinct representational approaches. Two images, entitled Game of Thrones 1 and 2 depict the earth from above and show mysterious earth works and boundaries barely visible at ground level but clear and graphically fascinating when seen from above. By contrast, the two images displayed alongside are of things seen in extreme close up. Ripples on the Shore and Lichenform are akin to magnified studies of nature or laboratory samples seen under a microscope. They share the patterns and rhythms of the macro images and the same fine detailed pen and ink work.

In the second set of images, Contornare, Lough Cullin, Patterson combines two distinct types of drawing. The central motif is a mineral-like structure composed of parallel lines reminiscent of those indicating terrain on a map. Countless minuscule circles bound this island or rock-like form. The formal simplicity of black and white enables Patterson to play with layers of associations in the imagery while still retaining a sense of continuity. Rivas: the Windings of the Moy seems to channel art historical references: a river snaking off into the distance recalls the idealised landscape of da Vinci’s Mona Lisa.

In the statement accompanying the exhibition, Patterson quotes French painter and printmaker Pierre Bonnard: “Art will never do without nature”. The choice of Bonnard is an interesting one. He was an artist whose work was predicated on a restless search for visual responses to the complexity of the natural world and on overcoming the difficulty of transcribing his observations into a form that could communicate eloquently to the viewer. Making precise patterns and rhythms from the complex forms of nature is a way of communicating their poetry, layers of history and meaning.

Bonnard also made art about what he saw around him. His work is characterised by the use of flurry of small marks, which come together to form dense and nuanced surfaces. He used the small rooms of his house and the rhythms of everyday life as his subject matter, as though the whole universe could be viewed through the lens of his immediate surroundings. In a similar vein, Patterson has used the land, its outward appearance and the layers of history just below the surface, to make a series of works that have, for her, the same immediacy and seriousness. In her exhibition notes, the artist outlines her interest in the traditional ways of harnessing the land as well as man’s impact on the natural world. Patterson’s mark making reflects multiplicity of ways in which the land can be represented, as terrain, as a series of boundaries, as mineral and botanical forms and as geological phenomena. Using the marks made on the landscape by man’s interventions over centuries, Patterson charts the effects of colonialism, changing societal structures and the tensions in our relationship with nature.

Andy Parsons is an artist based in Sligo. He is the founder of Floating World Artists’ Books.

Image: Mary Patterson, Ripples on the Shore.

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Niamh McCann, VISUAL, Carlow, 3 October 2015–3 January 2016

The core work in ‘Just Left of Copernicus’ is a large geodesic structure installed in VISUAL’s main gallery. This is a challenging space, but the work is big enough to successfully withstand compression by the room’s engulfing depth and volume. It is inspired by the work of Buckminster Fuller, a pioneering engineer/designer who patented geodesic building design in 1960 in an effort to achieve cheaper, faster and more efficient home building. McCann’s motivation for making this work seems ostensibly to come from nostalgia for the ‘modern’ period, when civil innovation was understood as a means to better the conditions of man. This ties into her collaboration with Limerick Fab Lab, one of many fabrication laboratories (see also WeCreate and Workbench) providing the public with an environment in which to design, make and construct pretty much whatever they choose.

The logistics of McCann’s dome were devised by architects Séamus Bairéad and Jack Byrne using a neat modular system of bespoke flexible joints and industrially produced cardboard tubes of varying lengths. The design allows the structure to spread into a series of connected domes, which ascend and curl while remaining tectonically weighted to the floor. The making process is foregrounded in its skeletal form and raw, uncoated materials. The palette of soft grey paper and warm plywood is earthy and wholesome in a way that Fuller’s proposed domes never were. Although his visionary designs won him both critical acclaim and notoriety, they were never commercially successful.

On a facing wall, the image of an Aer Lingus air hostess, taken from a 1960s pocket calendar, is rendered in a cheerful nostalgic style. The three-metre-high mural brings to mind the ideal of Lemass’s sparkling and unblemished Ireland, untarnished by the dark memories of industrialisation that haunted other nations.

The post-war zeitgeist that Fuller embodied was one of a desire for atonement, where western society seemed suddenly to discover humanity as a phenomenon worthy of attention. It was a time of social democratisation, of betterment and of innovation, all with the ambition to improve humanity rather than simply advance the cause of capitalism. It was a hunt for heile welt, or an ideal world, where nature, technology, humanity and capital could all exist in harmony.

Viewed holistically McCann’s practice appears to capture, overlap and juxtapose these zeitgeists of the twentieth century. But the very idea of a zeitgeist hinges on the existence of a collective consciousness and a collective memory, which have the potential to be moulded by the ‘spirit’ of the age. By probing and extracting important moments from this collective memory, McCann begins, whether intentionally or not, to fracture its legitimacy and truth. Gramsci identified capitalism’s greatest weapon as cultural hegemony i.e. its ability to give rise to an accepted weltanschauung or single, dominant world view. In the title McCann references Copernicus, who challenged the established and literal worldview of his time, and the German industrial architect Hans Poelzig, who, conversely, was noted for his pragmatic approach. In 1906, Poelzig wrote: “We all too frequently seek to save the emotional content of past epochs, without first thinking what use it is to us”. (1) By lining up Fuller, Copernicus and Poelzig alongside references to the emergence of modern Ireland, McCann emphasises the contested ways in which history is used and calls for a more critical interpretation of its perceived failures.

