LISA GODSON EXAMINES ARTISTS’ BANNERS THROUGH A MATERIAL CULTURE LENS, SITUATING THEM WITHIN THE BROADER HISTORY OF SOCIAL PROTEST MOVEMENTS.

Among the placards, signs and posters held aloft at the sixth annual March for Choice in Dublin on September 30 were a set of remarkable banners created by artists Alice Maher, Rachel Fallon and Breda Mayock. As Fallon explains: “We had a meeting at the beginning of the year about what way the artists’ campaign could go, in terms of repealing the Eighth Amendment. It was important to do something that was ‘us’ and that spoke of our expertise in making things”.

Until the early twentieth century, processions with spectacular banners were a widespread feature of civic life. Their vibrant colours and narrative content provided visual excitement as well as exhortation, amidst all manner of social gatherings and events, whether convening for religious devotion, political rallying or as part of the annual cycle of commemorative occasions. The practice of formal banner display on the island of Ireland now tends to be the preserve of conservative, even reactionary organisations, such as the Orange Order, the Irish National Foresters, the Ancient Order of Hibernians and so on. In keeping with their archaism, these organisations each flaunt their own particular claim on the past. Their banners bear iconography that invokes tradition and asserts continuation. This is aimed at servicing a teleology, where some foundation myth continues to uphold and reinforce present-day political claims.

The banners of Maher, Fallon and Mayock likewise refer to the past, but in more oblique ways. Appropriating art historical tropes, as well as some of the conventions of formal banner design, the artists succeed in mobilising a new iconography that makes its own heroic claims, based on contemporary aspirations. The three full-size banners took approximately 6 months to make. Their fabrication was preceded by a phase of research, which examined the tradition of banner-making and the appropriation of the banner format by contemporary artists.

As well as their broad collective knowledge about the history of visual culture, the artists were informed by research visits to the Millmount Museum in Drogheda and to the National Museum of Ireland in Dublin. The unique collection of banners at Millmount includes those made for nineteenth century guilds and trade unions, such as the Drogheda Labourers’ Society and the Irish Show and Leatherworkers’ Union. Inspired by these historic artefacts, the artists adapted decorative motifs for their banners and incorporated images of gallantry and the dignity of labour.

The first banner in the triptych involves a hieratic female figure with an outstretched cloak covered in embroidered eyes, in visual reference to the German Schutzmantelmadonna (Sheltering-cloak Madonna) or Madonna Misericordia (Virgin of Mercy), a recurring religious motif depicted, among many others, in a painting from the 1460s by Italian Renaissance painter Piero della Francesca. But rather than della Francesca’s gesture to protect the penitent and the prayerful, or the Irish confraternity banners that typically depicted insipid virgins of submission, this ‘Madonna of Repeal’ reveals the ‘Repeal the Eighth’ symbol on the lining of her cloak and as a clasp on her neck.

Maher explains that the eyes, used in a repeat pattern across the Madonna’s dress, function both as a symbol of protection and as a signifier of surveillance, suggesting that “we are watching you”. This denotes not just the singular Eye of Providence that sees all from everywhere, even from every dollar bill, but the watchful millions who observe the law-makers, the government and the oppressors.

The banner that most strongly invokes precedents, bears the figure of a leather-jacketed woman echoing the pose of the hero in Orazio Gentileschi’s Baroque masterpiece David and Goliath (c.1605-1608). The heroine wields a broad-sword against a snarling dragon covered in sequined number eight, with the legend ‘REPEAL NOW!’ emblazoned in a swag above her head. According to Maher, this was “the first image that came to us” and again, this banner is underpinned by art historical references. It recalls the chained Andromeda being saved by Perseus, for example in Rembrandt’s Andromeda Chained to the Rocks (1630), but “this is a reversal of that scenario; it is a reclamation of women from art history, as well as from Ireland’s patriarchal history of church-state rule”. This piece also echoes in format one of the best-known British trade union banners, that of the Dock, Wharf, Riverside and General Workers Union of Great Britain and Ireland (c.1890) that depicts a muscled Hercules wrestling with a serpent in a ‘holy war’ against destitution, prostitution and exploitation.

The final and most intricate banner took its starting point from a more contemporary work: a silk scarf designed by the British artist Grayson Perry for London’s Tate Modern as an autobiographical, “social and cultural map to help aspiring artists navigate the hostile territory, on their way to being accepted by the establishment.”

This format was translated by the artists to reflect the story of women’s lives under the Eighth Amendment in Ireland, presenting a series of vignettes that include: a naked woman being pulled in two directions by a mitred bishop and a wigged judge; an unlocked treasure chest of pregnancy tests; a giant needle; a teddy bear; a wad of cash; the hand of justice weighing the unequal lives of a man and a woman; and a wheel of fortune denoting how, as described by Fallon, “access to reproductive rights is often a matter of luck”. In addition, traversing through the composition, is an endless line of women dragging suitcases, a reference to the thousands who go abroad every year to access abortion services.

As well as the central imagery, the artists drew on the decorative elements – including the scrolls, fringing, frogging and borders – that solemnified and bedazzled the nineteenth-century antecedents featuring in their research. It took a lot of labour. Fallon’s embroidery of the eyes alone (on the Madonna of Repeal) involved more than 100 hours of needlework. Much of the making was done via correspondence, with the silk, drawings and embellishments circulating between the three artists until they came together in Maher’s studio in Mayo in an atmosphere of “joyful creation” (as described by Maher).

