The May – June 2019 issue of the Visual Artists’ News Sheet is out now.

This issue includes a brief focus on prominent national art collections. Discussing the 60-year evolution of the Niland Collection, Emer McGarry, Director of The Model, highlights collecting and ‘keeping’ as active investments in building ‘living repositories’ of thoughts and ideas. As the Arts Council of Northern Ireland launches its new Art Lending Scheme, Suzanne Lyle, Head of Visual Arts, discusses their contemporary collection. Similarly, Eamon Maxwell offers insights into the evolution of the Arts Council of Ireland Collection, which was established in 1962. VAI NI Manager, Rob Hilken provides an overview of art collections in Northern Ireland. 

Several feature articles focus on recent or ongoing archival projects. Val Connor and Dorothy Hunter offer insights into ‘The Long Goodbye’ – an exhibition focusing on the late 1990s as a pivotal stage in the 50-year history of Project Arts Centre. In a similar recollective vein, Christina Mullan profiles the Stephen McKenna retrospective, currently showing at VISUAL Carlow, while Pádraic E. Moore discusses the cultural nostalgia underpinning ‘The Last Great Album of the Decade’, a group exhibition at The LAB Gallery, Dublin. In addition, Vukašin Nedeljković discusses his ongoing project, Asylum Archive, which documents Ireland’s Direct Provision system.

We are delighted to publish a review by Lily Cahill, winner of the VAI/DCC Art Writing Award 2019, which offers vibrant reflections on Michelle Doyle’s exhibition, ‘Obedient City’ (13 – 23 September 2017), at A4 Sounds Gallery, Dublin. Also in this issue, Jonathan Carroll speaks to artist Eva Rothschild, who will represent Ireland at the 58th International Venice Biennale (11 May – 24 November 2019). 

In other feature articles, artist Karen Hendy reflects on her recent residency at Siamsa Tíre, while Aidan Kelly Murphy speaks to a group of artists who have created a temporary studio space in north inner-city Dublin. Julia Moustacchi discusses the benefits of Visual Thinking Strategies for Irish galleries, while Denis Farrell describes the evolution of Lodestar School of Art, an alternative summer residency in Glenstal Abbey.  

The Regional Focus for this issue comes from County Westmeath, with profiles from Luan Gallery, Chimera Art Gallery, Shambles Art Studios. Westmeath-based artists Celine Sheridan and Liz Johnson discuss their recent work. 

Reviewed in the Critique section are: Sam Reveles at Butler Gallery; Anita Groener at The Dock; Geraldine O’Sullivan at Uillinn: West Cork Arts Centre; Walker and Walker at IMMA; and ‘MAKing Art: The PAINTing Exhibition’ at Draíocht.

As ever, we have details of the upcoming VAI Professional Development Programme, exhibition and public art roundups, news from the sector and current opportunities.

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JONATHAN CARROLL INTERVIEWS EVA ROTHSCHILD ABOUT REPRESENTING IRELAND AT THE 58TH VENICE BIENNALE.

Jonathan Carroll: Your biography is the perfect antithesis of Brexit: you were born in Dublin; studied at University of Ulster, Belfast; live in London and have an MA from Goldsmiths; and you are being brought to Venice by Void Gallery in Derry, with a curator from Cork. Is it good timing for such a European endeavour?
Eva Rothschild: We were not alone in being anxious about getting everything transported to Venice before the initial Brexit date. The Scottish, Welsh and British pavilions were all installing early, to avoid any difficulties. There is nothing in the show that directly relates to Brexit – I don’t make work that has a narrative in that way. It is interesting to be working in Northern Ireland during this pivotal moment in UK-Irish relations. Living in the UK, it is very important for me to identify as an Irish artist.

JC: The selection process for the Venice Biennale is very competitive and involves a lot of partnering between commissioner, curator and artist. Can you give insights into how your team came together? 
ER: I have wanted to do Venice for ages but hadn’t realised you had to apply for it. As part of the open-call process, curators and commissioners nominate artists who they want to work with. Mary Cremin and I had wanted to work together for some time, and then she was appointed Director of Void in Derry. Mary is a force to be reckoned – a dynamic yet calm person who can deal with anything and has great curatorial flare. You also have to ensure that there is some sort of institutional support, to coordinate and provide structures to make the project happen. A big issue, of course, is additional funding.¹ 

