Critique | Eimear King, ‘Idir Talamh agus Spéir’

South Tipperary Arts Centre  

29 June – 2 August 2024

Photography, according to Susan Sontag, rather than being an art form, is like language – “a medium in which works of art (among other things) are made.”¹ In the contemporary digital world, there are billions of us skilled in this language, with the wherewithal to distribute a vision of our shared reality. However, in this image saturated context, what has any photographer got to offer that has not already been said? 

Eimear King’s response is not to try to “show something novel.”² She is not afraid to celebrate the things that have always drawn artists – trees, seascapes, sunsets, rooks taking flight, a twisting road. Within this framework of the familiar, she opens a window onto a world that, though nominally black and white, is imbued with warmth through the use of well-judged hints and washes of colour. This is enhanced by curator Helena Tobin’s understated presentation, which lovingly matches King’s vision. Simply framed and beautifully printed, the delicately ragged edges whisper of peeling bark and rippling tides. 

On first sight, an unremarkable headland on a dull day, Sea-Dream (2021), is distinguished by the all-over nature of its detail, from foreground to horizon: repeating curved swatches of marram grass, grainy sand, and stark trees under a delicately toned sky. The tilted horizon, coming from a precise hand, hints at a world less than solid. The same tilt in Headland (2021), animates the black promontory, underscored as it is by the silvery estuaries etched in sand that stream after the ebb tide.

King’s skies – painterly, windswept, lowering, cradled by the rounded dark edge of a scope, or bisected by a wire from which black crows launch – are backdrop and signifier. Clouds are ghosts of long-gone trees, just as puddles on a mountain road tear holes in any thought of solidity. 

Her wide gaze, combined with a laser-like focus on detail and photogenic subject matter, is striking. Sea pinks, usually so pretty, in West Coast Cooler (2020) are leached of their blush; stalks as ragged as old bone cast shadows upon the lichen splotched rock, onto which their bobbly heads fade and die. Beyond, under the eternal sky, the sea is washed with the lightest touch of deep blue.

The artist’s precision and application of warmth transforms even the blandest vista. In Islander (2021), three scattered boats are stranded by the tide, an arrangement that must attract passing tourists. Here, their decay is exposed in the full glare of the sun. In contrast, Over the Hill leans on form more than detail. A mountain road curves up into a dusky sky, carrying us away into the night. 

Encountering King’s work for the first time in the shadow of her untimely passing, it’s easy to assume that a perceived “undertow of melancholy” is a projection.³ However, the shade was ever there. Earlier work deliberately avoided any focus on subject – a non-descript hedgerow, a scrubby field – as if perpetually searching for something beyond. The picturesque holds no fear, and any melancholy is offset by wonder.

In ‘Idir Talamh agus Spéir’, knuckled tree roots reach down into the depths, powerfully sucking life, as delicate branches scratch the low clouds. An elm explodes like a firework, flaring white in a black sky. In fields trees stand their ground with a surety that has made peace with the passing of things, anchored in stubble, whispering to the passing clouds that mark the distance to the horizon. 

Eimear King’s wise, generous gaze speaks a “language understood in all parts of the world, and bridging all nations and cultures, it links the family of man.”⁴ Rather than separating us from reality, as Sontag dourly fretted, King speaks of crossing boundaries set by time and space. If there is nothing new under the sun, we may still walk among the stars.

Clare Scott is an artist based in Waterford.

¹ Susan Sontag, On Photography, Electronic Edition (New York: Rosetta Books, 2005 [1973]) p116.

² Ibid. p14

³ Ibid. p54

⁴ Helmut Gernsheim, Creative Photography: Aesthetic Trends (London: Faber & Faber, 1962) p217.