In the history of public ritual, the central banner for each organisation was always accompanied by smaller ‘bannerettes’, often of more a playful design. This format was also adopted by the artists, who walked with a set of smaller silk banners created by Áine Phillips, each featuring a different eye and a letter spelling out R-E-P-E-A-L. Phillips’s banners were a further testimony to the ‘all-seeing eye’, a witness to both the dire effects of Ireland’s laws and the tens of thousands who take to the streets each year to protest against them.

If the history of women and textiles in Ireland can be dark and oppressive (overshadowed by institutions, laundries and work houses), then these artists have reclaimed a different version of history, setting their subversive stitches alongside those of the suffragette and Irish Women Workers Union banner-makers. For now, the artists’ banners are stored in Maher’s studio, ready to be unfurled and reactivated in upcoming protests, as we face into the referendum promised in 2018. However, the banners’ future will ultimately lie in the National Irish Visual Art Library (NIVAL) in NCAD, alongside the drawings and documentation of their purposeful and happy invention.

Dr Lisa Godson is Co-Director of the MA in Design History and Material Culture at the National College of Art and Design, Dublin. She is also Visiting Research Fellow at the Centre for Gender and Women’s Studies, Trinity College Dublin.

Images: Artist’s banner; photograph by Alison Laredo. Artist’s banners, L–R: Alice Maher, Rachel Fallon, Breda Mayock, Áine Phillips and Lisa Godson; photograph by Alison Laredo. Banner-making; Breda Mayock; photograph by Alison Laredo.

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SARAH HAYDEN INTERVIEWS PÁDRAIG SPILLANE ABOUT THE TRAJECTORY OF HIS PRACTICE AND HIS RECENT EXHIBITION,  ‘WHAT PASSES BETWEEN US’, AT SIRIUS ARTS CENTRE.

Sarah Hayden: For several years, your practice has tended towards three dimensions, and yet it maintains a preoccupation with surfaces. How do you conceive of this development and how does it interact with your interest in interrogating ‘depthless’, two-dimensional images?

Pádraig Spillane: My interest in surfaces centres on how they can be reordered. This can involve searching the innards of materials, or cutting and tearing printed matter, to examine how things look and feel in proximity to each other. The images and objects I use – whether found or sought out – are generally commercial, industrial or mass-produced materials. These things are often familiar, ubiquitous or communally experienced in some way through our shared visual culture. I deconstruct these images and overlay them, looking for prompts and frissons and creating unexpected effects. The work’s evolution from two to three dimensions came out of this inquiry and from my desire to produce tactile transformations within an image-saturated contemporary context.

I do like the ambiguity of the word ‘depthless’. It suggests something that has no depth and can vastly extend. I originally worked with ‘flat’ materials, such as printed matter for collage and décollage. I am often attracted to how a figure or a body is placed within an image. I focus on considerations such as the significance of colour, the space around a body, what gesture is being shown and the props or symbols being used. I am also interested in how a tear or cut may operate within such images, particularly with regard to the tensions created by disparate elements coming together. I also work a lot with mirrors to harness the seemingly virtual spaces created by reflective surfaces.

SH: Much of your work seems hyper-attuned to instances of proximity and points of physical contact. What motivates this fascination with making artworks that appear preoccupied with touch?

PS: Using a collage strategy, the relationship between image fragments (or images and objects in my sculptural assemblages) is guided by proximity; relations and associations emerge, based on the placement of these images. Contact and nearness are fundamental to how I work. It is the excitement of breaks and interruptions – the openings generated through alterations to context and content – that drives my practice. I am interested in concepts of mirroring and doubling, as well as what makes something completely distinct. Tactility, stimulation and the simulation of haptic desire are central to this process.

SH: Your work has been featured in several group shows recently. Is there a constellation of artists, movements or tendencies (either current or art historical) with which your work seeks to connect?

PS: For me, it comes back to a very simple artistic priority of making work that I want to see. I admire artworks that do not merely reflect or reinforce the status quo, but critique it, break it down or twist it into something new through different forms of representation. Isa Genzken, Hannah Höch and Jimmy De Sana are artists that I would regularly look at and think about. I admire their ability to configure objects alongside the figure and their commitment to developing commentary through the use of manufactured materials, as well as the idealised ‘push-and-pull’ that manifests in their work.

SH: To what degree do you think of your practice as being research-led? What are you reading at the moment and what have you read that has informed your recent work?

PS: My background is in philosophy and as such, my research is directed towards absorbing new theoretical perspectives, to see how they can help generate new work. For my recent exhibition, ‘What Passes Between Us’ at Sirius Arts Centre (2 September – 15 October), I have been rereading Zone Fragments for a History of the Human Body, edited by Michel Feher, and From Communion to Cannibalism: An Anatomy of Metaphors of Incorporation by Maggie Kilgour. Both are insightful in examining both how and why we have generated many diverse constructions of human embodiment.

In addition, Space, Time and Perversion: Essays on the Politics of the Body by Elizabeth Grosz and Cruising Utopia by José Esteban Muñoz propose that how we speak brings the body into social being, and that the body is something constantly being produced and refashioned. I have also been reading Franco ‘Bifo’ Berardi’s new book, Futurability: The Age of Impotence and the Horizon of Possibility and #ACCELERATE MANIFESTO for an Accelerationist Politics by Alex Williams and Nick Srnicek. These have all fed in to my work. China Miéville is a sci-fi writer whom I also admire. While working on my exhibition, Miéville’s short story collection, Three Moments of an Explosion, was always somewhere in the back of my mind.

