Kerlin Gallery, Dublin
25 October – 7 December 2019

Speaking on Luke Clancy’s ‘Culture File’ on RTÉ Radio 1,  Eoin Mc Hugh offered ‘Loje, Jelo, Laso’ (Red, Yellow, Blue) as straightforwardly phonetic, like all of the words in Toki Pona, a philosophical language invented – believe it or not – to make things easier to understand.¹ McHugh’s titles have previously referenced poetry and psychoanalysis, in an oeuvre rich with allusions to both. Clearly interested in language and how it relates to our perception of art, he complicates things considerably here by choosing titles – our traditional access points – every bit as esoteric as the images themselves. Maybe that’s the point. Approaching an image through familiar language inevitably alters our perception; we see the image overlain with language, we ‘read’ it, and perhaps the artist wants to confound this tendency by presenting us with words we don’t understand. 

Mc Hugh’s previous Kerlin show (‘The Skies Will Be Friendlier Then’ in 2014) was commanded by an ungainly black beast. Unearthed from some despicable ground, the hybrid figure was both threatening and oddly vulnerable. On the walls nearby, two Persian carpets had been stripped of their woven logic and touched-up with a kind of analytic violence. The air in Toki Pona land is less fraught. Paintings and drawings – there are no scary sculptures here – are divided equally between framed and unframed, abstract and figurative, colour and black and white. The anxious air of old has been replaced with an idea of order. 

Seven small oil paintings are equally spaced along the gallery’s north flank. Of similar size and treatment, their colourful surfaces are smooth and blurry, like out of focus night scenes or botanical details too close for the eye. Of course they might be just paint, ordered by intuition and formed into pleasing abstractions. Introducing them, the gallery press release states that: “Research and source material are largely bypassed in favour of experimentation and direct expression…” This might be applied to any number of painting practices, and is difficult to square with Mc Hugh’s previous habits of allusion and metaphor. Of course things change, but their sense of a probing, underlying restlessness suggests these paintings are less about experimentation than a world waiting to be born, hovering on the brink of comprehension.

On the opposite wall, a series of more than 100 black and white notebook drawings are displayed in a row of elegant, white frames.² Hinged so they sit out from the wall, each frame carries two sets of six drawings arranged in neat grids on opposing sides. Made during and after therapy sessions, the pages have a doodling, obsessive quality, with birds, human figures, and other, freakier creatures, all set amidst explosions of marks and lines. Here and there words appear – ‘floating’, ‘glowing’, ‘nerves firing’ – and these, along with the serial format, bring comic books to mind (and zines, á la Raymond Pettibon, for instance). A grander imaginative leap might take us to Goya, and his etching series, ‘Los Caprichos’ (1799). An early comic book of sorts, the most talismanic work from that set, The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters, would feel perfectly at home here. 

Mc Hugh is a gifted draughtsman, adroitly capable of making even the most outlandish scenarios seem, if not exactly natural, at least on the brink of credibility. In a separate, larger drawing, called Orzchis Caldemia, a bald and naked man sleeps beneath an orgy of spiralling figures and abstract shapes. While he sleeps, his erect penis, topped with a miniature version of his own head, appears distinctly awake. This miniature knobhead is, in turn, a platform for a tiny songbird, one of a myriad of avian creatures (some with penises of their own) swirling within the centrifugal image. In an additional twist, the entire scene appears to be emanating from the eye sockets of a ghost-like, human skull. A previous work by Mc Hugh, Little Hans Nightlight (2014), with its light projecting eyes, seems a forerunner to this macabre image. I’m also reminded of John Ashbery’s long poem, Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror, where the poet describes a captive soul, restless to go further than the eyes can see. “But how far can it swim out through the eyes”, he asks, “And still return safely to its nest?”

John Graham is an artist based in Dublin.

Notes
¹ First published in 2001, Toki Pona (‘Good Language’) was invented by Canadian linguist, Sonja Lang.
² The series of drawings is collectively titled ‘io’, from the aUI language, invented by W.J. Weilgart as an aid to psychoanalysis.  