JC: One of the Arts Council’s main criteria for Venice artists is the capacity to bring their practice to another level – were you asked to “think big”? 
ER: I am nearly 50 and have been working as an artist for 25 years. I suppose if you want me to do a project, you know it will probably be sculpture, though this is not the same as making a show for a small commercial space or doing an architectural project. In any instance, you take into account the context of the exhibition. Showing in Venice is like doing the most public exhibition you can imagine. There is an expectation that the work will demonstrate a scale and ambition not suitable in other contexts. As a sculptor, I feel that a lot of internationally recognised contemporary Irish art is quite narrative-based, or very much to do with time-based media. I felt it was important that my work stayed true to a sculptural core, so that is very much how I approach the pavilion, to emphasise physical sculptural engagement. It is worth noting that the Irish pavilion is situated as a continuation to the main Venice Biennale exhibition – curated this year by Ralph Rugoff – unlike the standalone national pavilions located in the Giardini. It’s the only remaining artworld show organised around national identity. The history and longevity of the Venice Biennale and the positioning of the pavilions echoes the colonial structure that is now eroded. The Irish pavilion is sort of in the ‘post-colonial’ section – it’s a good place to be. 

JC: Can we expect something of the scale of your 2009 Duveen Commission, Cold Corners, for Tate Britain? 
ER: It is within the idiom of my work, but I have considered the architecture of the space and the flow through of people. I was warned that nothing can prepare you for the crowds coming through during the first few days. The four main sculptural elements I will be showing are very demanding, in terms of their physical requirements. That is one of the great advantages of showing in the Arsenale – there are not that many floors in Venice that can take concrete blocks or heavy sculptures. The location could not be better, in terms of access. This space is also quite rough and ready, so the work needs to be robust and coherent enough to deal with those kinds of conditions and to hold its own. My work is either episodic or made up of multiple elements – although you see it arranged in one way, it allows for the possibility for it to be shown in different ways.

I am very interested in how people view a room of sculptures that is also populated by other people – they give a kinaesthetic sense of scale and possibility in relation to the objects. We all have the experience of going to these blockbuster exhibitions and peering over people’s heads, trying to catch a glimpse of the rarefied artwork. That’s not an ideal situation but I think with sculpture, you get to see how people look at things, how they comport themselves in relation to the object, and how they arrange themselves in their modes of looking. I am interested in spectatorship, especially in a spectacular situation like Venice. I am very aware that the time people give to an artwork is miniscule. Within these few seconds, there is a desperation to find the language to go with it, so a search for the panel and title ensues. To counteract the tendency for the Irish pavilion to become a corridor, I have included seating in the exhibition, to encourage people to stay a while. I’ve also added a sort of forced interaction with the work, by creating barriers which corral the visitors. You can’t just walk past the work; you have to circumnavigate it in some way. 

JC: Perhaps there will be some sort of relief for the viewer, after they’ve come through this heavily curated narrative section, to find ‘stuff in a room’?
ER: Yes. Viewers will have encountered many shows within the Arsenale, by the time they get to the Irish pavilion. And that is what it comes down to – it’s ‘stuff in a room’, stuff you are not going to find anywhere else. I think when you talk to sculptors who are very involved in making, there are lots of things that inform their work but usually they are overridden by the desire to see something exist, or to force the material to do something. So, there is a tendency to place the idea above the object, but for me, the object is key. I think there is such a divorce from materiality now, that I feel very privileged every day to be actually dealing with ‘stuff’ rather than screens. I squash something into a box, or I saw something in two, or I make a mould. That is what I would prefer to do all day – I like physicality, I like the sense of labour, the sense of work. If I wasn’t doing this, I would rather be doing something physical than something chair-bound.  

JC: Can you discuss the significance of titles within your work?
ER: I find titles are very important. Titles direct the language-functioning part of the brain towards creating meaning for the visual. People also view the title as a kind of crutch, so I think it is important that I design that support. I suppose I am continuing my authorial role through the titles of the works. I hate when works are untitled. In the process of developing this exhibition, I changed the title of an artwork, which was problematic, as the catalogue essay had already been edited. However, this amendment was important to me, as the work is settled now, whereas it felt a bit unsettled before.

JC: There is a certain pressure on artists to be relevant to the current moment, but your work maintains a certain detachment that insulates it from this need to continually comment on the present. In your press release for Venice, there is mention of allowing for “contemplation of the material legacy” of both “present and past civilisations”. Is it important for you to avoid time-specificity within your work?  
ER: One of the weird things about doing something like Venice is the level of discussion prior to the opening and the drive to fit things into a series of subjects. These things inform the work, in that they form my view of the world, but the work itself is not illustrative of these things. I would be very much of the Susan Sontag ‘Against Interpretation’ kind. I do want the work to float free of those things, but that is not to say that my own concerns are not the concern of the work. There isn’t usually the drive to sort of shoehorn the work into a narrative, in the same way as there is when doing something like the Venice Biennale. 