SH: To what extent was ‘What Passes Between Us’ conceived as a site-specific project?

PS: To borrow from Alice Jardine’s discussion ‘Of Bodies and Technologies’, a suitable orientation for the exhibition might be the phrase “rituals for future bodies”.¹ ‘What Passes Between Us’ contemplated modes of production that bring forth different transformations of  – and within – the body. When devising the concept with the curator, Miranda Driscoll, the location of Sirius was used explicitly to orientate the exhibition. The arts centre is located within the industrial global hub of Cork Harbour – a site that holds a concentration of pharmaceutical and technological plants producing products and commodities to alter human bodies. The idea that bodies are subject to intervention thematically underpins not just this exhibition but also my wider ongoing practice.

The works presented at ‘What Passes Between Us’ borrowed from minimalism in their use of simple structures, repetition, grids, outsourced fabrication and industrial-grade materials such as mild steel and PVC. They were also influenced by post-minimalism and queer minimalism, with bare assemblages aiming to engender bodily feelings. This minimalist aesthetic was subverted by the introduction of a repeated palm which, in turn, was manipulated and made strange using the logic of the grid, which heightened the sensation and affect. Something that exists ‘to touch’ has been turned into something ‘to be touched’, viewed and felt. This image became both captivating and horrifying, through its repetition and rearticulation within the array.

SH: What prompted your decision to incorporate a sonic element into this installation?

PS: I was interested in investigating the voice as a site and generator of desire. I was listening to a lot of choral music, as well as enjoying vocals, ad-libs and refrains in house and pop tracks. The erotic potentiality of vocal articulation is something that both my collaborator, modern composer Simon O’Connor, and I are fascinated by. For the show at Sirius, we created two musical scores, based on the themes of attraction, repulsion, intimacy and encounters between bodies and objects.

SH: Given the future-oriented, speculative attitudes manifesting in your recent work, I’m prompted to finish by asking: What happens next in your practice? Do you have a direction in mind?

PS: My intention is to examine how embodiment is culturally and technologically produced, in a Foucauldian sense. I wish to open cracks in how we understand our biopolitical relationship with technology. In 2018, my work will feature in a group show at Crawford Art Gallery. Together with photographer Claire Ryan, I will also curate an exhibition at Sirius Arts Centre for the biannual Cork Photo Festival 2018. Since 2013, I have been a part-time photography lecturer at Crawford College of Art and Design (CIT) and critical discussions on how compositions and images are structured have become an increasingly important strand of my research.

Pádraig Spillane is a visual artist who works with photography, collage and assemblage. He is based in Cork.

Sarah Hayden is a writer and lecturer at the University of Southampton.

Note

1. Alice Jardine, ‘Of Bodies and Technologies’ in Dia Art Foundation’s Discussions in Contemporary Culture Number One, ed. Hal Foster (Seattle: Bay Press, 1987), pp.151-158.

Images used: Pádraig Spillane, Wish Landscape Dream Lover, 2015, installation view, TACTIC, Cork; photograph courtesy Roland Paschhoff. Pádraig Spillane, Pulse Positions, 2017, digital collage on Hahnemühle 310 gsm, 32 x 37 cm. Pádraig Spillane, Eyes Future Tense, 2017, digital collage on Hahnemühle 310 gsm, 25 x 16 cm.

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STEPHEN BRANDES DISCUSSES THE FOOD, THE BAD AND THE UGLY – A NEW PUBLICATION BY THE DOMESTIC GODLESS.

This year, the gastronomic art collective the Domestic Godless celebrate 15 years of working together and exploring food – its taste, its appearance, its history and cultural values – as material for subversive experimentation. The occasion will be marked with a three-week-long residency at Crawford Art Gallery in Cork in November, and will be followed next year with a national tour to several arts centres around the country. Over those 15 years, we have repeatedly been asked questions relating to our research interests and practice, such as: “What exactly do you do?” (by those who don’t know what we do), “Are you the guys who do roadkill?” (from people who think we do roadkill, but are wrong) and “Would you ever think about making a book?” (from those who do know what we do and, thankfully, find it amusing). So, this year seemed an opportune time to finally make that book and to lay those questions to rest (while possibly igniting many more).

As artists, it was inevitable that we would approach this project as an artwork, in that we would shape the material at our disposal into something that willfully avoided easy categorisation. The food, the bad & the ugly is not a history, a biography, a work of fiction or a recipe book, yet it contains all of these elements. It is also conventionally a book, though its content is far from conventional. Aside from our own archival documentation, we have been lucky to include contributions from a food critic (writing under a pseudonym, for the sake of protecting their professional reputation), a prominent writer on art who has considerable knowledge of cheese and a TV chef who has been dead for 20 years and whose additions to the book have been transcribed by séance.

Crucially, the book is self-designed and self-published. Work began in early 2017, as we accumulated the material, texts, recipes and images and learned InDesign from scratch. We were lucky to receive funding from Crawford Art Gallery and Cork City Council, which gave us the time to consolidate this material, to research fresh content and to design the book. Early on in the process, we needed to make practical decisions regarding the size and look of the publication and this was partly achieved by looking at examples of other books that we thought might work. We also had to consider working to a tight budget, which had not yet been raised.