McCann’s research material is laid out on glass-covered tables and shows a preoccupation with space exploration and engineering. She includes a charming image of Soviet poster boy Yuri Gagarin, photos and maps of lunar landscapes (including the Copernicus Moon Crater), handmade geodesic maquettes, the architect’s sketches for the plywood joints and schematics for the full-scale structure. The earnestness of this material matches the playful nature of the dome and underpins the entire project with a sweet childlike optimism. It brings to mind my own childhood poring over the Junior World Encyclopedia, marvelling at wonders like the Brussels Atomium, Fuller’s Dome for the 1967 World Expo and German spaghetti junctions. But curiously, on a wall opposite the lovely Aer Lingus lady, there is painted a deflated weather balloon that casts a withering chill over the galleries. I couldn’t help but feel that somewhere along the way something went wrong that McCann is trying to put right. In ‘Just Left of Copernicus’ she is both persuasive and captivating, drawing attention to a worthy dream – even if you weren’t born before 1975.

Carissa Farrell is a writer and curator based in Dublin.

Note: Hans Poelzig, Die Dritte Deutsche Ausstellung, 1906

Image: Niamh McCann, ‘Just Left of Copernicus (The Roof of the Story)’ installation view, 2015, VISUAL, Carlow.

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Kathryn Elkin and Seamus Harahan, CCA, Derry,
10 October–28 November 2015

CCA’s latest show explores the temporary nature of exhibition alongside residual cultural processes. It activates the build-up to an opening performance, or the post-processing of creative method, and the legacy left by those actions. The first collaboration is founded in Irish folk music. Artist Seamus Harahan formed the group ‘Trees Prosper’ with Patrick Morgan, Christina Anna Morgan and Sara J. Barry, who, in this venture, collaborated with established traditional singer Len Graham. The musicians worked toward the opening-night performance Along the Faughan Side, and their chairs remain in an arc in the space as a part of the recorded and exhibited rehearsal process.

A full rendition of their performance plays on a cracked 4:3 television, with each song portraying romantic and nostalgic stories of local scenes. The film itself is shot outside, showing the musicians as leaning silhouettes against bright sunlight. The steady, handheld camera moves occasionally and eventually picks up enough detail and light to show the musicians against the walls of the city.

In these understated films, it feels as though the rehearsal is captured almost incidentally. In another work, the song The Rollicking Boys of Tandragee is followed by what seems to be an impromptu solo of The Bunch of Kale. This time the musicians rehearse inside, seated on the foldout gallery chairs, which squeak as they sway to the rhythm. In this work, the musicians’ process is foregrounded; the performance element, the film and the stories that are shared in the song are secondary. The lyrical communication becomes a side effect, and so its informal structure and potency remains in spite of overt re-presentation within the gallery.

A live microphone points toward the empty chairs, capturing the audio of surrounding films. It’s plugged into an old tape deck, so visitors can play another rehearsed song, The Newry Highwayman, on top of this ambient sound. This musical layering and the sound quality of the cassette produce the most evocative rehearsal record; there’s almost a synthetic session in the background. The outmoded equipment, which is used in this work and dotted throughout the collection, gives no indication of the work’s timeframe, yet the surrounding recordings are made immediate in the space when converted into ambient sound. These very subtle prescriptions and shifts in the music’s status between forefront and background, old and contemporary, play with the active/passive nature in our own receptive role: we consume their results, but without seeing the true performance, and so we are left with its decommissioned suggestions. The performers have produced another myth of the opening-night work, which can only be alluded to in this rehearsal documentation.

In her work, Kathryn Elkin addresses a collaborative archetype in an entirely different cultural realm: specifically, that of the celebrity talk-show interview, where formal transactions of influence and image-building are dressed up as casual discussions. Her work replicates and distorts the format, expanding and borrowing from two interviews with Dustin Hoffman; in one, the young actor discusses his method and, in a more recent interview, he talks about how he plays the song La Bamba to “stay loose” on set.

The work John Shuffling His Tarot Deck & Playing Guitar recreates a retro interview set-up, complete with black background, swivelling leather chair and a vase of pale flowers. Whilst a tinny and tentative guitar solo of La Bamba plays, the sitter slowly does as the title suggests, giving an awkward smile. It’s a combination that’s almost comically esoteric. John’s gestures in the title sequence are left unexplained, and the viewer can’t see any of the cards. It operates like a trailer for the next work, Why La Bamba?

In this work, shown on a cinematic scale in the next room, John sits on the same set, repeating selected lines from an old interview given by Hoffman just after he made The Graduate. Elkin prompts his lines off-camera, and they converse and joke in between, at one point discussing Hoffman’s sincerity while they imitate him. John repeats statements about method acting – “I’m not a sailor, I’m a captain” – which are occasionally overlaid with a Spanish translation and become increasingly abstracted. We join the dots between the statements as if they were rumours, assisted by John, who slips in and out of character. The mix of humour and sincerity parallels the original interview with Hoffman, which is on show in the CCA library space, itself a display of discomfort and wandering comedy. In a similar way to Harahan’s work, the performative myth is built upon, this time focusing on the man rather than the tale.