JC: The Irish Pavilion usually returns to Ireland after the biennale closes in late November. Where will it be shown?
ER: Having studied in Belfast, I have a strong link to Northern Ireland and was very keen to show at the Void Gallery in Derry. Then we will be showing in VISUAL Carlow and somewhere in Dublin – as yet, we have not decided on a venue. 

Jonathan Carroll is a curator and writer based in Dublin. 

Eva Rothschild is an artist who currently lives and works in London. The 58th Venice Biennale will take place from 11 May to 24 November 2019.

Notes:
¹ Eva has produced a series of prints and sculptures to help fund the final project.

Feature Image:
Eva Rothschild, ‘Kosmos’, installation view, Australian Centre for Contemporary Art, Melbourne, 2018; photograph by Andrew Curtis.

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LILY CAHILL, WINNER OF THE VAI/DCC ART WRITING AWARD 2019, REVIEWS MICHELLE DOYLE’S SOLO EXHIBITION, ‘OBEDIENT CITY’, AT A4 SOUNDS GALLERY, DUBLIN.

I recently hosted a visiting American friend. Spending the majority of their stay in suburban south Dublin prompted the query as to why the fashion is for graveled driveways as opposed to grass. This was one of the only notable differences between the modern metropoles of Dublin and Boston, apparently. Having never paid any particular attention to such ubiquitous assemblies in the past, I couldn’t speculate as to my fellow citizens’ preference for large gatherings of pounded stones surrounding one’s abode. The zealous tourist prompted pause for thought: What can stone stand for? 

Grass can grow anywhere, and concrete is a mutt. Gravel, however, consists of stones that are mechanically, uniformly, crushed and filtered. The multitudes of our suburban stones were standing for our citizenly civility: “The Obedience of the Citizens Produces a Happy City”.¹ No undergrowth here.

Michelle Doyle’s ‘Obedient City’ at A4 Sounds Gallery (13 – 23 September 2018) announced itself, per its press release, as “a visitor centre of the minerals, obstructions and energy of public works”, showing “how the true essence of Dublin … can be packaged” via the supposed ‘museumification’ of OPW sites and the general privatisation of Dublin city’s infrastructure.² With over half of Dublin’s rental units reportedly short-term occupied by site-seeing tourists during a national housing crisis, this is hard, core, matter Doyle’s digging up.

From a DIY punk background, Doyle has predominantly, and often collaboratively, worked via less materially driven formats – such as pirate radio, social media and through the distribution of zine publications, badges and online sound and video works. Having completed a three-month residency at A4 Sounds in Dublin’s north inner city, the artist has taken a departure with the culminating solo exhibition. She presents mainly sculptural works and one large video projection, with the exhibition scheduled to coincide with Culture Night 2018 – an event (amusingly described by Doyle during her artist’s talk as “a purge”) of note to an artist invested in the facilitation and distribution of heritage – heritage being the variable packaging or parentage of culture(s). Or vice versa, depending on the target audience.

In the exhibition, Doyle mimics ‘visitor experience’ methods and tropes utilised by heritage sites and museums with theatrical flourish. There’s a neon lit Vitrine and even a Gift Shop – which fittingly sells things that don’t appear to have much to do with the show. Works such as Death Masks, The Monument (towering, comical, columned), and various objects inside Vitrine (plaster casts of indents in the city’s streets, like Telecom Éireann logos and other reminders of bygone publicly owned resources) are made of materials ranging marble, plaster, clay, sand, stone and granite. The three Death Masks are splayed on the wall, their foreboding faces anguished, drooped, stretched, sagged and delicate in their distortion. The video, Distance From Stone, features the ever-popular dulcet tones of a ‘deep-voiced wise man’ guiding our visual journey, comprising Dublinia scenes to our freshly churning incinerator (described by Doyle as the “best monument of all time”) and later populated by the wobbling visage of another exhibited mask, superimposed and floating mythically, though troublingly, and pointedly, somewhat meaninglessly, over an internet-sourced mystical sky.

The stars of the show – two glamorous, glittering, Pebbledash Masks – hit the high note from their wall mounts, though one had no mouth, thusly rendered unable to proclaim or protest. This particular po-faced player, silently fretting its hour on stage, prompted the exhumation of that most famous corpse – one so concerned with heritage and distinction, the specificities of location, that it killed him. Indeed, Macbeth’s moving forest would not shock today in this global village: “We just can’t see the wood for the trees because, in actuality, Birnam Wood has moved – Welcome to Dunsinane! With a new accessible location, better facilities, a bigger car park and easier access to freshly built Neolithic houses!” ³

