Critique | ‘Bodies’

Waterford Gallery of Art

5 December 2024 – 5 April 2025

In the public imagination, museum collections often summon up dusty places that are cloistered and devoid of relevance. However, since the turn of the century, there has been a push to place the museum at the centre of an increasingly fluid community – a shift which has become more urgent since the pandemic, with the collection at the vital heart of this new role. 

While many cultural institutions lag behind in this regard, The Waterford Art Collection, housed in Waterford Gallery of Art, is a shining exception. One of the oldest municipal collections of art in Ireland, it comprises over 700 works by artists including Paul Henry, Jack B. Yeats RHA, Louis le Brocquy, Evie Hone, Mary Swanzy, and George Russell (using the pseudonym AE), as well as a growing number of contemporary works. It is overseen by Visual Arts Co-ordinator, Luke Currall, who has extensive experience in the UK, including a stint at The Wellcome Collection in London. Currall believes that the collection must “remain a living, developing, relevant resource, not just a time capsule of historic, innovative and ambitious ideals within Waterford’s past.”

The outfitting of the two-storey gallery in 2019 was overseen by Waterford County Council Arts Office and Rojo Studios Architects with collection consultation from Dr Éimear O’Connor. Using a system of movable walls, the space has a contemporary feel, while preserving many of the building’s nineteenth-century classical features. Currently showing until 5 April in the upstairs gallery space, ‘Bodies’ presents works from the collection alongside new commissions, inspired by the human form. The skilful use of a familiar theme to surprise and beguile is characteristic of Currall’s curatorial approach. 

For instance, while Nude Study (c.1918) by Mainie Jellett nods to Susan Connolly’s solo exhibition, ‘GROUND (two-unfold)’ – a riff on Jellett’s cubist work, which runs concurrently downstairs – it is a lively, figurative work, rather than a cubist piece. Similarly, placing James Joseph Power’s bronze of a famine-era couple, Gorta Mór (1961), beside Áine Ryan’s contemporary sculpture, Implements (2021) – a disembodied glass hand on a rusted pitchfork – brackets a space in which rural histories might be reimagined.

Many artists here were active on the wider political and cultural scene. William Orpen – whose Nude Study (n.d.) is a tutorial in drawing – was an official Great War artist. Another of his sketches depicts Irish Free State Senator, Oliver St John Gogarty. Mainie Jellett and Father Jack P Hanlon (Nude Study, n.d.) were two of the founders of The Irish Living Art Exhibition (IELA) in 1943, while Conn McCluskey, represented here by the sculpture Untitled (1960), founded the Homeless Citizens’ League in 1963 and the Northern Ireland Civil Rights Association in 1967. This exhibition launched Una Sealy’s huge new portrait, commissioned by the OPW and WCC, of Dr Mary Strangman – public health advocate, suffragette, and the first female member of Waterford City Council – which holds a central position in the gallery. Reclining Nude (n.d.) by artist and curator Mary Grehan (who, incidentally, played Strangman in a recent local production) hangs nearby. Notably, the collection has a considerable number of works by female artists, which Currall is committed to building upon.

There are international links too. Women in Conversation (1953) by Stella Steyn (an Irish-born artist of Russian extraction) recalls the monumentality of Picasso’s Two Women Running on a Beach (1922) but has a vibrance and lightness all of its own. Elsewhere, a watercolour by Niccolo d’Ardia Caracciolo, titled Nude Study (n.d.), reflects the artist’s mixed heritage. A member of the RHA, Caracciolo was born to a Waterford mother and Italian father and grew up in Waterford Castle. He died in a motorbike accident in Italy in 1989 aged 48. 

Local and contemporary artists also feature in the show. Portrait of the Young Man as an Artist (1981) is a beautifully executed parody – one that subverts the title of James Joyce’s second novel, while mirroring the composition of Rembrandt’s figurative painting, The Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Nicolaes Tulp (1632) – by Waterford artist Pat O’Brien, the subject of the dissection. The medical students, tutors from WRTC (now SETU), will be recognisable to generations of Waterford art students, now scattered across the world. Alongside, Anthony Hayes’s Gladiators (2014), groins shielded by game controllers, crowd forward, their thrust offsetting Cuán Cusack’s You in Blue (2024) – cyanotypes and poems about dysphoria, floating on organza nearby.

Eamon Grey and James Horan’s This Little Piggy Went to Market (2023), holds such ambiguity within. A pair of feet, carved from Carrera marble, from which white bones comically jut, balance on pink stilts, sunk in a heap of white gravel. Sadly, Grey did not live to see the work complete, having died in 2022, but this sculptural installation, which provides a literal and figurative frame for the show, also suggests the possibility of moving forward with verve and zest. An alternative cipher, a terracotta nude, sits opposite, curled like a cat. The artist is ‘anon’ – a reminder that beauty lives on and belongs to all.

An effective and engaging exhibition, ‘Bodies’ exemplifies the new ideal of the municipal art collection as a tool to variously reach, inspire, reflect, and support its communities. The museum collection also acts as a repository of sorts, helping to bring history to life by providing tangible connections to stories of local, national, and international significance. However, collections need careful management, resources, and expertise to reach their full potential, since there is an expectation of durational care among those who donate artefacts. Currall’s presence has therefore been a game changer for the Waterford Art Collection, and it will be of national interest to see where he guides it.

Clare Scott is an artist and writer based in Waterford who recently completed a Postgraduate Diploma in Museum Practice and Management at Ulster University.

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