‘Kathryn Elkin/Trees Prosper & Len Graham’ is a show that riffs on cultural output on two temporal levels: the effect of time on cultural communication, and the amalgamation of two widespread points in a creative career. When combined with the brief nature of this exhibition and the artists’ one-step-removed methodology, these disparate points in time don’t consolidate but instead build up fictitious, contemporary legends of performance and performer, and new paradigms therein.

Dorothy Hunter is an artist and writer based in Belfast.

Image: Trees Prosper and Len Graham, The Boys of Tandragee/The Bunch of Kale, 2015. Photo courtesy of CCA Derry-Londonderry.

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Hanuman is the Hindu monkey-god, a follower of Rama, the seventh incarnation of Lord Shiva, and a warrior credited with the ability to slay thousands of demons. The exploits of Hanuman are told in the epic poem the Ramayana, a 24,000 verse composition regarded as a great work of Indian literature.

The warlike god also lends his name to the latest solo exhibition from British-born artist Paul McKinley. This new body of work draws on the events  that took place towards the end of the brutal Sri Lankan civil war, which lasted from 1983 until 2009, and on its folklore of gods and monsters.

Often free from inhabitants, McKinley’s work uses landscape and the natural world to explore the nature of mass killing and genocide, attempts to eradicate entire races or tribes of people. Even the works which don’t directly reference these themes still radiate an aura of discomfort, a suspicion that there is something dark and unwelcome concealed in the lush vegetation and bucolic landscapes scrutinised in his beautifully rendered drawings and paintings.

In this compendium, the artist once again reflects on a specific tragedy in recent history, exploring the complex legacy of civil war, ethnic cleansing and the advent of ‘dark tourism’, where such sites become destinations for ‘adventurous’ tourists seeking an authentic connection with the less palatable aspects of human history.

In his 2013 exhibition at Kevin Kavanagh Gallery, titled ‘Operation Turquoise’, McKinley worked from photographs of Rwandan flora and fauna, taken by Trinity College Dublin ecologist Shane McGuinness. Replicating images of volcanic craters, the indigenous ancient shoebill bird and the country’s rust red earth, he captured what writer Gemma Tipton described in the accompanying text as “meditations on never truly knowing a place”.

This sense of unknowing and of a vague unspecified threat also permeates the work here. Once again working from photographs, he addresses diverse subjects. The spirit of the monkey god is referenced in the eponymous and finely executed ink drawing Hanuman, where a long-tailed primate is captured mid-leap between branches. In the watercolour Call to Arms, a bright green meadow hosts a vast troop of monkeys stretching from foreground to background, while a lone deer in a dense forest is picked out in goldleaf in the detailed ink drawing Deception.

These relatively small-scale drawings are joined by oil paintings of varying sizes, from the dazzling vibrance of the painting Sita’s Flowers (a reference to Rama’s wife Sita) to the commanding canvas of Towards Mullaitivu, where a beaten earth road takes the eye to the crest of a small hill before it disappears. Subjects are sometimes framed almost as though the image is cropped, zooming in on details like tree branches. As with so much of McKinley’s work, there is a pregnant atmosphere, an expectancy that brings the viewer to wonder both what next will happen or what just has happened.

All of the locations in the works have been touched in some way by the Sri Lankan civil war, which ended when the insurgent Tamil population were quelled by government forces. Disturbingly, these sites were witness to terrible events even while tourists enjoyed other ‘safe’ parts of the country, oblivious to what was happening.

In the small publication produced to accompany the exhibition, former UN spokesman Gordon Weiss describes the “awful irony of of tourists still flocking to Sri Lanka’s southern beaches during the final phase of the war … even as hundreds of Tamil civilians and Tamil Tigers were besieged and bombarded by government forces on a beach on the northern coast”. The beach was Mullaitivu, just out of sight in McKinley’s gorgeously lush painting.

Elsewhere the artist plays with colour and the kinds of images one might treasure as holiday snaps. A shoal of bright orange fish swim about in Lolanda Reef, while the yellow ochre tones of Mines evoke a faded Kodachrome photograph, where spindly palm trees fringe an idyllic tropical beach scene. Compelling and enigmatic, each work pulls off this feat of unsettling ambiguity.

McKinley’s exceptional skill and his ability to switch between media, whether creating impressionistic vistas or executing detailed drawings, allow him to pose these questions of occluded histories again and again. Operating as emissaries between brutal histories and the present, few of the works are as explicit as the vibrant Battle, with its raging jungle flames, or as disturbing as the monochrome oil painting Burning Books, with its immediate affront to free speech and liberty.

These are, in a way, exceptions to the rule, while the overall ambiguity only serves to invite us to look, and look again, more closely.

Anne Mullee is a Dublin-based writer and curator.