With an ‘outsider’ element always present, this ‘trickster’ persona is a vital part of Doyle’s work. The artist effectively sprinkled ‘Obedient City’ with stardust, knowing that a glint in one’s eye can be the best magnifying glass. Nearly a century ago, a roving pack of women – “a kind of 1930s Pussy Riot” – rallied to the “new cause” of protecting rural England from the “tentacles of development”.⁴ Whilst raising money for the National Trust, ‘Ferguson’s Gang’ employed props, masks and aliases (such as ‘Bill Stickers’ or ‘Granny the Throttler’) and then proceeded to stage-dive official ceremonies, bestowing their endowments. Like those before her, Doyle knows that, for better or worse, the medium is the message. She spoke of an “Obedience, not only to the city, but to history itself”. What, or who, lies under graveled foot as we, with our civic civility, represent and animate a repackaged past at surface level? Shakespearian fool? Doyle delights in the role of tragic town crier in an era’s national farce. 

Lily Cahill is a writer and co-editor of Critical Bastards Magazine based in Dublin. She is a graduate of IADT and NCAD and is currently studying radio production. 

The DCC/VAI Art Writing Award was devised to encourage and support emerging and experimental art writing in Ireland. The previous winners are: James Merrigan ‘The New Collectivism’ (2011); Joanne Laws ‘Commemoration – A Forward-Looking Act’ (2013); Rebecca O’Dwyer ‘Attentive Festivalisation’ (2015); Sue Rainsford ‘Serpents and Clay’ (2017).

Notes:
¹ According to the exhibition press release, this is the motto of Dublin City appearing on its Coat of Arms. 
² ‘Museumification’ can be defined as “transition from a living city to that of an idealised re-presentation of itself, wherein everything is considered not for its use, but for its value as a potential museum artifact”. See: Michael A. Di Giovine, The Heritage-scape: U.N.E.S.C.O., World Heritage, and Tourism, (Lanham: Lexington Books, 2009).
³ For more on new-build Neolithic houses, see Will Self’s Guardian article ‘Has English Heritage ruined Stonehenge?’, 21 June 2014, in which he states: “each era cannot help but seek out a past that it finds inspiring – or at least congenial.” theguardian.com.
⁴ Charlotte Higgins, ‘The battle for the future of Stonehenge’, 8 February 2019, theguardian.com. 

Feature Image:
Michelle Doyle, Distance from Stone, 2018, HD Video, 10 minutes; film still courtesy the artist.

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Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin
15 February – 3 June 2019

‘Nowhere Without No(w)’ highlights Walker and Walker’s longstanding interest in the Modernist canon – particularly Charles Baudelaire and Stephane Mallarmé, in this instance. The themes of the works presented – and the artists’ long-running collaborative practice – are diverse, but Romantic association predominates.

The exhibition is exactingly prescriptive in its use of ideas and literary references. Its sleekly direct and literal translations of ideas into form invoke the aesthetic austerity of the conceptual tradition. However, its sensuous silvers and inky blacks exacerbate the cerebral quality into kitsch and fetish, helping to establish a sense of fraught disclosure. Pathos is prevalent along the fault lines, where abstract ideas are made materially concrete. The artists appear to be interested in making celebrated artistic and intellectual material perform isolated gestures in public space – exposing them to embodied interactions and interpretations. The work approximates sculptural aesthetics in this tentative or emergent materiality. 

The conceptual agenda generally feels pertinent to a foregrounded Romantic sensibility, with an emphasis on authenticity, the endeavours of reason and the existential situation of the subject. This is so with French Surrealist writer, René Daumal, whose unfinished 1952 novel features a summit joining reason with an incommensurable sublime. The duo’s feature-length film, Mount Analogue Revisited (2010), condenses Daumal’s alternately penetrating and knowingly obtuse philosophical text – while also drawing on the work of other writers – into a more sober film in which a polymath, an author and a linguist grandiloquently explain who they are and why they have come to Mount Analogue, in response to questions apparently posed in an immigration reception centre. 

Thoughtful play with reference and space permeates the entire exhibition. One enters by turning a door handle designed by Walter Gropius, German architect and founder of the Bauhaus. Via this device (distributed inside and outside), viewers engage In Dialogue With the Past (2019). The penultimate room bears the brass plaque, Temenos (2019) – a Greek term meaning ‘spiritually dedicated land’ and a Jungian postulate of a therapeutic mental haven. Here also, a table-top installation, Morning star/evening star (2019), tracks the movement of Venus, famously denoted by both terms in this work’s title, with a monitor displaying binary code and a pencil-wielding machine, putatively in the early stages of a rose pattern. 

