The LAB Gallery
15 September – 4 December
‘Holding on Lightly’, Elaine Grainger’s show in The LAB’s Cube Space, conveys both a desire to retain something and an acceptance of letting it go. This dynamic plays out over time, a dimension used as a working element in a site-responsive installation that evolves throughout its run across three locations. Exhibits carried to and from the artist’s nearby studio are installed and de-installed intuitively, a clipboard inventory on the wall recording changes. Some are placed among the eclectic fare of a local antique shop, inviting visitors to move between the calm of the gallery and the noise and clutter of a real-world emporium.
The Cube Space has two glazed walls, which overlook the street, and two internal walls; all have been draped in lightweight plastic sheets, made from dissolvable hospital laundry bags. This creates an inner sanctum that models subjective interplay between public and private domains. Their fleshy pink colour fosters somatic associations, with the womb, for instance, or with closed eyelids filtering light.
A gathering of items, some with nostalgic overtones, are arranged individually or as assemblages, either within the drapes, outside them, or in between. They variously include tired potted succulents, dusty chipboard, a silver jug, a holey jumper, a workaday stool, a grow-box containing brown-tinged moss, shards of bottle-glass held together by the label, and unfired clay vessels. Some are anchored to the floor by flimsy wires that hold on lightly. The vessels, especially, embody time and its unwinding. Made from coils that have been rolled and layered, they will, before long, disintegrate, losing these in-built acts of creation.
Visiting on a sunny day, the light-inflecting drapes lend an air of mystery. On a second encounter, the sky is dull and a section of plastic has been pulled back. Stripped of imagination upon seeing the entire display, the inevitably of things breaking down is laid bare. Later, finding one of Grainger’s clay vessels in the nearby shop, among discarded buttons, used crystal glasses, and kitsch melting clocks, the story shifts to one of renewed potential.
Thoughts about second lives, past and present intertwining, are amplified in the joint presentation by Diaa Lagan (a Dublin-based artist from Syria) and Basil Al-Rawi (an Irish-Iraqi artist from Leixlip). It brings an expansive energy to the ground and first-floor galleries through its range of historic and socio-political perspectives.
The title of Al-Rawi’s film The Salmon Leapt Toward Babel (2023) combines myths from his dual heritage; the leaping salmon of Leixlip and the Tower of Babel (in modern-day Iraq). Alternating between footage of Irish country roads, woodlands, a river, and the dry, brighter terrain of Jordan, the consistency of its bilingual soundtrack (Arabic voiceover spoken in the Irish passages, and Irish voiceover in the Jordanian) weaves cohesion between locations, laced through with memories of trauma.
Unlike a related passage in the Book of Genesis, in which God intervened to ensure that the builders of the tower spoke in different tongues and could no longer collaborate, subtitles are provided. Typed translations, artist talks and tours, and an Arabic calligraphy workshop also work to bridge divides and promote mutual understanding through both verbal and visual languages.
Upstairs, the space is partitioned by Between the Lines (2023), Al-Rawi’s take on a traditional mashrabiya screen, which melds intricate Arabic and Celtic motifs. Nearby, a postcard series titled Baldati, ‘my town’ (2014), comprises six photographic images, some modified (in the ways memory might) to find parallels between two homelands. They carry messages from his Iraqi family, one of which urges: “We wish you to learn Arabic and talk to us.”
In Arabic Calligraphy Composition (2022), Diaa Lagan’s trio of unframed screenprints, flowing text excerpts are cast into motion around other recurring elements, some rendered cleanly, others sketchily. An impression is given of mapping, or a lexicon being formed, altered and re-formed, while the plain supports and muted colours lend a contemporary feel. Other prints include Whirl (2022), which layers an experimental shape created by combining triangles (representing higher and material worlds) with overlapping circles of varying scale that symbolise the unity of the universe.1
Downstairs, the artist’s new paintings and sculptures draw freely from Eastern and Western traditions. Eight-pointed stars (an Islamic symbol) and excerpts from sacred texts and classical poetry proliferate across the works, including the gold leaf-embellished Paradise (2023) and floor-based Christ on a Carpet (2023). The latter incorporates a loose rendering of Carlo Maratta’s The Rape of Europa (c1680-1685), housed in the National Gallery of Ireland Collection. The narrative of this Greek myth, which involves the abduction of a Phoenician princess to Crete, references, for Lagan, among other things, transit between East and West, and ongoing losses of life in the Mediterranean.
In working through themes relating to culture, geopolitics and identity, ‘Shahid’ moves fluidly between personal and public, experienced and inherited realities. It also communicates a pressing need – painfully underscored by the recent Dublin riots – to understand and engage meaningfully with others in our shared world.
Susan Campbell is a visual arts writer, art historian and artist.
susancampbellartwork.com
1 ‘In-Conversation about Shahid’, with artists Diaa Lagan and Basil Al-Rawi and Viviana Checchia, Director of Void Gallery, The LAB Gallery, 27 November 2023.