Images left to right: Paul McKinley, Burning Books, 2015, oil on canvas, 45 x 37cm; Paul McKinley, Bunker, 2015, oil on canvas, 57 x 70cm.

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Lisa Fingleton, Siamsa Tire, Kerry, 30 October–4 December 2015

The central work in ‘Holding True Ground’ is 30 Days of Eating Local Food. Located in the Round Gallery, the work takes the form of a diary, with each day unfolding through diagrams, notes, sketches and photographs. Day one includes a mind-map questioning the artist’s reasons for undertaking such a project. She quotes Gandhi: “You must be the change you wish to see in the world”.

In the centre of the room are a number of objects, which shuttle between the sculptural and the everyday. A wooden structure echoing a tree, its wellington-capped branches radiating from the central trunk, could be a subtle allusion to Duchamp’s Bottle Rack. There are also garden implements, a watering can, small trees and tomato plants. A battered armchair completes the Relational Aesthetics–style set. I was confused as to whether this was an invitation to sit. Was it a found object transformed into an art piece by its placement in the gallery or did it remain a functional object? The chair can be seen as one of the pivotal objects in the show. It troubles the relationship between art and non-art. I decided to err on the side of caution and remain standing.

Three small black-and-white photographs in kitsch gold frames are placed on the wall beside the entrance to the Middle Gallery. Two are stills from the film Darby O’Gill and the Little People (Disney, 1959) and the other is a photograph of Lisa’s intrepid wife. To their left is a table on which is placed a fanzine-style booklet, Lisa Fingleton: Artivist, which refers back to the piece 30 Days. It is an expanded and denser version of the wall piece, the title an explicit acknowledgement of the artist’s desire to intermingle art and activism.

Breathing the Same Air is a short video piece documenting various community projects that engage with issues around sustainable food production and our relationship with nature. They are very concise documentary pieces, which bear witness to people’s attempts to propose alternative ways of living. Projected onto the opposite wall, Love Darts is a much more ambiguous piece. The image is hazy, the colours muted and washed out; there is an atmosphere of suspension about it. An organic, gloopy, viscous object is suspended from a line, almost unmoving. On the gallery floor stands a pair of wellingtons, each with a small torch attached. All is revealed by putting on the headphones and listening to the soundtrack, a recording of the artist interviewing gardeners about their relationship with snails. The title is explained in the exhibition literature, which describes “the love making antics of snails, hermaphroditic creatures lunging their love darts into each other’s flesh”.

The Back Gallery is screened off with a red curtain, but the Irish air My Bonnie Irish Girl escapes its confines and wafts through to the Middle Gallery. The song accompanies the short video piece The Good Wife, which documents Fingleton’s partner engaged in various tasks around their small farm. She is shown digging spuds, collecting seaweed for fertiliser, chopping wood, minding chickens, zooming around on the farm quad bike and baking cakes. It is a celebration of the idea of the ‘good life’ and a humorous testament to things both changing and staying the same.

Another video piece, What Goes Around, is shown in the Corridor Gallery. Fingleton made the film at a masterclass in London with the Iranian artist Shirin Neshat. Through the double screen of tank and lens, densely-packed fish swim and tendrils of plants drift, accompanied by the burbling, bubbling sound of water. This piece calls for a more contemplative engagement, with the absence of a voice-over allowing the viewer to imagine how it relates to the other works.

Sharing a wall with What Goes Around are three framed watercolours titled Craving Colour. A lobster’s claw, a flower, a seed head, each delicately rendered in a palate of reds and oranges, are isolated on the white paper. In the Stillness Something Moves is a suite of nine A3 ink drawings pinned to the opposite wall. Thick black undifferentiated lines depict the artist’s farm and garden. The supporting material explains that the drawing project was undertaken as a way to try to escape from the technological devices of the studio. The computer is a dominating technology for the contemporary artist. It can be a tool for making art, but it is also the instrument of administration and promotion, which are crucial for any artist working in the highly competitive, individualistic contemporary-art world. The drawings show a desire to engage the hand and the body, to embed a more physical labour in the artwork.

‘Holding True Ground’ is a celebration of the attempt to create an ethical, purposeful and pleasurable way of life. With an air of humour and a light touch, it also portrays the challenges faced by those who choose this path.

Catherine Harty is member of the Cork Artists’ Collective and a director of The Guesthouse Project.

Images left to right: Lisa Fingleton, ‘Holding True Ground’ installation shot, 2015; Lisa Fingleton, In the Stillness Something Moves, 2015.

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EAMON O’KANE WRITES ABOUT THE PROGRESSION OF HIS CAREER OVER THE LAST 10 YEARS.

In 2005, I wrote an article for the VAN titled ‘Constant Production and Exposure’, which outlined my career trajectory up to that point (eamonokane.com). At that time, I was living in Bristol and was a lecturer in Fine Art at the University of the West of England. Myself and four others had set up an artist-run gallery space called LOT, which ran for one year and involved an ambitious and dynamic programme.