In the first room, a host of disk-like forms awaits the viewer. In Waiting (oak tree) (2015) is an arresting stainless-steel grille – the sort usually encountered on urban pavements or town squares protecting trees – which alludes to the potential presence of an absent tree. It occupies the same space as a large circular black mirror, in which a cold white neon reflection appears. The titular phrase, the presence before him was a presence, is taken from a short story by American writer, Henry James, but it is rendered backwards, adorning the upper portion of the opposing wall. This tautological neon succinctly evokes the logic which underlies the language we use to conceive, reference and articulate ideas, as well as material presences – the nature and meaning of which confounds us, despite fluency in culture and learning. Such sombreness and anxiety in respect of language, and the apprehension and conceptualisation of proximate entities, is encountered elsewhere in the exhibition. Dusk (2019) extends a black and a white string from floor to ceiling, between parallel nickel and brass fasteners. I found its binary reverse tendencies bruisingly poetic.

In the second space, elided, chunky aluminium letters declare: “I say: a fl w r! And … there arises musically, as the very idea and delicate, the one absent from every bouquet”. This line – taken from an essay by French Symbolist Mallarmé – adorns a wall with ethereal awkwardness. Widow’s Pane, or Bachelors, Even, after Marcel Duchamp, after Charles Baudelaire (2015) is a poplar wood model of a window which sits squatly on the floor. Pastel-blue with eight dark panes in hinged doors, it evokes reverie while summoning conflicting historical influences: two poems by Baudelaire, celebrating subjective interpretation (one of which, Windows (1869), is displayed nearby); and Duchamp’s artist-decentring glass construction, The Bride Stripped Bare by her Bachelors, Even (1923). 

The range of works is punctuated by white, powder-coated aluminium shapes, roughly the size of A4 pages and nearly an inch deep. This ‘In-between Letters’ series (2013) presents the cognitive dross of prepositions and a pronoun – ‘it’. These jigsaw-like forms are jarringly ghostly, hovering at head-height, protruding slightly from the walls and glowing softly with the spotlighting overhead. In the esoteric environment of ‘Nowhere Without N(ow)’, their illegibility draws attention to the matter of how the exhibition and its themes relate to publics. The work’s sensitive coaxing of ideas into aesthetic, interactive materiality serves to configure a drama of (mis)apprehension; of aesthetic and moral urges, and mental intentionality. While this should be generally relatable to viewers, the artistic or curatorial emphasis on illustrious personages as protagonists is intriguing. While an argument for their relative audacity appears implicit, it can feel side-lined, quaint or eccentric. 

Danny Kelly is an artist based in Dublin.

Feature Image:
Walker and Walker, Morning star/evening star (detail), 2019, installation view, IMMA; all photographs by Ros Kavanagh, courtesy of the artists and IMMA.

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The Dock, Carrick-on-Shannon
19 January – 9 March 2019

Stories of displacement are not aesthetic. These are rushed, unplanned, reactive situations, without much time or resources for calculation or intention. Perhaps this is part of the reason why many people find it hard to identify with asylum seekers; it is difficult for most of us to comprehend such an urgent need to escape danger and to find a safer place. 

Anita Groener’s recent exhibition at The Dock captured this challenge, before we even approached the work. The title, ‘The Past Is A Foreign Country’ – taken from the opening of L. P. Hartley’s novel, The Go-Between (1953) – highlighted this sense of detachment. Spread across three gallery spaces, the work itself aimed to negotiate this distance by identifying and portraying individual experiences. The challenge was to situate these stories within a global historical narrative of ‘refuge-seeking’, while simultaneously recognising that each account belongs to an individual.

Gallery 1 hosted the titular installation, featuring trees hanging in mid-air and linked by bandages, creating an organised, straight-lined matrix. Rather than being rooted in place and nourished by land to grow branches or leaves, these displaced trees were dry and completely dependent on the structures that kept them upright. The same space also included a video, titled Nest (2018), showing a bird’s nest being broken into twigs by a pair of hands in the dark. These pieces made a strong opening statement on both the subject matter of displacement and on Groener’s recurring visual motif – drawing in both two-dimensional and three-dimensional space.

Gallery 2 carried the narrative thread from the natural world back to society. A large circle of twigs, mounted on the far wall, acted as a diorama of sorts, holding miniature silhouettes of individuals or groups as they travelled along the dark offshoots. Some scenes were expected, like a group of women carrying parcels on their heads as they walk, but some stung with poignancy, such as the man standing with his arms raised, presumably surrendering to an unknown pursuer. 

On the opposing wall, five animated drawings, titled Moments (2018), featured short snippets of news interviews with children displaced from Syria. Even when they were standing still, the characters were animated, as if at any moment these children would continue with an update on their current lives. Minimal, hand-drawn lines were traced around those featured in the footage, reducing the emotional content of these scenes to their most essential and making them difficult to leave behind once viewed.

