Pauline Rowan, ‘Under a Vaulted Sky’
Caline Aoun, ‘When the Invisible Touches the Surface’
11 May – 6 July 2024
Two exhibitions, hosted simultaneously at The Dock, offer different experiences – one emotive, the other tactile – based on explorations of environments and nature itself. Caline Aoun considers states of transformation, and the accumulation or dissipation of energy, while Pauline Rowan focuses her lens on a small community, set in a deconsecrated convent and its partially derelict grounds – slated for demolition at the time of the artist’s research and eventually turned into apartments.
Initiated in 2018, Rowan’s ongoing photographic series, ‘Under a Vaulted Sky’, documents a community in transition, caught between the retreat of a fading theocratic order and a razed future, heralded by a property developer’s bulldozers. Even as change is imminent, it is a place haunted by its complex past, as conveyed by Lift Me (2018), which features a young woman crouched at the base of a statue of the Virgin Mary, caressing its hand. Given the Catholic Church’s historical grip on women’s lives in Ireland, the image induces ambivalence at first. Yet foliage encroaches the ivy-draped statue, suggesting a state of neglect after the Church’s abandonment. While the Trinity of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost has retreated as an ideological force, the gesture of an outstretched hand suggests a nascent spirituality has emerged in the wake of that departure.
Elsewhere, recuperated religious and botanical imagery abound. A woman tends a grotto cleared of statuary. Two women, one veiled, face away from the viewer, framed by foliage. Overripe apples, roses, and trees shot alone at night also recur, lending rich symbolism. Here is a mysterious, even preternatural realm, wholly separate from the larger, profane world; a walled garden, lushly overgrown and inhabited by women, as imparted by tender portraits of women in states of repose or contemplation. Rowan’s mother is posed sitting in a throne-like chair on the altar in an otherwise empty room, wearing a crown of purple hydrangea blossoms. Regal, she radiates the wisdom of her age in a place of traditionally patriarchal power, in contrast with the archival photograph of a young girl, herself as a child, in a communion dress. In this light, the apples refer to a return to paradise, to knowledge lost and recovered.
“A garden is a time capsule,” writes Olivia Laing, “as well as a portal out of time.” The garden is a powerful metaphor for the history of women’s lives in Ireland: once a controlled and enclosed space, it has become wild and even strange, containing new possibilities, even as it is threatened from outside. The fragile ecosystem of the convent is nevertheless a site of mutual support and interconnectedness, where bonds are centred around care and contemplation.
In contrast, Lebanese artist Caline Aoun’s exhibition, ‘When the Invisible Touches the Surface’, draws a tactile response, by representing dynamic environmental exchange. Arranged in the large, bright, airy space of Gallery Two, the presentation is minimalist and even clinical in design and execution. Measuring Entropy consists of two large, framed works that at first glance appear to be paintings; they are sheets of paper, containing the marks of fallen pine needles, captured on silicone from surrounding trees in her studio in the mountains of Beirut. In Relying on the Sun, copper sheets cover the panes of one of the gallery’s large sash windows; the boundaries between inside and outside are dissolved as the copper transforms the panes into conductors of heat from sunlight. The fingerprints of previous visitors are visible across this metallic surface.
Dreaming of Artificial Dew (2024) also plays on the visuality of minimalism. Accompanied by the humming of unseen fridge compressors, three pale, rectangular, monochrome paintings hang on the wall. Viewed up close, their aluminium surfaces glisten with condensation and ice crystals, which gather and drip, occasionally cascading onto the floorboards below, as they interact with and adjust to the room’s temperature. Other mechanisms (including a fan, thermostat, and pipes) are partially concealed to the rear of a custom-built partition wall, which viewers encounter first, upon entering the space. Radiant Data is a copper-clad iPad emitting a subtle heat as live data is streamed. Data is usually thought of as discrete and virtual, but here, the invisible is rendered tangible, prompting reflection on how unseen forces subtly but persistently shape our environments.
Examining our relationship to nature in complementary ways, these two exhibitions use self-contained environments (the garden, the exhibition space as laboratory) to explore the invisible and, in turn, processes of change. Elements in these environments – heat and cold, maps and apples – are active components, intricately connected within a larger system, serving as interfaces between bodies and invisible forces, whether energic or otherworldly. The alchemy of time transforms matter – seasons compel growth, water crystalises on cold surfaces, temperature lifts and drops, a garden decays – shifts that are registered by the body and felt.
Phillina Sun is an American writer based in the Northwest of Ireland.
@phillina.sun