For the exhibition I curated with LOT, titled ‘REMOTE’, I asked all of the artists in the show to send me instructions, drawings and photographs for projects by post or email, and I then carried out those projects in the space. The idea occurred out of necessity, as we didn’t have any core funding at that time, and out of an interest in Sol Lewitt’s instruction-based work. I was interested in seeing what would happen in the process of translation from idea/instruction to artwork. I translated instructions for wall-and-window-based artworks from artists such as David Shrigley, Katie Holten, Niamh O’Malley, Garret Phelan, David Sherry, Liam O’Callaghan, Sophia Gref, John Beattie and Joel Croxson.

The following year I undertook a six-month residency at the British School at Rome, and I produced works for solo exhibitions in Baden Baden and Berlin and at Draíocht in Dublin. Residencies have always proved to be important for me, and I have been reaping the benefits of the residency in Rome ever since. I returned to full-time teaching in Bristol for one year but then took the difficult decision to leave my job as a senior lecturer there and move to Denmark with my family in order to take up a residency in my wife’s hometown of Odense. I also undertook a three-month residency at Centre Culturel Irlandais in Paris in the spring of 2008, where I produced works for solo exhibitions in New York and Berlin and a series of solo exhibitions in the UK.

It was during the residency in Odense that I began my engagement with the legacy of Freidrich Fröbel, the inventor of the Kindergarten. My wife had borrowed a book from the local public library for me titled An Eames Primer, written by Eames Demetrios, grandson of Charles and Ray Eames. I not only discovered that Charles Eames was expelled from studying architecture for his loyalty to the vision of Frank Lloyd Wright but also that, like Wright, Eames had studied in an original Kindergarten in the USA. In addition, the book outlined how Charles Eames’s grandfather Henry had emigrated from Limerick to America in the 1800s. This gave me the idea for an artwork that would reconnect Eames with Limerick, where I had lived for a year in 2000–2001.

I began with the idea of constructing a two-room walk-in model, a hybrid of the Eames house and studio, and using one of the rooms for a series of works based on the connections between Eames, Lloyd Wright and Fröbel. I also managed to get permission to screen the films of Charles and Ray Eames within the installation. The other smaller room became an interactive space where Fröbel gifts were accessible alongside objects designed by Eames and others as well as furniture designed by myself.

I found that providing access to the Eames films alongside this interactive ‘play area’ had many surprising consequences. Children and adults embarked on parallel journeys of discovery and shared experiences. Given the rich and varied histories, contexts and approaches referenced by the Eames films and the open-endedness of the interactive Fröbel studio, the participants were able to investigate complex questions around the advent of computing, human mortality and the origins of the universe. The work became a foundation for my subsequent interactive installations (1).

Another project, which has developed and taken many forms, began in 2007 when I was preparing work for a solo exhibition at the newly built RCC Art Centre in Letterkenny. ‘The House and the Tree’ featured a reconstruction of an original part of my parents’ house that was demolished half a century ago, and it also included a film of derelict vernacular architecture from the county, augmented by audio recordings of Sean-fhocail (Gaelic proverbs). A sycamore tree, under which King James II dined, was blown down in a storm in 1999. The cut-up fragments of the tree formed the centerpiece of the show, along with a large wall drawing of the tree itself. I had previously used charcoal to make wall drawings of trees, but this was the first time where the burnt tree, the wall drawing and the fragments of wood were exhibited side by side.

The project turned into a touring exhibition with the works evolving and changing as they moved from venue to venue. At the time I was developing The Eames Studio Limerick, I was also working in Bristol with a local carpenter to transform the sycamore tree into a seventeenth-century-style table and chairs, similar to those used by James II. I approached an installation of the exhibition at Plan 9 in Bristol in much the same way that I would approach a period of research in my studio. My intention was to work directly with the material and not from any preconceptions about how the show was to be installed prior to the four days of installation. I kept all the waste wood from the process, worked with these wooden fragments in the space for four days and eventually settled on laying the fragments out over the floor.

In 2009, I used the replica furniture to stage a re-enactment of James II’s meal at ArtSway in the New Forest. Again, I intentionally took an improvised approach to how the artwork should evolve. Using the seventeenth-century-style furniture produced in Bristol, I directed the reenactment, which was performed by the English Civil War Reenactment Society. This took place at two sites in the New Forest on 19 April, almost 320 years to the day from the actual event. I gave the re-enactors a brief synopsis of the background history and asked them to improvise the roles they were given. The film was shot in one take and then edited. The furniture was installed in the gallery space with the video documentation of the reenactment. This was connected to another re-enactment, which took place on the same day, of a hunt led by James II, who was the last king to hunt in the New Forest. I was interested in connecting the two places using the fact that James II had visited both.

The exhibition came back to Ireland in 2010 for my solo show ‘The Twentieth Of April Sixteen Eighty Nine’ at the Crawford Municipal Gallery in Cork, while at the same time Fröbel Studio was shown in an exhibition titled ‘School Days: The Look of Learning’ at the city’s Lewis Glucksman Gallery. Works from both exhibitions were included in Dublin Contemporary 2011. Installing two apparently unrelated installations in the same exhibition caused me to reflect on the connections between them, and this led me to a new body of work dealing with entropy and carbon. The most recent work related to this is titled wood archive and is currently on show at the Vigeland Museum in Oslo as part of the Norwegian Sculpture Biennale.