A series of five ink and gouache drawings on paper was presented in Gallery 3, further embodying the allegory of drawing as social practice. Created line-by-line, dot-by-dot, these drawings are an exercise in focus. Each mark is different and unique and has its own moment of creation. In the gallery’s mezzanine space, the narrative seemed to suddenly shift from local to global once again, with a looped video, entitled Blink (2018), showing thematically-arranged photographs of international victims who have all been displaced. Though the images in this film were primarily presented in greyscale, some colours were introduced periodically, to highlight a particular character or moment in time, which offered moments of relief to the intense sequence and the viewing experience. This piece also provided the loud, deep, heartbeat audio that resonated throughout the three gallery spaces.  

In contemporary western society, we are trained to be audience members – a mode that is more often used cynically, to manipulate and numb our responses to injustice. Groener uses this contemporary disposition to demonstrate the empathy we are capable of, when someone else’s story is relayed to us with care. Walking through ‘The Past Is A Foreign Country’ was, without a doubt, a challenging experience. The artist persistently played with our capacity to alternate between long-shot frames and extreme close-ups, from painful story to global impact, and vice versa. Drawing being her primary medium, the artist carefully placed lines, markings, and lighting to create beautiful shapes, while making sure individual elements did not get lost in the process. Overall, the exhibition allegorically uses visual manipulation to take a compassionate political stance.

Moran Been-noon is an independent curator and artist based in Dublin.
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Feature Image:
Anita Groener, The Past is a Foreign Country, 2019, installation view, The Dock; photograph by Paul McCarthy.

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Butler Gallery, Kilkenny
17 March – 12 May 2019

‘Poulaphouca’ at the Butler Gallery is Sam Reveles’s first large-scale solo exhibition in Ireland. The fourteen works on display in the four adjoining galleries include Reveles’s most recent paintings and works on paper. The exhibition is a journey of an experience which demonstrates the development and shifts in Reveles’s work over the last few years.

In the first gallery space, one of the artist’s earlier works, Cill Rialaig 2, is an elemental example of his previous ‘grey’ period. The paper is approached episodically; an underlay of grey wash is erased by a lattice of horizontal scratchy marks. This method of creating through destruction is haphazardly deployed, revealing the layers and excavated glimpses of embedded arcs and veins in white and stone. In the past, Reveles has been labelled a “graffitist”, as well as a “gestural abstraction painter” and “a scribbler”. His artworks combust in tangled lines and they are energetic, chaotic and frenzied. However, as observed in this exhibition, there has been a defiant shift in his recent work. 

Gallery 2 is subdued and still. The four gouache and pencil works on show seem to construct the pictorial schema with the architectural coherence of structural lines. Poulaphouca #2 has six points where the (possible) perspectival lines meet, dissecting the otherwise blank paper into shards and splinters. Reveles has attempted to encapsulate the three-dimension quality of landscape into a reduced and distilled representation. It’s as if a kaleidoscopic camera obscura has been used. The traditional organisation of the vanishing point, horizon and field of projection have been reconfigured to produce a constellation of shattered pieces. Although the perspective has been pinched and pulled, a certain depth is still present; the two large concave forms meet at the centre and there is a darkened sinking sensation.

It is important to know that Poulaphouca is a reservoir to Blessington Lakes in County Wicklow – a body of water spanning more than twenty kilometres. Having spent a lot time at these lakes myself, I wonder if these plotted lines represent actual viewing points? Is this an aerial view of Poulaphouca, mapping the myriad of surveying sites that circulate the lakes? As an abstract representation of the place, these artworks appear to dismiss the limits of time and distance, instead seizing upon a more dynamic form of observation. 

In the final space, the exhibition culminates with three large oil paintings. Recurring Dissolution epitomises Wicklow as the ‘Garden of Ireland’. The complex composition breaks the horizontal frieze into a multitude of coloured facets: vermillion green, canary yellow and cornflower blue. The same accumulative layering is present here – the blank canvas is exposed with its mapped measurements in pencil, while clusters of colour build up to form a concentric motion. Throughout the work there are small conscious gaps of bare canvas, perhaps rendering dappled light on the water or rays caught within the trees. Reveles is transfixed by the constant transformations that occur in nature, capturing its moving moments and emphasising our failure to ever connect with it entirely. 