Pricing the book became a balancing act. We decided on a figure for the number of pages we thought we would fill, the type of paper we wanted to use and the rough size – something that would comfortably fit in an envelope. We considered what might be a reasonable selling price and a sensible production run. We finally needed to consider the feasibility of the project, but optimistically assumed that if one third of the people who had befriended us on our Facebook page bought a book in advance, then we would achieve our target.

We then did a lot of research regarding printers to get several quotes. We were aware of many printers whose reputation for value and professionalism are assured, but for us as novices it was essential that we found a printer that had the patience to deal with our lack of experience without becoming exasperated. From past experience, the English language – no matter how well it is deployed – has the potential to be misinterpreted, so we were very happy to find a local printer that we could talk to face-to-face. If any problems transpired, discussions and solutions could be arrived at after a short drive, as opposed to numerous emails or telephone calls. Eventually, I went to visit Watermans on Little Island in Cork, with a tasty Polish publication my colleagues had picked up in Gdansk as a reference. My confidence in the printer was significantly enhanced by him knowing exactly what type of paper had been used just by looking at it. He was able to advise on sensible solutions to adjust the size and format to fit our budget. With the composure and humility of a very good primary school teacher, he settled my mind-numbing anxieties.

The next stage was to raise the money. Crowdfunding seemed the obvious choice. We used Fundit, an Ireland-based crowdfunding platform run by Business to Arts, who offer meticulous planning advice for preparing a project and a step-by-step guide to creating a successful campaign. We set ourselves a time limit of 40 days to achieve our goal. Fundit works by offering rewards in return for financial support. In our case, we were offering advance sales of the book, with an invitation to the launch or free postage within the island of Ireland to those who couldn’t attend or collect the books themselves.

Most projects seeking funding offer several reward options in increasing increments. We decided to keep ours as simple as possible, not forgetting that the resources for delivering these rewards would need to be factored in  to the overall target. The rewards consisted of one signed book for €25, two signed books for €50, two books with the funder’s name printed inside for €100. Our top reward to funders willing to pay above and beyond the price of the book was to offer an additional exclusive evening of tastings, a take-home goody bag and a specially procured bottle of sea-lettuce vodka. The eventual target not only included the printing costs, but also an educated estimate for postage and packing and funds to deliver our top reward (having set an available limit of twelve).

What followed was a crash-course in marketing. We built a short animated introductory video and embarked on a carpet-bombing campaign of social media with news and images from a project commissioned by the Athens Biennale team, to coincide with the arrival of Documenta in Greece. The Fundit campaign was subsequently launched immediately on our return.

As Fundit accurately predicted, the public response over the first two weeks was healthy – and then it tailed off worryingly. We were conscious that, if we failed to reach our target, it would mean the death of the project and any funders would have their lodgments returned. So, with two weeks before our deadline, we embarked on a daily social media campaign. Being painfully aware of the desensitisation that repeated advertising can induce, we designed a completely new reminder every day, each one infused with humorous, but acutely visible, signs of panic and distress. And it worked. The book has since gone to press and will be launched at the Crawford Gallery on 4 November.

While the Domestic Godless pride ourselves on a measured but irreverent disregard for professionalism when it comes to our presentations with food, we played it fairly safe with the presentation of this book. In this instance, it seemed a step too far to either furnish it with an anarchic mélange of styles or over-design it with cleverness, when the content within already displays enough disregard for convention. We had considered using different papers – including edible rice starch or elements that could be scratched and sniffed – but in the end, we opted to publish something both accessible and feasible. At the time of writing, The food, the bad & the ugly has not yet entered the public realm, so there may be some surprises yet to be found amongst the pages. Moreover, this book may not be our last…

The Domestic Godless was originally founded in 2003 by artists Stephen Brandes, Irene Murphy and Mick O’Shea under the Cork Artist’s Collective banner at the exhibition ‘Artists/Groups’ at Project Arts Centre, Dublin.

Images: Documentation from The Domestic Godless in Athens, ‘Waiting for the Barbarians’, Athens Biennale, 2017; photograph by Linda Curtin. The Domestic Godless at O’Herlihy’s, Kinsale Arts Festival, 2015; image courtesy The Domestic Godless.

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Solstice Arts Centre, 25 August – 13 October 2017

On show at Solstice Arts Centre are three solo exhibitions by different artists, each with their own title and separate room. Free from a fixed or unifying theme, the exhibitions are loosely bound by a general sense of abstraction within the artists’ creative processes, along with some allusion to local history, heritage or landscape.

Upon entering the first space, David Quinn’s works appear minimalistic, with a series of nine intimately-sized pieces in muted colours. The strength in Quinn’s works emerges when we draw closer and discover the detail present. The works are built up of layers that variously comprise gesso, oil and paper, as well as off-cuts of plywood and perspex. The humble line takes centre stage, as Quinn records its journey across the surfaces, using an oil pencil or cutting tool. In Made, the incision in the perspex gradually deepens as the line moves left, until it flows seamlessly into a cut made in the plywood background layer. In the accompanying literature, we read that Quinn uses a ruler, yet the lines are at times imperfect, highlighting the impact of the artist’s hand or an uneven surface on even the most controlled of processes. The works jut out from the wall like raw sculptural extensions of the building’s structure, celebrating the inherent potential in the materials, uncovered by the artist’s touch.

