Highlanes Gallery, Drogheda
25 July 2019 – 29 August 2020

I walked into the Highlanes Gallery to experience Margaret Corcoran’s solo exhibition, ‘A Further Enquiry, Love & Independence’, with a certain excitement, as it was the first gallery I had entered since the imposition of COVID-19 public health restrictions. It felt uncanny to be in cultural space after months of restricted movement. It was not just the physical indicators of difference – the yellow and black public health signage, one-way system, plexiglass barriers, the presence of hand sanitiser, and a mask over my face – that contributed to the defamiliarisation of this otherwise routine experience. I also found myself lingering at each painting longer than usual, with a desire to reach out and touch the work; to trace the lingering gestures of someone else’s presence in the paint, during a time when physical contact was heavily restricted. I stood close up to these works, in an attempt to reconnect with the act of viewing art in the gallery context. Despite some sensations of familiarity, the experience is irrevocably different.

What is striking about the show is the amount of new works on display, with many completed since March 2020. The newer works are watercolours, mostly conveying scenes from Bhutan and Rwanda. The inclusion of these new paintings provides a glimpse into time spent in lockdown. Instead of painting scenes from her locality, Corcoran recreated images from foreign countries she has never visited. The Bhutan paintings were based on an issue of National Geographic from the 1970s, while those of  Rwanda were informed by a friend’s photographs. Corcoran’s distinctive painting technique draws attention to the material qualities of the medium; yet her compositions evoke the visual language of photography. Working with photographs as source material makes painting a process of translation, whereby certain qualities of the photographic image are transposed, creating a dialogue between the two forms of image production. Repetition of imagery is present in various paintings, suggestive of the photographic process. But unlike analogue and digital photography, with the capacity for reproducibility, Corcoran’s paintings behave as diffractions, with the similarity of images pointing to their inherent differences. For example, Rwandan Friends (2016) is a largescale, unframed oil painting, depicting two young men relaxing underneath a small grove of trees. The painting style sits between the gestural and representational, as recognisable figures are obscured with smudges and drips of paint. This scene is presented in two other works in the show, Isaac and the Farmer – Rwanda (2017) and Football Jersey – Rwanda II (May 2020). The former is produced with minimal lines, as marks are conservatively placed along the paper. The latter, created during COVID-19 lockdown, focuses on the figure of the man on the right, wearing a red football jersey. In contrast to the other versions, where emphasis is placed on the landscape, his body fills up most of the image frame – a striking distinction at a time when physical human contact has been limited.

The influence of photography can be also be detected through the composition of paintings, especially The Enquiry Series, where attention is placed on a teenage girl – Corcoran’s daughters – looking at artworks in the National Gallery of Ireland. These paintings are composed like snapshots, conveying the girl’s behaviours as she moves through the galleries. A Framed Viewing – The Earl as Subject – Observing Charles Coote by Joshua Reynolds (2019) presents Corcoran’s younger daughter looking up at Reynolds’s painting of the First Earl of Bellamont, next to an ornate mirror reflecting two figures. The scene evokes Las Meninas by Diego Velázquez, which has been the subject of art historical and philosophical analysis in the structuring of the gaze. However, unlike Veláquez’s work, where the unity of composition comes through the tracing of sight-lines, in Corcoran’s painting there is a disconnect between the gaze of Earl Coote, the gaze of the girl observing the painting, and those of the figures reflected in the mirror. The unifying gaze of A Framed Viewing is the maternal gaze of the artist. Thus, Corocoran’s series encompasses a multifaceted study of the gaze, involving subjects historically excluded from positions of authority in art and philosophy: the mother and her daughter. Corcoran’s gaze as a painter collapses with her maternal gaze through this series, as she presents the roles of mother and artist simultaneously as attuned creator.

EL Putnam is an artist-philosopher living in Westmeath. She lectures in Digital Media at National University of Ireland Galway.
elputnam.com

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Pallas Projects/Studios, Dublin
14 – 29 August  2020

The launch of Barry Mulholland’s solo exhibition, ‘Tossed in The Drink’, at Pallas Projects/Studios – the first in the gallery’s 2020/21 Artist-Initiated Project programme – was postponed due to COVID-19. However, this delay proved to be a fruitful one, with the Belfast-based artist creating a diverse body of new work, inspired by recent events, and making use of a broad range of media and materials. The resulting exhibition succinctly articulates the lived realities of 2020, characterised by anxiety, flux and daily news cycles, that have seen us collectively lurching from one crisis to the next, with barely a pause to process or evaluate.

The exhibition’s title, which references the tossing of Edward Colston’s statue into Bristol Harbour in June, reflects not only Mulholland’s mining of recent events for inspiration but also the witty delivery of his incisive commentary. ‘Tossed in the Drink’ wears its references proudly, in a manner that is frankly refreshing. Among an eclectic cast of actors, we encounter the disembodied heads of Irish politicians – Sinn Féin Leader Mary Lou McDonald, Taoiseach Micheál Martin and Tanaiste Leo Varadkar – projected through acrylic cut-out, to cast faint shadows onto the main gallery wall. The gargoyle-like heads of Boris Johnson and Jacob Rees-Mogg, wearing the institutions of Westminster and St Paul’s Cathedral like hats, also feature in a theatrical installation that is tucked inside the gallery’s smaller room. All five heads were created using laser cutting and etching techniques on plastic and wood, indicative of the ever-encroaching role of technology in art creation. Johnson and Rees-Mogg are viewed by many as the tyrannical architects of Brexit, whilst simultaneously being seen by others as the saviours of Britain. Such binary existence is a key component of populism, which further amplifies the ‘Us Versus Them’ mentality that has come to typify 21st-century politics and electioneering, despite the capacity for societal unity displayed during the early phases of lockdown.

Elsewhere in the exhibition, we encounter conspiracy theories (via ‘Pizzagate’) and internet memes (through depictions of the Ghanaian Pallbearers) – two trashier aspects of digital culture that have gained momentum during the pandemic. And of course, COVID-19 – which has accelerated and laid bare the encroachment of politics in social life – is a central theme. It does not dominate any individual work, but instead is carried through them all to become omnipresent. In the main gallery space, a large wooden frame, edged with multicoloured hazard tape, spans from floor to ceiling. Amebic, virus-shaped blobs float freely through this hollow barrier, highlighting the fallacy of manmade borders in stopping microscopic bacteria. The transient nature of national borders is highlighted in Mulholland’s laser-cut maps of Europe. The dissolving and fluctuating borderlines represent areas of past conflict, reminding us that they did not emerge through peaceful means. They signify areas where political tension continues to rise; areas where the past still needs to be reckoned with, assessed and understood.

Mulholland’s colour palette is vibrant and, at times, garish and intoxicating. This fun and playfulness masks a serious, almost sinister message, offering a perfect analogy for the dark arts of politics, in which optics and spin is everything. Occasionally, the sheer volume of works can feel overwhelming – the accompanying list outlines 20 artworks, with some involving multiple constituent parts. It can be impossible to isolate or critique individual works, just as historic events cannot be reviewed in isolation. Increasingly history is understood through its connections and effects upon other events, people or cultures to provide a more rounded reassessment of established narratives. The artist highlights a recent example with a submerged view of slaver Edward Colston’s statue covering the entire back wall of the gallery.

While Mulholland’s exhibition offers timely commentary, some quieter and more personal moments provide distance to help us reflect on this enormous paradigm shift, taking place during our lifetime. In two small but emotionally packed oil paintings, titled Waiting for Deliveroo and Now, back to looking out the window, we observe and empathise with the loneliness, distance and solitude of lockdown. In these moments, Mulholland is most vulnerable – we all are – and the human connection between artist and viewer feels strongest.

Aidan Kelly Murphy is a writer based in Dublin. He is an Associate Editor for CIRCA Art Magazine and the Arts Editor for The Thin Air.

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Kevin Kavanagh Gallery, Dublin
9 July – 1 August 2020

Gemma Browne’s exhibition, ‘Queen of the Dusk’, comprises 16 small canvasses filled to the brim with frenetic, loudly colourful expressionist painting. Their diminutive size is emphasised by the cool white expanse of the Kevin Kavanagh Gallery. The show consists of a series of staged portraits of women and girls in domestic environments that appear to be set in the early Victorian period. Ornamental decorative arts and fashion from this era provide a rich source of flourishing motifs that Browne maximises in her crowded paintings. Florid baroque patterns are loosely applied to curtains, dresses, wallpaper, furniture and the miniaturised architecture of dollhouses. Every inch of canvas is busy with hastily daubed lines, criss-crosses, diamonds and swirls. Browne’s instinct to obsessively cram the picture plane compresses their narrative content in an unsettling way.

Throughout her career, Browne has explored the impossible standards of beauty imposed on women. In previous work she appropriated the classic magazine head cover image with painted images of doll-like women with exaggerated eyes, cheek bones and petite noses. Her reflex to squash the head into a tiny panel with little or no background margin is continued and expanded in ‘Queen of the Dusk’, resulting in an uneasy sense of confinement. The difference with this work is that the complexity of the images makes each panel appear like a tiny window into a chaotic interior, inhabited by her female subjects. Browne has introduced the location and paraphernalia of women’s lives – the home and bedroom, mirrors, clothes, possessions, style – as evidence of conformity. Embedded in the luminous colour and luscious paint of these scenes are multiple enforced boundaries of consciousness and physicality.

Feeling Lovely Today features the reflection of a young woman (or child?) in an oval mirror placed in front of a window. In the tiny margin a set of open curtains frame a view onto greenery. The subject is trussed into an elaborate dress and wears a floral hat that is casting a purplish shadow over her face. Although Browne’s handling of the paint and colour palette is soft and very comforting, the dominant mood is one of longing and separation. Browne has previously painted with an edgy and sometimes deliberately careless approach to the craft, but in this she achieves a satisfying balance between those tendencies and a more seductive approach.

A Mysterious Dress and One of my Many Acts are two works where the subject’s face is respectively absent or cut out of a mirrored reflection. In both images a baroque framed mirror tightly fills the canvas. In A Mysterious Dress the garment takes on a life of its own and seeks its reflection in the absence of the subject wearing it; while in One of my Many Acts, the subject’s reflection is seen only from the neck down. This playful concealment seems to pass the time for the subject within the mirror, perhaps to the irritation of the viewer, while also seeking relief from being a constant object of desire.

In two other paintings, this spirited disruption vanishes. Meeting the World and She Reigns Supreme have the appearance of formal drawing room portraits. Their features are distilled to emulate the porcelain doll look of the era, modelling the kind of uniformity that ran through Browne’s earlier magazine cover paintings. In this enclosed world they become part of the chattels that surround them, while their elaborate hair, clothes and makeup follow a strict regime that allows for little individual identity. As if to emphasise the sense of imprisonment in these paintings, the title of another portrait, Unbreakable, signals a subtle key-change to strength and warmth, reflected in the subject’s compassionate expression. Additionally, Browne tames her instinct to sabotage good painting by rendering the work with gentle refinement. In contrast to the sadness of Feeling Lovely Today, the woman depicted in Unbreakable stares out of the painting with resolute agency.

Several paintings feature dollhouses or life-size female figures that resemble actual dolls. This infantilisation of femininity in western society is a well-known phenomenon of disempowerment. Browne’s practice has relentlessly tried to disrupt and corrupt the legitimacy of western culture’s blasé acceptance of this. These frantic paintings – some sketchy and bare in sections, others seductive and temperate – seem like a cathartic expression of continuing outrage that does have legitimacy. Browne’s tendency to casually disregard tastefulness is pitched against her demonstrable facility for very fine painting, which makes her work all the more compelling.

Carissa Farrell is a writer and curator based in Dublin.

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Temple Bar Gallery + Studios, Dublin
28 February – 25 April 2020

The world is on pause and we must now stay at home; we are all in a state of suspension. There is a strangeness to the world that we inhabit today, as we sit and wait. With only brief excursions outdoors allowed, the experience of nature can only be snatched in fleeting moments.

As I write this review, Mairead O’hEocha’s exhibition, ‘Tale Ends and Eternal Wakes’ at Temple Bar Gallery + Studios, is closed to the world. It is in its own state of suspension, not unlike the world outside the gallery and the subjects of her paintings, which feature dioramas from Dublin’s Natural History Museum, known as the ‘dead zoo’. Like the museum’s curator, O’hEocha echoes the role of ‘The Keeper’. She has carefully displayed her paintings and drawings in a way not unlike the tableau vivant, where actors pose silently, theatrically lit and in costume. This staging of the work is in keeping with the themes of display, artifice and the representation of nature that she has explored in previous exhibitions, most notably ‘Blackbirds in the Garden of Prisms’ at mother’s tankstation, Dublin, in 2016.

This new show is something of a departure for O’hEocha in terms of medium. Here, she presents drawings for the first time, as well as showing some large-scale paintings (something that she hasn’t done much in the past). The drawings are displayed physically and perhaps symbolically, in opposition to the paintings. In terms of her approach to the medium, the paintings are executed in her usual studied and thoughtfully composed manner, whereas the drawings have the appearance of spontaneity and fluidity in the movement of the ink and brush. The arrangement of the drawings invite the viewer’s eye to move from one to another, from the monkey, to the bat, to the lion, and perhaps to pause on the herons and how the arch of their long graceful necks is fluidly sketched out in one movement of the brush. 

The display of the paintings can be viewed in marked contrast to the drawings. In the paintings, the brush marks disappear into subject matter and the subject matter is enfolded into the material of paint. O’hEocha’s handling of paint, in particular her systematic colour palette, is assured and confident and makes a definite nod to artifice. The colours work from high-key acidic yellows and turquoises – colours not readily found in the natural world and definitely not the colour scheme of the animals and birds characterised. For me, it is her colour choices that distinguish these works utterly as ‘paintings’. They reveal how, in painting, the subject matter takes a secondary place to the execution of the painting itself.

Whilst the overall exhibition is charged with a positive vitality in the use of colour and expressive brushwork, the drawings are also imbued with a sense of melancholia, when considering the subject of animals on display, frozen in time. The press release makes reference to John Berger’s classic essay, ‘Why Look at Animals’ as a touchstone for O’ hEocha.² Berger On Drawing is also worth considering here, in particular his essay, ‘Drawn to That Moment’, in which Berger reflects on the process of drawing his recently deceased father. This has pertinence for O’hEocha’s drawings of dead animals. In the essay, Berger writes:

“As I drew his mouth, his brows, his eyelids, as their specific forms emerged with lines from the whiteness of the paper, I felt the history and the experience which had made them as they were. His life was now as finite as the rectangle of paper on which I was drawing, but within it, in a way infinitely more mysterious than any drawing, his character, his destiny has emerged. I was making a record of his face and his face was already a record of his life. Each drawing then was nothing but the site of a departure.”²

Perhaps I am also prompted by life as it is now, at this moment of writing, when I consider a point that is made in O’hEocha’s press release, regarding public display and artifice, which states: “It would be a shame at this point to ignore that the art gallery, its visitors and its windows facing the busy city street reflect a parallel menagerie.” ³ Indeed, for now the lights are off, the gallery is silent, the streets outside equally so. The public space of the gallery and its exhibition must wait in suspension, like the animals in the dioramas of the dead zoo, to be animated once again by the presence of a visiting public.

Alison Pilkington is an artist based in Dublin. 
alisonpilkington.com

Feature Image: Mairead O’hEocha, ‘Tale Ends and Eternal Wakes’, installation view, Temple Bar Gallery + Studios, 2020; photograph Denis Mortell, courtesy of the artist and mother’s tankstation Dublin | London.

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HILARY MORLEY REVIEWS TULCA FESTIVAL OF VISUAL ARTS 2019.

There is no better place to experience the transformative and disruptive effects of contemporary art than in Galway during November. Visitors wind their way through streets and alleyways, as TULCA Festival of Visual Arts negotiates its way into every available space in the city. In its seventeenth year, this curator-led festival occupied the city’s repurposed buildings and sparsely available galleries, sometimes operating without any heat while rain fell inside, as well as out.

Having performed ambitious interventions through her own artistic practice, which have earned her a brave and disruptive reputation, the appointment of artist Kerry Guinan as curator of TULCA Festival 2019 was an inspired choice. Guinan likes to research and examine the relationships between art, capital and place, in an age of grab-when-you-can capitalism. For TULCA, she explored human manifestations around belief – a particularly pertinent inquiry at a time when beliefs are becoming more polarised. “Those [beliefs] that we thought were laid to rest, are re-emerging”, stated Guinan, during her opening speech. “The inspiration for the festival is my belief that art is effectively ‘magic’ and that it has a profound effect on the world”.¹

Enter ‘TACTICAL MAGIC’ – the theme chosen by Guinan for this year’s festival (which ran from 1–17 November 2019) – featuring 15 artists, four specifically commissioned works and 12 associated events, spread across 14 venues. From a giant site-specific mural, and a socially engaged film project, to a spectacular light installation, all manner of exciting works were waiting to be discovered. The launch party at the Festival Gallery on 1 November was a significant event in itself, as was the date, which coincided with the ancient Celtic festival of Samhain, officially marking the start of winter.  

Discovered and transformed by the Galway International Arts Festival, the miraculously repurposed GPO on Eglinton Street was the latest in a long line of temporary art spaces commandeered by TULCA. At the launch, the limited lighting gave the main venue a dark, cavernous feel; it was as if we had descended into a deep grotto, adorned with mysterious artefacts. The atmosphere was unearthly and magical. During Samhain, the division between earth and the otherworld is at its thinnest, as spirits make their journey from one world to the next. That night I felt I may have made that same journey – two performances on the opening night corroborated this. 

Artist Mark Cullen began by using amplified sound. A haunting chant was the backdrop to a sort of sacred ceremony. Central to this was his Metal Slug Seer, a sculptural entity, made from expandable air-ducting and aluminium – a “member of a biomorphic underclass”, which operated as a “motorised priest” for the future.² It expelled plumes of incense into the space. