Limerick City Gallery of Art
16 February – 7 April 2024
When observing Eddie Cahill’s solo exhibition at Limerick City Gallery of Art (LCGA), one enters into a continually developing personal universe, filled with stormy scenes, shadows, and abstracted figures. In the accompanying text, Cahill reflects that this exhibition is symbolic of his life’s journey; he spent time in Limerick Prison in the 1980s and has now returned to Limerick to celebrate ‘Searching in the Dark’.
The presented paintings offer personal and collective reflections on structures of power, experiences of isolation, and both the loss and reclamation of agency. They hold space for a web of narratives to unfold. Each work is a fragment of a story that chronicles the trauma of incarceration, the transformative effect of artistic practice, and the physiological impact of isolation, as experienced by billions of people across the globe during the Covid-19 pandemic.
Eddie Cahill, ‘Searching in the Dark’, installation view, Limerick City Gallery of Art; photograph by Roland Paschhoff, courtesy of the artist and LCGA.
Upstairs in LCGA, we find ourselves pressed in close to Cahill’s paintings, starting with his Pandemic series from 2020. Each painting acts almost as a diary entry. Unstretched, hanging loose on the wall, the thick cotton paper lifts up at the edges like well-worn pages from the artist’s sketchbook. The depicted figures are partially shrouded by masks or veils, with features either blurred or blank, thus obscuring any expression. This is a repeated motif across many other works. For example, The Broken Heads series (2018 – ongoing) depicts simplified figures with partially obscured expressions, blurred features, or no features at all.
The exhibition is accompanied by three texts written by an anonymous writer, who is currently incarcerated in Loughan House Open Prison, where they are studying via the Open University. The words of this anonymous narrator follow us through the space, vocalising the internal worlds of Cahill’s subjects, as well as their experiences of isolation, oppression, confinement, and judgement.
In response to Square Brain (2012), a small painting in the Beer Matt series (1997 – ongoing), our anonymous writer asks: “Can you see me?” This monologue narrates the internal world of this small boy, dressed in red with his head bowed down, staring into his lap. He is trapped inside a TV screen and asks: “Do you see me?” The repetition of this question throughout the text prompts viewers to consider what we see when we look at him. Do we see the many layers that make up the composite of his role in this world? Do we see any of the parts of himself that he experiences internally?
These texts give space to the emotions felt by Cahill’s subjects, as they experience grief, trauma, and loss in many forms. In addition, many of the artworks are accompanied by shorter texts, presumably written by the artist himself, which further animate the exhibition through slivers of fiction, biography, and autobiography.
Across the presented paintings, light is handled with care, whether radiating softly across faces in Transportation (2012), or emerging from shadow, as in The Mourning After (2012). The light in the majority of the paintings comes from outside and lands directly on the figures’ faces, illuminating their features whilst the background remains dark.
Since the early 1990s, when Cahill began painting whilst incarcerated – facilitated by a NCAD Fine Art programme run by Brian Maguire in Portlaoise Prison – he has been finding the form of his own gestural language as an artist. The characters that populate the world he has created appear as symbols or archetypes: mother, father, child, brother – always nameless. Folded into the rhythm, brushstrokes, and fibres of Cahill’s works are his own lived experience of incarceration and his belief in artistic practice and the therapeutics of creativity as a language through which to articulate and overcome trauma.
More recently, Cahill created a space for artists in custody to share their own experiences through creative expression, as curator of ‘Alternative Ways of Seeing’ at Rua Red (19 March – 27 April 2024) – an exhibition of artworks, selected and curated by Cahill, by people who are currently incarcerated across Ireland.
Theo Hynan-Ratcliffe is a writer, sculptor, and project coordinator based in the West of Ireland. She is Co-Editor of The Paper, and a studio holder at Spacecraft Artists’ Studios.