Moving through to the next gallery space, we encounter Seán Molloy’s playful, yet finely executed, landscape paintings. While hinting at features within the local Meath landscape, these capriccio-inspired works delve into fantasy, rather than being strictly representational. They draw from many sources including some of art history’s finest Dutch ‘Golden Age’ landscapes, architectural archives, as well as figures and topographical elements belonging to different times and places. All but one work is scattered with hyper-pigmented shapes and lines. These compositions reference certain features of modern digital image-making, including early video games and the pixilation occurring in low-resolution images. In Landscape with horseman II, we feel as if a flawless interface is beginning to crumble before our eyes, breaking the illusion of a view out onto a pastoral scene. Molloy’s paintings urge us to delve deeper than our first impressions to consider the many layers and components that make up an image. By overlaying historical imagery with contemporary features, Molloy evokes the evolution of image-making and how image manipulation has existed throughout the ages.

As we step into the third and final space, we are enveloped by the sound of water and wind. Cliona Harmey presents two archival audiovisual installations that explore the possibilities when nature and technology collide. In Seapoint 1.1, we are invited to click on diary dates, presented on a screen, to view footage and hear the sounds of the sea on particular dates. Inspired by early communication technologies, Harmey transforms facts and figures into an accessible and engaging artwork. This project was originally created in 2002 in collaboration with artist Dennis McNulty. Each day, the sea’s condition was recorded from the same point and then classified by Harmey using a poetic adaptation of the Beaufort wind force scale. Originally devised in 1805 by Navan man Rear Admiral Sir Francis Beaufort, the scale measures and categorises wind speed by gauging its effect on the sea’s surface. Harmey processed the recordings and McNulty resampled the audio using numbers from the compiled data, before recombining the audio and visuals. The result is an exchange between nature, man and technology, which transports us from gallery space to Dublin’s seashore.

Conceptually simpler than Seapoint 1.1, the video installation, Rain, also broadens our reading of a mundane natural occurrence as we view close-ups of raindrops drumming the surface of a body of water on a large screen. Hearing the audio through earphones allows us to immerse ourselves fully in the hypnotic imagery and sound. A point of interest is that the technologies originally used to make and store both of these projects are now almost obsolete, so the data needed to be reprocessed to work with the current exhibition display equipment. The projects create a sense of continuity between outmoded communication methods, while using up-to-date technologies that, no doubt, will also be relegated to history in the near future.

Sabina MacMahon, curator-in-residence at Solstice Arts Centre, has selected three extremely different artists and, by only linking them very loosely, has allowed common themes to naturally emerge. The overall sense gained from the three exhibitions is the need to reconsider how we view and interpret what lies before us. Through general processes of construction, reduction, disassembling and reassembling, the artists have each altered the ways in which seemingly familiar materials, images or elements in the natural world are perceived. They encourage us to consider the many layers in our daily reality, be it tangible physical layers, the subtle painterly or digital layers within everyday imagery, or the complex role played by technology in processing what we see. As such, we can enjoy the shows separately, based on their own merits, while also considering the myriad ways in which artists, and art practices, can explore similar ideas.

Roisin Russell is a photography studio manager and writer living in Dublin.

Images used: Cliona Harmey, Rain, 2002, video still, standard DV video installation, duration 5 minutes 53 seconds. Sean Molloy, Landscape with cow, 2015, oil and enamel on canvas, 90 x 120 cm.

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Paul Mosse ‘What’s with the Apocalypse?’, VISUAL, 16 September – 12 January 2017

Pat Collins ‘Twilight’, VISUAL, 9 September – 28 January 2017

This season’s exhibitions at VISUAL have been programmed around the themes of landscape, nature and found materials. In the Digital Gallery on the first floor, is a screening of Pat Collins’s new moving image work, Twilight (2017). Filmed off the West Cork coast over a two-year period, Twilight is as vibrant as a living painting. The quality of light captured in the footage vividly portrays the pinks and oranges of a sunset, which gradually give way to midnight blue, as darkness encompasses the scene. Voluminous grey clouds pick up speed and move ominously across the screen. To the left, the high moon oversees a purple-hued silhouette of a nearby headland.

Twilight is not a silent occurrence; rather the landscape in the late evening quietly hums, as people sleep and the world keeps turning. Collins has collaborated with the sound artist Chris Watson to create the film’s audio, which was developed through a series of field recordings. The soundtrack is not constant, but is interspersed with silent footage, in order to accentuate the noisier moments. As the light seeps from the sky, a gull can be heard in the distance and a crescendo of birdsong escalates across the darkening landscape.

On VISUAL’s ground floor, Paul Mosse’s retrospective ‘What’s with the Apocalypse?’ occupies three galleries, bringing together an impressive selection of work, ranging from 1967 to the present. Mosse is probably best known for his use of non-traditional media and the creation of precariously-balanced sculptural pieces. Viewing his early work in the Studio Gallery, one can observe the artist’s progression from geometric colour drawings in the 1960s to layered and delicately sculpted work in recent years. His later work is typified with the centrepiece, UNTITLED (Pink) (2011), a chaotic, mixed media sculpture which appears in a state of dereliction or collapse, while also somehow managing to maintain a delicate equilibrium.

A tangible shift in style is evident in the intervening years, with Mosse’s artworks becoming more layered and textured, causing the artist to refer to them as “two-and-a-half dimensional painting”. In Essex Garden (1985), for example, the use of car paint and the layering and cutting of paper, gives a topographic feel, highlighting the fact that landscape is a constant source of inspiration. In the Main Gallery, wall-mounted pieces are colourful and intricately-layered, while central, plinth-based sculptures loom large, echoing the texture of hedgerows.