Another body of work that explores ideas around entropy relates to the plant nursery complex outside Odense that I bought in 2009. The greenhouses (6,000 square metres in size) were in use up until the day we took it over, and I have been documenting its steady decay since then. Surveying the buildings in those first weeks, I became aware of the various work processes involved in maintaining and running a ‘controlled horticultural environment’. The architecture and design facilitated the most efficient use of the space for plant growing with minimal staffing. Every inch of space was used, and an elaborate system of huge rolling tables enabled access to all the plants. These were ingeniously built using various off-the-shelf components from a standard building-supply warehouse: concrete drainage pipes used as support pillars, steel piping for the rolling mechanism and then the large plastic table with aluminium frames.

Long concrete paths connected all of the spaces from the greenhouses themselves to the potting room, with its huge soil-spitting monster of a machine, to the canteen, the packing room and the loading bays. Large trollies were used to transfer plants from space to space, and the elaborate watering system consisted of thousands of plastic pipes supplying water from the mains as well as a groundwater well and a huge rainwater catcher.

The process of adapting this complex into working artists’ studios began the day we took it over. The setup was curiously compatible with the needs of a studio: spacious buildings of various sizes and heights with good access to one another. Many of the tools and materials also found a new life: plastic for packing artworks, plant pots for mixing paints, extension cables, lighting, pallet trucks, and so on. Thousands of smashed-up concrete pipes were used to fill in an unwanted pond, while the metal transport trollies were used to build moveable walls and a huge stainless steel table was used in setting up an etching workshop. All decisions followed a particular logic and felt like a series of Chinese whispers between the buildings themselves. Throughout this process, I felt the ghostly presence of those who had built and worked in the buildings.

Working at this site over the last six years, I have slowly begun trying to trace my own logic. The artworks I’ve produced here have been largely lens and installation based. An interesting element of these mediums is that, although there are iterations, the works are never finished, or at least their completion is suspended until the site has fully returned to nature or I have expired – whichever comes first. I am developing this work for a major solo show at the Butler Gallery in Kilkenny in 2017, and I am using images taken at the site for solo exhibitions that will take place in the USA, Germany and Denmark in 2016–2017.

Note: The Fröbel Studio has been shown in New York, L.A., Quimper, Dublin and Norwich, and it has recently toured Ireland with support from the Arts Council Touring Scheme in a series of solo exhibitions curated by Linda Shevlin, starting at Roscommon Arts Centre and then travelling to Riverbank Arts Centre, Galway Arts Centre and, most recently, The Model in Sligo.

Images left to right: Eamon O’Kane. Black Mirror Building 1 (Case Study House), 2014, acrylic on canvas, 150 x 200cm; Eamon O’Kane, ‘Twentieth of April Sixteen Eighty Nine’ installation view.

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JENNIFER TROUTON DISCUSSES THE PROCESS BEHIND HER WORK ‘THE TIES THAT BIND’, WHICH WAS SHOWN AT THE ROYAL ULSTER ACADEMY’S 134^TH ANNUAL EXHIBITION (16 OCTOBER 2015 – 3 JANUARY 2016).

My painting The Ties That Bind has its roots in the 1700s and the patriarchal mindset of the founding president of the Royal Academy of Arts, Sir Joshua Reynolds. In a sweeping generalisation, Reynolds decreed: “Let men busy themselves with all that has to do with great art . . . let women occupy themselves with those kinds of art that they have always preferred, the painting of flowers”. This statement, and the attitude toward still-life painting that it evokes, put fire in my blood in 1999 and has continued to be a source of motivation to this day.

My initial reaction to Reynolds was to create a piece of work titled Looking at the Overlooked, which consisted of 304 still-life works on six-inch-square boards. It was my intention to create a large contemporary work of art that owed its very existence to a traditional genre and which, as a whole work, could not be easily overlooked. I had worked in multiples before, but never on such a scale. Neither had I used multiples as a rhetorical storytelling device. Looking at the Overlooked was exhibited in 2003 at the Ashford Gallery, Dublin and from that point I have experimented with the use of multiple images as a narrative device to explore wider issues. Even in 2003, however, I knew that I wanted to attempt a single large-scale work, but somehow always managed to cleverly talk myself out of it until The Ties That Bind.

In 2012, with the aid of an Arts Council of Northern Ireland grant, I was able to buy a number of Milliken Brothers six-foot oil primed linens. They were carried up eight flights of stairs and through the labyrinth of the old Queen Street Studios to my workspace. The delivery men left me 100 square feet of intimidating white linen to stare at and I continued to stare at that bare linen for a further 12 months.

During that time I was invited to take part in a three-person painting show in the Solstice Arts Centre, Navan. Solstice is an expansive gallery with acres of open wall space. It almost demanded that I face my fear and start work on the large linens. So after a few false starts I finally did, and along with a multiple piece of mixed media on wallpaper entitled What Remains, I began The Ties That Bind.