It is evident that Reveles has a very meditative relationship with nature. There is a particular essentialism in his work, whereby he persistently alludes to a deepened spirituality, successfully conveyed through the process of abstraction to individualise features and enhance essential forms. Reveles’s paintings also encapsulate his own experiential relationship with the landscape of Poulaphouca. In a fronto-parallel medium, he offers the viewer a plurality of encountered moments that have been imprisoned upon a singular surface – defying space, time and distance. The result is an ethereal and weightless portrayal of the place with a compelling electricity, as if channeling the functionality of Poulaphouca reservoir, where hydroelectric energy is harnessed to an electric means. 

In all, Reveles has personalised the process of abstraction and, in my opinion, has made it approachable and familiar. To engage with this exhibition, time is needed. The works demand extended engagement, to fully observe them and to immerse oneself in the immense landscapes that the artist is depicting. 

Rachel Botha works in Poetry Ireland and is a freelance art critic. 

Feature Image:
Sam Reveles, Recurring Dissolution, 2018, oil and pencil on canvas, 91.5 × 152.5 cm; photograph by Roland Paschhoff, © the artist, courtesy of the artist and Butler Gallery.

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Draíocht Arts Centre, Blanchardstown
14 March – 18 May 2019

Immediacy, I’ve found, has always been an underlying characteristic of much contemporary painting. I’ve never tried to pull back the curtain of the canvas, in search of hidden meaning lurking beyond sight. Surely, I thought, there is no code to crack; what you see is what you get. However, this limiting preconception was unilaterally turned on its head by ‘MAKing Art:PAINTing’. Sitting with the paintings in this group exhibition – which includes work by Susan Connolly, Bridget Flannery, Geraldine O’Neill and Liz Rackard – I found nostalgia, warmth and physical engagement seeping out. 

‘MAKing Art:PAINTing’ is the second instalment in a series of exhibitions tailored to the general public and young people. Speculating that this exhibition may have an ‘educational agenda’ (as I’ve seen in previous shows), I did not expect to encounter work that would showcase the true scope of Irish contemporary painting. In fact, the opposite is true. 

Liz Rackard’s small-scale portraits of family and friends read like a family album, however they are not necessarily the kind of photos you would display above the fireplace. Two acrylic works on paper, Big Sleeper (2016) and Little Sleeper (2016), detail anonymous figures during moments of rest. These scenarios recall the mental image we all have of loved ones relaxing after a long day. The tenderness of these images and their intimate scale draws us into the frame and into the warmth and comfort of these private domestic moments. Such delicate reminiscence is stripped bare in Bridget Flannery’s painted panels. Rather than languorous figures, we are shown rugged abstract landscapes, painted vibrantly with expressive brushstrokes in muted pastel shades. Across Clearings (2018) embodies atmospheric natural hues, textures and materials at the contracting methodical scale. Flannery’s physical expression of memory and place seeps pungently into the wood, which acts as a support for this work. Rather than formal paintings, Flannery’s compositions feel as though they have been chiselled out of a dreamscape, like organic segments cut and pasted onto the gallery wall. 

On the opposing wall, three works by Geraldine O’Neill lean into the art historical cannon of realist painting. O’Neill’s compositions appear to take influence from seventeenth-century Dutch Still Life and other prominent movements throughout the history of painting. And yet, the work feels extremely fresh because it is permeated with modern cultural references, including the vibrant pink and orange outfit of Dora the Explorer, depicted in Mouse Trap (2010). This scene is so meticulously painted, that we can almost hear the synthetic rustling of the ever so slightly deflated, crinkled balloons. In addition, the rich green Irish football jersey, depicted in Boy (2008), is instantly recognisable. This painting depicts her own son against a vast and barren landscape, providing a seemingly outdated backdrop for the uncanny aura of youth.

The stand-out work – quite literally – was Susan Connolly’s large-scale, installation-based painting. The artistry of Connolly’s oeuvre does not lie her in subject matter, but in matter itself. It is her layering process and her unapologetic treatment of materials that translates the work into three dimensions. For example, Ymc-iridescent (2019) invites us to shift from viewer to active participant. Our perspective moves from outward to inward, as we venture between the fixed blue wall and the back of the canvas. As we move, the shadow cast by the intricately arranged panels traverses the body, momentarily transforming it into a light-painted surface. 

Overall, the experience of each body of work is heightened by curator Sharon Murphy’s gentle consideration, which allows autonomy to emerge between each cluster of paintings, while encouraging the viewer to follow each surface throughout the space. This diverse range of painting practice is further supported by a strong concurrent exhibition taking place in the First Floor Gallery, which showcases paintings from the Arts Council Collection. Spanning a 50-year period (1968–2018), this choesive selection of paintings range from Roy Johnston’s minimalist yet sculptural Sixteen Rotating Forms (1975) and the vibrant parallel brushstrokes of Diana Copperwhite’s Argentina (2006), to Damien Flood’s delicately restrained and considered approach to subject matter in Parting (2016). No cultural object can retain its value without consistent viewing by new audiences. This makes the regular showcasing of works from the Arts Council Collection ever more important. 