Mosse builds complex surfaces from found materials and detritus that echo the chaos of the natural world. Pieces are allowed to decay organically – a process that prompts the viewer to contemplate human aging and mortality. In The Floor (2016), the artist used discarded materials that were literally scraped off his studio floor and mounted on a frame, which allows inspection of the anatomy of the work from both sides. Mosse is also influenced by Nkisi Nkondi – African idols used in tribal rituals that have pegs, blades and nails inserted into their surface. Mirroring the appearance of these ethnic artefacts, Mosse uses materials such as lint, grit, wooden skewers, nails and sawdust, mixed with glue and acrylic in his work.

To highlight the artist’s extensive use of unorthodox materials, VISUAL commissioned anthropologist Juliette Harvey to visit his studio and harvest a collection of items found there. The resulting work is ‘Materials Library’, a collection of intriguing items that functions almost as a museum-style cabinet of curiosities. Displayed across trestle tables and minimalist shelving in the gallery, the collection comprises an unusual range of manmade and organic specimens: cobwebs are held together in a structural form by grit and leaves; deconstructed nails and lead shot are displayed in jars; examples of antique lace and taxidermy specimens are presented in glass cases.

Audiences have the opportunity to engage directly with some of these exhibits and touch is encouraged. Tours for visitors with visual impairments will also be delivered during the exhibition, along with the introduction of braille signage, so that they can experience the sensory qualities of the materials. A pertinent and accessible essay by Harvey accompanies the library and explains how Mosse wastes nothing in the artmaking process, as he engages with the “life and death of nature” on a daily basis. Over four decades, Mosse’s work has challenged audiences to think about the cyclical nature of decay and renewal, both in life and in art. Above all, this intriguing and sensory retrospective exhibition prompts reflection on the artist’s favourite material – time. It is therefore worthy of deep contemplation and multiple visits.

Erika Tyner is a visual artist and photographer working in County Wicklow.

Image used: Pat Collins, Twilight, 2017; film still (installation view); image courtesy Ros Kavanagh. Paul Mosse, image of ‘Materials Library’; courtesy Ros Kavanagh.

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Sirius Arts Centre, 3 September – 15 October 2017

Pádraig Spillane’s exhibition of new work, ‘What Passes Between Us’, is presented across two galleries at Sirius Arts Centre. Four upright, mild-steel, modular frames, approximately adult height, stand in the centre of the floor in each space. A single sheet of clear PVC is cast across the top of one of the frames, while several wall-mounted digital prints complete the presentation. Two specially-commissioned electronic and vocal sound pieces – composed by Simon O’Connor and sung by Michelle O’Rourke – are transmitted into the galleries from speakers situated on the floor.

The minimalist presentation suits these light-filled spaces. In the centre gallery, four wall prints depict intense close-ups of the human palm, with the thumb and wrist areas merging. Titles for these digital collages, including Palm Animator (2017) and Palm Merging (2017), seem appropriate. The images are mirrored and repeated across a brown background, conjuring various grid formations. The overall impression is that these compositions are highly controlled and provocatively sensual, whilst also feeling slightly strange. There is a hint of something less than comfortable afoot, involving some sort of modification or restaging of bodily elements.

The display in the west gallery brings these concerns to the fore. While the upright modular frames are duplicated from the last space, they are more dispersed in this room, with the PVC sheeting disturbed. Furthermore, two of the four wall prints here are more directly provocative. The digital collage, Eyes Future Tense (2017), depicts a close-up of a pair of white staring eyes, while From Altered Light (2017) comprises an image of a solar eclipse paired with a portrait of a lynx, whose white eyes also beam outwards towards the viewer, as if caught in headlights. This provocative effect is accentuated by inverting the purple-blue and white colours of the images from positive to negative. There is a science fiction feel to these assemblages. The mysterious nature of the empty metal forms seems to evidence something agitated and recently departed from the scene; something missing. It is reasonable to ask why natural elements are depicted in this manner, in the midst of an otherwise open and enlightened presentation.

The sound pieces that accompanying Spillane’s visual works may provide clues. In Look, Stranger I and II, Michelle O’Rourke’s voice is layered electronically to generate nostalgic feelings. They evoke the gallery’s maritime setting, but also seem slightly eerie and unsettling. In searching for something more complete, the voice is made to work hard but never sounds entirely satisfied. Perhaps it is this audio element that forces viewers to look outside the space for further clues about the artist’s concerns.

Both galleries at Sirius Arts Centre look out onto the expansive lower Cork Harbour. The slag residue of the former Irish Steel works can be seen on the opposite shore, with sleek and modern pharmaceutical facilities visible further afield. Spillane grew up in the Cork locality and he brings his personal experiences of the harbour’s industrial legacy to bear in this exhibition. Spillane uses the gallery’s location as an opportunity to pose pertinent questions about technology and its impact on the body.