Having previously undertaken an ACNI-funded research trip to Massachusetts, I knew the themes I wished to explore: class conflict, the famine, industrialisation and the Irish diaspora. My American research focused on the story of my family’s emigration from rural County Armagh to the factories and railroads of Massachusetts. My discoveries triggered a series of potential intersections for enquiry, such as urban/rural, wealth/poverty, factorymade/handmade, home/abroad and authenticity/illusion.

I also knew that wallpaper would become the unifying motif of the works, both large and small. The Ties That Bind would be a political painting that used the traditions and techniques that have been historically associated with still life paintings, the techniques and tropes that Reynolds himself would have understood as women’s art, and women’s subject matter.

What I didn’t know was how and where to start painting on such a large scale. The physical reality of negotiating the linen was truly daunting. With procrastination as my mistress, I spent three months ruminating, designing and refining the composition. Each element was carefully considered before I made a single mark. I remember clearly the day I began work on the linen, as it was my 42^nd birthday. Realising I didn’t have brushes large enough to paint a ground colour, I rather nervously laid down my first layer of paint with a roller from B&Q. Once in place, I finally relaxed and set about slowly and patiently plotting out the composition, gradually realising as I went along that it was going to take a while. I was not wrong. The piece ultimately took a full year to complete. What I also could not foresee was how The Ties That Bind would help me through personal tragedy. After suffering a miscarriage in April 2013, I fully immersed myself for many months in the mechanism of painting, allowing the daily rituals and routines of the studio to provide temporary respite from the profound grief I was experiencing.

The dominant feature within The Ties That Bind is the wallpaper. Wallpaper is often the last tangible mark of a person’s presence left in an abandoned domestic space, and it can reveal so much about their history. In The Ties That Bind I have reproduced a toile wallpaper entitled Stag Hunting. The original wallpaper depicts the rich at play. For the rich the land is a lush playground to be enjoyed. The scene is one that reinforces aspirational and reassuring ideas of status and wellbeing. By subtly replacing a number of the original motifs with images of the peasant classes, toiling and perishing on the land, I have subverted the idealised vision of the landscape and created a new narrative. The original unthreatening images of aristocratic enjoyment are now mixed with Irish looms and with the dead, the dying and the starving. The American factory towers that lured so many from their faceless agrarian pasts represent an urban, industrial future: a geographical and cultural shift well known to my own ancestors, who emigrated in the 1800s.

The still-life table arrangement further extends the narrative. The imported embroidered silk contrasts with the pink fabric, which is a family heirloom. The silk represents the ‘new world’ and its infinite possibilities. Its decorative opulence is mass-produced and counters the handmade, functional fabrics of the domestic spaces left behind in Ireland. Spaces like the crumbling two-room home of my great-great-grandmother, which are fading into the Irish landscape. The twine and the candlesticks, which belonged to my great-grandmother, serve as a reminder of the cottage industries lost to the industrialisation of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.

The Ties That Bind is a response to Reynolds, to his eighteenth-century misogyny, and to a patrician attitude that excluded women from being ‘serious artists’. However, these long-dead men, with their work that hangs row upon testosterone-fuelled row in the galleries of Europe, ultimately failed. Women stepped out from their petticoats and created art that spoke about the world, and about politics, hunger, rage and desire. They showed that they were much more than reproducers of flowers and fruit and, although, still, relatively few works hang alongside those created by men, women have broken out of the box that the establishment would have had them occupy. But even now, within contemporary art, where ideas can be elevated above execution, figurative painting has been kept in the background. Consequently, The Ties That Bind is also a response to the contemporary world, to those who think that aesthetically pleasing art is no more than a decorative craft. It is possible to look at The Ties That Bind and see just that: classical composition and academic lines, still life in its traditional sense, conservative, safe and unthreatening. But wait a while longer, take time to explore the possibilities and you will see that still life, like the women who were shackled to it, continues to be much more. It is a vibrant seanachaí – centuries old but still telling stories that we want and need to hear.

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Images left to right: Jennifer Trouton, The Ties That Bind, Royal Ulster Academy; Jennifer Trouton, The Ties That Bind detail.

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LOUIS HAUGH DESCRIBES HIS TIME AT ARTFARM (11–27 SEPTEMBER 2015), A RURAL ARTISTS’ RESIDENCY IN COUNTY GALWAY.

For the past year, I have been researching the history and practice of commercial forestry in Ireland. I’ve always been perplexed by the wealth of non-native coniferous trees across Ireland’s landscape and by the dwindling number of our native broad-leaf trees, such as oak, ash and beech. So I traced the roots of this matter (quite literally) back to the National Herbarium in Glasnevin. It is here that the Augustine Henry Collection is housed: an archive of thousands upon thousands of tree samples, including leaves, twigs, seeds, cones and roots, all meticulously boxed, labelled and archived.