Feature Image: Eoin Mc Hugh, Orzchis caldemia, 2018–2019, acrylic ink and watercolour on paper, 56 × 72.5 cm; courtesy of the artist and Kerlin Gallery.

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Studio 12, Backwater Artists Group, Cork
12 September – 11 October 2019

Unsteadiness is a deliberate quality of Sarah Long’s work, recently exhibited at Studio 12, Backwater Artists Group in Cork. For this exhibition, titled ‘Kingdom’, Long presented five mixed-media works on canvas and one wire-based sculpture. Behind blotches of paint, the canvases lie host to trembling pencil lines, indexing a shakiness of either the hand or ground. Tremors would exit through the utensil either way, traveling between floor and body and, in Long’s show, right to the tip of the art objects themselves; as a viewer nears the glass case containing the wire sculpture, its thin ends quake with each approaching step. 

The encased piece is titled I’ve been silent for so long. The silence the wire proclaims – fugitively, breaking nothing – is indicative of Long’s interest in interfaces between the Irish landscape and the English language, and the literary history that embeds the two. Long’s textual references range from Yeats and other Romantic poets, to contemporary writers like Derek Mahon, whose poem, A Disused Shed in Co. Wexford, supplies two artwork titles in the show. One of these artworks, The world waltzing in its bowl of cloud, uses Arcadian purples and pinks; the titular work, Kingdom, incorporates glitter, indulging the colorful fantasies of the literary and artistic imagination, while simultaneously scratching them out.

Natural hedgerows are Long’s primary subject. The wire sculpture materialises the prickliness of hedgerows, its knotty lines and barbs poking in and out to form a warped honeycomb barrier. Like language, borders are another imposition on landscape. I’ve been silent for so long is Long’s first foray into sculpture, which she labels a ‘3D wire drawing’ – a term insisting on her sculpture practice’s lineage in her painterly background. It suggests lines being coaxed off the surface to intrude on the observers’ space, out in the open. Open space in Long’s paintings is anything but empty, with white canvas overrun by bands of delicate lines. Sometimes the lines coalesce into weeds and flowers, like sketches in a naturalist’s notebook. More often they run freely, filling works like Kingdom in a way that Long has compared to the population density that distinguished Romantic Ireland from counterparts in Scotland, rural England and Wales. With over eight million people in Ireland before the famine, there was simply less vacant territory. 

Working at West Cork Arts Centre last year, on the exhibition ‘Coming Home: Art and the Great Hunger’, Long has incorporated this history into her research, showing us how landscape is ceaselessly written over. Through unsentimental shapes and lines, she renders the callousness – the hardening over – that characterises a landscape withstanding before, during and after famine. Testifying to this endurance, I can recall – Long’s ‘lyric poem’, presented as a wall text and de facto epigraph to the show – speaks to centuries of change witnessed by the natural world. It reads like an account of a long war, in which the lost are given a chance to tell their story beside the living paintings. 

In the third stanza, Long writes about “the last wolf of Ireland’s plangent cry at the hands of the old noll.” The last wild wolf in Ireland is thought to have been killed in 1786 along the Wexford-Carlow border – near, perhaps, the disused shed in Co. Wexford? The wolf had been killing sheep, so the hunter killed the wolf. Hunting reads like a motif in the show, with artworks like Kingdom incorporating the camouflage colours of a hunting blind. Art historians have often integrated British Geographer Jay Appleton’s theory of prospect-refuge¹ into theories of landscape, which suggests that the environment is something we scan from the perspective of both predator and prey. To hunt smartly, predators must empathise with prey; as such, empathy is not a neutral construct. In the context of environmental precarity, Long’s work finds more reciprocity in relationships of entanglement than in relationships of empathy. Unsteady is this new hand. The ship is rocking, down to the tip of each single gluey branch of wire. One footstep and the wire quakes; one stroke and the wolf is gone.

Frani O’Toole is a writer currently based in Cork. 

Notes
¹ See: Jay Appleton, The Experience of Landscape (London: John Wiley and Sons Ltd, 1975).

Feature Image:
Sarah Long, I’ve been silent for so long, 2019, 3D wire drawing, installation view; all images courtesy of the artist and Backwater Artists Group.

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