While we might consider the presence of global pharmaceutical companies in Cork Harbour to be a signifier of scientific advancement, Spillane seems to suggest that these progressive processes may in fact pose a threat to human experience. In extensively modifying the body, these companies aim to improve our lives, whilst also simultaneously undermining the integrity of the human condition. Though not quite on the level of the ‘Anthropocene’, Spillane sees this evolving nature of the body, increasingly influenced by products and medical devices made in these factories, as raising questions about how we think of ourselves and what we are becoming. Notwithstanding the benefits that such products bring, Spillane also sees a parallel advancing state of artificiality and a loss of bodily integrity, not unrelated to the controlling narratives of these commercial and scientific interests. In discussing his work, Spillane referred to the #ACCELERATE MANIFESTO, which recognises the enslavement of technoscience to capitalist objectives and encourages an acceleration of capitalist processes, in order to ultimately bring about their failure.¹

Spillane’s site-responsive interventions serve to focus our minds on this subject. While paying homage to the tropes of minimalism, he uses repetitive and clinical staging devices to point towards a less certain, post-human scenario of bodily modification, genetic mutation, even cloning. It may also be pertinent to mention the curatorial pairing with Dara McGrath’s photographic series ‘Project Cleansweep’ in the adjoining east gallery. It strikes me that there are numerous links that can be made between Spillane’s bodily inquires and the physical legacy of post-military and industrial contamination documented by McGrath. 

Colm Desmond is an artist based in Dublin. 

Note

1. Alex Williams and Nick Srnicek #ACCELERATE MANIFESTO for an Accelerationist Politics, Mexico: Gato Negro Ediciones, 2016. 

Image used: Pádraig Spillane, From Altered Light, 2017, digital collage.

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Gallery of Photography, September 9 – October 22

The result of the 2016 British referendum on the future of European Union membership has brought about a new era of social and political anxiety regarding the border between the Republic and Northern Ireland. ‘Brexit’ is a neologism that has been mobilised by ultra-conservative politicians and sections of the British media alike, to portray what was in reality a marginal ‘yes vote’, as the inevitable political expression of the zeitgeist of British isolationism and nationalism. On the island of Ireland, Brexit has resurrected the spectre of the border which has haunted Irish politics for nearly a century. Kate Nolan’s exhibition ‘Lacuna’ at the Gallery of Photography explores everyday experiences of the border through the local inhabitants of Pettigo, a small town in County Donegal. This body of work emerged in the midst of political speculations about Brexit, including the potential hardening of the border between north and south.

Nolan’s recent body of work was not produced as a reaction to Brexit’s revival of the border as a prospective geographical and ideological barrier; rather ‘Lacuna’ emerged in the midst of the psychological ‘anxieties of place’, engendered by the shadowy presence of Britain’s exit from the European Union on the not-so-distant future horizon. This distinction is important because the cultural weight of Brexit (and its pervasiveness in the discourse of European affairs) can obscure the more nuanced experiences of border life explored in this exhibition.

Looking at Nolan’s exhibition solely through the prism of Brexit would limit the artist’s investigation of the everyday realities of border communities. Importantly, place, border and geographic location are not abstract concepts; they are lived out through the everyday experiences of the individuals who dwell and labour in the interstitial spaces between the neat geographical borders that demarcate north from south and vice versa. Indeed, as the centenary of the 1921 partition of Ireland approaches, ‘Lacuna’ may become a precursor to wider investigations of other border locations.

The exhibition comprises several photographic and audio-visual works including: two large-scale colour portraits; photographs of landscapes and the built environment, including detailed depictions of fauna and water; an audio recording of an adolescent girl who describes a typical Friday night; and a three-screen audiovisual installation with an accompanying sound piece composed by Gavin O’Brien. Nolan’s visually distinctive installation focuses on the shifting momentum of Termon River, which divides the town and functions as the border between the Republic and Northern Ireland. Three monochromatic projections animate the light against swaying conifer tress. What coheres this audiovisual installation to the other works in the show, is a sound recording of an adolescent girl describing her journey to the local chip shop. These deceptively simple descriptions of mundane events are highly effective in conveying how ‘place’ is enacted through the daily routine of traversing the border.

The various artworks are interspersed with wall-mounted textual inscriptions, drawn from stories recounted by Pettigo inhabitants. While these statements are not attributed to specific individuals, their dispersal throughout the exhibition prompts the viewer to make connections between the photographic works and the community’s experience of the border. However, the anxieties created through the possible imposition of a ‘hard border’ are not directly expressed in this exhibition. Instead, the artist focuses on the mundane aspects of daily life, evidenced in stories about the practicalities of school bus journeys, visiting friends or relatives and the delivery of take-away food. Combined with Nolan’s two large portraits of an adolescent girl and boy, photographed against a densely wooded backdrop, these textual descriptions convey the everyday ‘lifeworlds’ of communities – a subject that has increasingly permeated Irish photography over the last decade. Such work has been characterised by photographers engaging in ‘empathetic insideness’, to borrow a term from Canadian human geographer Edward Relph. In other words, these artists present a sustained ‘seeing into’ and appreciation of place as lived experience.

The bodily disposition of Nolan’s two young subjects in these large-scale portraits, coupled with the absence of formal codifications of portraiture, emphasises an awareness of how place and identity are intertwined. However, it is the audio piece of the adolescent girl – who relays her knowledge, experience and familiarity of her locality, through a habitual Friday night trip to the local chipper – that provides the most powerful evocation of place. On her journey, landmarks are named, residents are identified, history is recalled, and before the chipper comes into view, “the sweet sting of vinegar” awakens the young narrator to her position in the everyday ‘lifeworld’ of this small border town.

Justin Careville is a lecturer in Historical and Theoretical Studies in Photography at the Institute of Art, Design & Technology, Dún Laoghaire, where he is also Programme Chair of the BA (Hons) Photography Programme.

Image used: Kate Nolan, Untitled, 2017, photographic print; image courtesy of the artist.