Sara Muthi is a writer and researcher based in Dublin.

Feature Image:
Geraldine O’Neill, Mouse trap, 2010, oil on canvas, 130 × 180 cm; courtesy of the artist and Kevin Kavanagh Gallery.

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Uillinn: West Cork Arts Centre, Skibbereen
9 March – 10 April 2019

The crisp depiction of County Cork’s Fastnet Lighthouse – tall and erect yet submerged in a sea of blue – opens Geraldine O’Sullivan’s exhibition, ‘Light Keepers’ at Uillinn: West Cork Arts Centre. As one of 14 artworks on display, this painting immediately anchors the viewer in what unfurls as a world of green gushes, titanium white surf and brilliant blue horizons. 

O’Sullivan’s paintings are accompanied by 11 mixed-media collages that act as visual documentation of the information, stories and anecdotes the artist has encountered since commencing research into the history of lighthouse keeping in Ireland, over three years ago. Hung in a traditional style along the four walls of the ground-floor James O’Driscoll gallery, the works seem to gently enshroud the viewer. This sense of enclosure, combined with the brilliant white walls and the double-height ceiling, serendipitously seems to simulate a lighthouse interior. However, the lighthouse structure itself is only a minor component of these artworks. O’Sullivan is also concerned with the lives of the individual ‘light keepers’, as evidenced in her collaged works. 

The artist refers to these collages as “lifescapes” which aim to capture the keepers’ lives – based on old photos and memorabilia given to her by their families – while creating narrative through the various connections between imagery. For example, in Semaphore, black and white photographs of happy lighthouse children are juxtaposed alongside a smiling, cherubic girl advertising ‘Brasso’ metal polish, and a woman in old-fashioned dress demonstrating flag signals. A painterly rendering of Rockabill lighthouse is central to this small, intimate composition of memories. 

The exhibition is accompanied by a short film that provides the ‘Light Keepers’ with historical context, thus foregrounding an ‘archival impulse’ – something American art critic Hal Foster described as the desire to “make historical information, often lost or displaced, physically present” .¹ With modernisation, lighthouses in Ireland are no longer manned, so the world that the artist is reflecting upon is now essentially a lost culture. This archival impulse was also evident during the artist’s talk at the gallery on 16 March, when O’Sullivan’s work served as a backdrop to the anecdotes of her guest, Galley Head lighthouse attendant, Gerard Butler. As a third generation ‘keeper’, Butler’s lively reminiscences seemed to emerge from and embed themselves in the artworks that surrounded him.

Interestingly, a large acrylic painting, The Morning After the Storm, is actually based on Butler’s memory of the aftermath of a particularly cruel storm, now preserved in paint by the artist. The painting’s foreground is devoted to capturing the unusual qualities of the ‘green water’ observed by the light keeper that day. In isolation, it is almost an abstract pattern of green and grey swirls, sitting on a pool of deep Prussian blue. Surging from the left, the swell collapses into a white foam, as it meets the cliff edge to the right of the foreground. Emerging from the water to occupy the top half of the composition, is the rugged rock of Fastnet lighthouse. Slit-like marks of varying intensity indicate the harsh, jagged realities of its form. The intense pattern of water that floods the painting’s foreground is juxtaposed with stacks of marks, compacted to create a craggy rock, allowing little space for the eye to rest. The lighthouse keeper’s staggered feeling on the morning after the storm is cleverly evoked by the painting’s composition.

Another large acrylic painting, The Cliff Divers Perch, is notable for its design. O’Sullivan’s research involved accessing drone imagery of the lighthouses and their surrounding areas, providing her with unusual reference imagery on which to base her compositions. Again, the composition teeters on abstraction, as the viewer is positioned at a cliff edge with the sea opening out below the rock underfoot. As such, ripples of blue replace the sky, while yellow ochre drips from the rock, as it drops down from the foreground into the watery pool. This exhibition showcases the artist’s vast painterly skill, as much as it highlights the fading culture of lighthouse keeping in Ireland. O’Sullivan’s ‘Light Keepers’ offers the viewer a fresh visual archive of an outmoded way of life. 

Sarah Long is an artist and writer based in County Cork.

Notes: 
¹ Hal Foster, ‘An Archival Impulse’, October, Vol. 110 (Autumn, 2004), p4.

Feature Image:
Geraldine O’Sullivan, Birds Eye View of the Galley Head, acrylic on canvas, 101 × 140cm; photograph by Roland Paschhoff, courtesy of the artist and Uillinn: West Cork Arts Centre.

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