Over the course of eight site visitsin early 2015, which were kindly facilitated by the director, Dr. Matthew Jebb, and the brilliant research botanist Dr. Noeleen Smyth, I began to discover that these samples serve as a blueprint both for Ireland’s landscape and for the forestry industry as we know it today. I rummaged through the archive, row after row, stack upon stack, not knowing what in particular I was looking for, until at last it was staring me in the face. A manila folder with some crushed twigs and cones inside. Sent to Ireland from Alaska in 1919 and labelled “On His Majesty’s Service”, it contained Picea sitchensis, more commonly known as the Sitka spruce, the conifer tree most predominant in Ireland. I found these samples fascinating and spent a lot of time photographing this entry and many others like it.

I then shifted my focus from the archive to the landscape and began recognising these trees in every county in the country: Wicklow, Dublin, Kildare, Meath, Laois, Kerry, Donegal, Galway. I became almost obsessed and photographed them at every opportunity. It was through this creative engagement with the forests that I started to understand them as a type of architecture. I noticed that they have boundaries and borders, corridors and footpaths, elements that I would normally associate with a city or a built environment. I knew that I had to spend as much time in these forests as possible.

While I was researching, I heard about the call for applications to ARTfarm, a rural residency programme in County Galway funded by Galway County Council Arts Office. Nestled away behind a town called Newbridge (not the one that’s famous for silver cutlery), ARTfarm comprises a beautiful stone cottage, a separate open-plan studio and a few acres of land. The location itself is heavily forested for commercial use and serves as a perfect example of how Picea sitchensis has taken over the landscape of Ireland.

The application process itself was quite swift. I saw a call for proposals on the VAI website and rang the arts office for some more information. I felt as though my current research was very much in sync with what was being offered, and I hoped that they would see this. Within a week, I received a call from Galway congratulating me on my successful application and putting me in contact with Sheila, who runs the residency.

As I approached ARTfarm, the many road signs pointing in different directions towards a town called Creggs disorientated me. I later discovered that all roads lead to Creggs. Even later, I found out that there are no road signs pointing out of Creggs. I pulled over and rang Sheila to ask for directions. Within five minutes she had come to get me from the side of the road, and my residency had begun.

Pulling into the driveway of ARTfarm is something I will never forget. I was presented with a brilliant confusion of plants, flowers and sculptures. I even caught sight of a giant Chinese dragon tucked away in an open shed, waiting for a parade worthy of its presence. The next few hours were spent conversing with Sheila over pots of tea and coffee. She told me that her dream for ARTfarm is that it would give artists the opportunity for creative exploration in a peaceful and quiet environment. If in some way ARTfarm could help towards furthering their work, then all the better.

Later that afternoon, we took a drive around the neighbourhood and seldom passed a house. I took in forest after forest. My trees were everywhere, and I was right where I needed to be. Over the next couple of weeks, the forests that were so new to me would become familiar. Each one developed its own significance and relevance to my work. Every morning I set out with my camera and tripod, photographing new forests and revisiting others. I spent hours walking though the densely populated coniferous forests, which were so dense that each tree had but a few needles at the top of its trunk, as the light could not penetrate deeply enough to sustain the lower branches.

About a week into my residency at ARTfarm, Sheila took me to a different forest, one that I would never have discovered on my own: the ‘forest of many names’, as I jokingly call it; or Castlekelly, Aghrane or Old Forest, as the locals call it. Here, amongst the various firs, pines and spruce trees, lay the remains of ancient oaks: stumps of trees that were felled by people long gone. Most of the oaks were dead, though some were miraculously still growing a branch or two.

It is difficult for me to describe the reaction that I had to this place, but after multiple visits I began to realise that, as a non-religious person, it was the closest thing to a religious experience that I’ve ever had. These relics stood as monuments or even sentries. My work slowly took a tangential path, and I began documenting these stumps each day, returning to see how the light fell on them at different times. Mid-afternoon was my favourite time to photograph them, as the sun was high enough to briefly penetrate through the surrounding conifers and illuminate the clearing in which the stumps remain. I have not been back to this forest since completing the residency, but a return visit is high on my list of priorities.

Through my involvement with the various trees and forests, I built up a sense of the rural environment in which I was living. The community and local towns that at first seemed so sparse and spread out started to seem more tightly knit and connected. Although we were technically in County Galway, I came to learn that the locals read the Roscommon newspapers and tune their radios to Roscommon stations. There is a fine line between Galway and Roscommon, and it lies 11.7km away from the border in Ballygar.

Through Sheila’s feverous work within the community, I began to see the importance of art and of creative hubs in rural contexts. Sheila has fostered a sense of creative opportunity within the town of Ballygar, where the local residents have recently restored a beautiful old courthouse. It is now used for recitals, exhibitions and events. On Culture Night, the place was truly buzzing with people who had come from miles around to participate or to spectate in the events. Afterwards, we went to the local pub, The Thatch. It served the best Guinness I’ve ever had, and I was amused when I got a euro change from a fiver.

My time at ARTfarm came to an all-too-sudden end. It felt as though I was still unpacking my things when the day came to pack them all up again. My last weekend was spent paying final visits to familiar forests, having one last cup of tea with Sheila and saying farewells. On my way back to Dublin, I passed three more signs for Creggs and finally decided to turn on my satnav.

Images left to right: Picea Sitchensis, National Herbarium, 2014; Louis Haugh, Aghane Woods, 2015; Louis Haugh.

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