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The Butler Gallery, 12 August – 15 October 2017

Aideen Barry, Hannah Fitz, Atsushi Kaga, Nevan Lahart, Maggie Madden, Jonathan Mayhew, Caroline McCarthy, Isabel Nolan and Liam O’Callaghan

Thirty years ago, Swiss artists Peter Fischli and David Weiss unveiled their influential work, The Way Things Go (1987) – a 30-minute 16mm video transfer film that documents the complex chain reactions of an ingenious Rube Goldberg-esque contraption built by the duo. The action takes place in a warehouse, where industrial detritus (including tyres, ladders, pipes, oil-soaked rags and chains) is used to create a sequence of cause-and-effect actions. Shifting mechanical levers and hypnotic balancing acts trigger sparks, fires and cycles of apparent perpetual motion.

Though the work took three days to film, the resulting footage was meticulously edited to imply a single take, and ever since, it has held up to extensive scrutiny. For ‘The Way Things Go: An Homage’ at the Butler Gallery, curator Anna Sullivan invited nine artists to respond to this seminal work. Some made new artworks, while others present existing pieces that illustrate relationships with the original source material. Located in the basement of Kilkenny Castle, the gallery comprises a series of interconnected rooms – a spatial configuration that affords a gradual unfolding of artistic responses.

The gallery entrance is home to Come and enter the Void with me – an installation by Japanese artist Atsushi Kaga featuring comic book-style works painted across custom-built partition walls. The chief protagonist is a bitter and confused bunny (reminiscent of the nihilist rabbit featured in Matt Groening’s comic-strip Life in Hell). A disjointed narrative sees Kaga’s anthropomorphic rabbit interacting with his friends, including a one-eyed cat, evoking the bittersweet machinations of the everyday. The installation is topped off with a series of glittery donkeys and cats, which act as castellation for the structure, while giving sculptural form to the artist’s imaginary characters.

Inside the gallery, The Way Things Go is presented alongside two works by Isabelle Nolan. There will be time no longer is an exquisite cursive of red wool ‘cable’ in the corner of the room that loops through space, as if describing kinetic arcs. It brings to mind the hypnotic effect of a dancing cobra, poised in mid-air. An adjacent series of black and white photographs considers ‘provisory rug designs’, loosely configured on the floor using blocks and wedges, illustrating the artist’s profound understanding of structure and form.

Maggie Madden uses materials of such delicacy and subtly they may almost not exist. They beg the viewer to closely inspect their form, such is their demand for exploration. In Madden’s work total internal reflection (2016), a simple loop of optical fibre and telephone wire resembles a lasso or even a noose. Deftly suggesting an unseen threat, it radiates a power at odds with its simplicity.

More well-known for their junky assemblages of salvaged materials, both Nevan Lahart and Liam O’Callaghan depart from their habitual approaches to present a large oil painting and a series of five c-type photographs respectively. Lahart’s sepia-toned monochromatic painting, Overpainted Underpaint, depicts a kind of nihilist teddy bear’s picnic: humans are dressed as pandas and tigers; a tree plays guitars, serenading a coterie of laughing cats; the severed head of W.B. Yeats is pumped with fluoridated water – and more. It’s a mysterious and compelling vignette, overloaded with cosmic allegory and stuffed with metaphysical symbolism. O’Callaghan’s photographs, Designs for public monuments that won’t happen (dumb series), depict maquettes of structures made from an assortment of random materials including Jaffa cakes, timber blocks, cardboard packaging and plastic eggs. These ad-hoc arrangements have been doused in viscous glossy paint and tantalisingly documented in luscious colour.

Using words, quotes and textual fragments is a familiar trope in Johnathan Mayhew’s work. For this exhibition, he presents aphoristic snatches of text on a monitor, against a background of spoken word, barely audible in this space with competing sounds from other artworks. Different Thoughts Various Evenings (2017) explores what Mayhew describes as the “points where quantum realities, physics, literature and poetry might intersect”, and its simplicity is profoundly moving.

Referencing the meditative allure of The Way Things Go, Caroline McCarthy’s MANSIZE is a real-time video of tissues being removed one by one from a large tissue box. Meanwhile, Aideen Barry employs her signature combination of drawing and animation to detail aspects of domestic drudgery. Presented via mini-projectors, and so it goes (2017), speaks to Fischli and Weiss’s industrial concerns with the more quotidian realities of the exhausted homemaker.

This domestic response is echoed in two new works by Hannah Fitz, Candelabra and Rose – synthetic decorative objects made from PVA glue, epoxy resin, paint, wire and paper. Rose is gleefully presented on the gallery floor as a sickly red puddle containing a long-stemmed rose surrounded by shards of a broken vase. With such strong responses to The Way Things Go, the work is once again reaffirmed in its role as both instigator and enduring reference point. Perhaps in another 30 years, it may play this role anew.

Anne Mullee is an art writer and curator of the Courthouse Gallery and Studios in Ennistymon, County Clare.

Images: Installation view, Gallery 1, including work by Isobel Nolan and Fischli & Weiss; image courtesy of the artists and  Butler Galley; photograph by Roland Paschhoff. Still from Peter Fischli and David Weiss, The Way Things Go, 1987; film 16mm, color, sound, 30 min; Camera: Pio Corradi; copyright Peter Fischli, David Weiss, Zürich 2017; image courtesy Sprüth Magers, Matthew Marks Gallery, Galerie Eva Presenhuber.

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