Critique | Hughie O’Donoghue ‘Territory’

The Glucksman

1 December 2023 – 10 March 2024 

‘Territory’ is a solo exhibition of recent works by Hughie O’Donoghue at The Glucksman in Cork. This show comprises eight large-scale paintings and one sculpture. The paintings are largely oil and mixed-media works on repurposed tarpaulin and flour sacks. They depict seascapes and various scenes of the Irish countryside, often accompanied by a male figure.

I am drawn to the nuts and bolts of O’Donoghue’s paintings: the screws pierced through tarpaulin; the layered glops of resin, petrified along the edges of paintings like molluscs on rocks. In Michael Gaughan’s House (2023), we can see the supporting material’s past life, as the tarpaulin’s folds and wrinkles haunt the painting. A line runs vertically down the picture plane, indicating where two large swathes of material are fastened together. This visible trace of fabrication calls to mind John Berger’s writing on Van Gogh: “He believed that reality could best be approached through work, precisely because reality itself was a form of production.”¹ 

Indeed, O’Donoghue’s affinity for Van Gogh can be seen in Reaper (2024) and Hammering The Earth (2019). In the former, O’Donoghue poses as one of the many agricultural labourers painted by the Dutch artist. Interestingly, in the latter painting, it is O’Donoghue’s son who poses in reference to Van Gogh’s self-portrait, The Painter on the Road to Tarascon (1888). There is a sense that O’Donoghue, as Berger framed it, is attempting to approach a reality through work. The artist is physically locating himself within the landscape of County Mayo. English-born with Irish ancestry, the artist roots himself in this geographical context through the familial lineage of his grandfather and son, and through a direct exertion upon the land. O’Donoghue evokes the words of Walter Benjamin: “He who seeks to approach his own buried past must conduct himself like a man digging.”² This sense of excavation of an identity, a belonging or a reality, is further evoked by the artist’s prolific use of superimposed photographic images. O’Donoghue impresses himself upon the materiality of the photographic image; tracts of oil paint cut through the composition, and visual information is stained, highlighted, obscured, and otherwise produced.

In The Letter (2023), O’Donoghue continues his connection with County Mayo as an ancestral and actual home. An inscription of gold loopy handwriting obscures the imagery of the artist working the land. Typically, the tidy authoritative font of a state or institutional power accompanies our experiences of landscape, rendering places significant to suit different political narratives or agendas. Here, the landscape is indexed by the personal. The handwritten message is unclear; it signifies a bond, its content only illuminated by the accompanying gallery mediation. The text is an extract from a family letter noting that the bad weather has a more significant impact on their environs than World War I. In this way, the land shapes the personhood, just as the subjective dictates the territory. 

The gallery floor is demarcated by the only large-scale sculpture exhibited here. A Distant Thunder (2016) echoes the formation of a railway track and refers to how artillery at the Battle of the Somme could be heard off the south coast of England. It is interesting to consider how British and European imperialism continues to loom large in the cultural psyche, resonating in ongoing conflicts in various ‘territories’ of the world, including Palestine. The exhibition title bears heavily upon the work. In many ways, ‘territory’ is a word that repels, since it calls to mind cartographic injustices, power relations, borders, war, and necropolitics. According to the accompanying text, O’Donoghue asserts his interest in “how identity is formed through an understanding of our place in the world.” The artist is fundamentally interested in how personal connections to the land can create context to interpret the world at large.

Sarah Long is an artist and writer based in Cork. In 2020, she created The Paper – an online forum for discussing and responding to the Cork art scene. 

@thepapercork

¹ John Berger, ‘The production of the world’, The Sense of Sight: Writings by John Berger (New York: Pantheon,1985) p. 279.

² Walter Benjamin, ‘Excavation and Memory’ in Michael W. Jennings, Howard Eiland, and Gary Smith (eds.) Selected Writings: Volume 2, Part 2, 1931–1934 (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1999) p. 576.