Echo Echo Dance Theatre, Derry-Londonderry
25 May – 15 August 2024
On the Inishowen Peninsula in Donegal, there is a coastal path connecting the towns of Moville and Greencastle. The ‘Shore Walk’ presents a saline, sensory experience, at times only a matter of centimetres from the windswept drama of the Atlantic. The peninsula sits on the western edge of Lough Foyle, sovereignty over which remains in dispute between Ireland and the UK to this day.
This is where I locate myself, within the environments depicted by Sinéad Smyth in a new body of paintings, shown in her recent solo exhibition ‘Land-shape Dreaming’. These paintings are inspired by the landscapes of Inishowen, with colour palettes of churning skies and waters, arranged on the walls of a small, triangular antechamber of the Echo Echo Dance Studios. This in-between space, dotted with exits and entrances to studios and greenrooms, seems appropriate. A landscape – a real landscape – is similarly framed in our minds as a meta-space containing places with names defined by shared psychogeographic relationships.
Sinéad Smyth, Sand dunes and mirrored skies, 2024, oil on canvas; photograph by Des Kemmy, courtesy of the artist and Echo Echo.
Some of the paintings evoke a sense of portraiture, vertically orientated and focused on subjects described with impasto gestures, such as A Temple For Trees or Moonlight Falling and Fairy Thorn. Most canvases are unimposing in scale, including a few postcard-sized images. They are mounted centrally in off-white box-frames with cream mountboards, suggestive of domesticity and decoration; nearly half have little red dot stickers, denoting that they are already earmarked for new owners. In The Company Of Foxgloves is an outlier, with its horizontal canvas mounted vertically off-centre towards the top of the frame, allowing the sky to loom large above.
The exhibition is foregrounded by a sort of autobiographical mythology. Smyth attempts to describe a personal sensory experience of Inishowen, writing: “These are places I’ve spent time alone, gathering ivy, building huts and dams in small streams, crying to myself or laughing out loud.” There is a conceptual tension here between the presentation of artworks as deeply personal, yet framed and ready for sale – aesthetically contained in a way at odds with the awe-inspiring scale of their subject matter.
Cloudscape I, II & III (all 2024) are not landscapes, or even skyscapes, but depict a series of cloud formations that occupy the entire canvas. These clouds are so unmoored from points of reference as to become almost abstracted. At the bottom of each cloud are vertical drippings of paint that suggest rain disgorging onto some unseen surface below. Conversely, in another painting, This Island, rainfall is described with vertical brushstrokes, emphasising the purposeful hand of the artist rather than the viscous properties of the medium.
Sinéad Smyth, Island, 2024, oil on canvas; photograph by Des Kemmy, courtesy of the artist and Echo Echo.
The distant view of rainclouds is a common sight here on the Moville Shore Walk. Stand here long enough, in any season, and you’ll see processions of rain showers pass over the cliffs of Binevenagh Mountain, across the water in County Derry. This perspective draws attention not just to the showers, but to the intervals between them.
We have developed a lexicon for understanding the environment in ways that confirm the biases of our perspectives. The Gaeilge word, Aiteall, refers to a spell of fine weather between rain showers, which betrays a conception of rain as a phenomenon that begins and ends. And yet, the shadowy rhythm of rainfall over Binevenagh speaks to a more protean agency, neither beginning nor ending, but constantly changing.
Kevin Burns is an artist and writer based in Derry.
![Cornelius Browne, Afternoon Watering Can, 2024, oil on board [detail]; photograph by Paula Corcoran, courtesy of the artist.](https://visualartistsireland.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/09/Afternoon-Watering-Can-Cornelius-Browne-1-1-560x420.jpg)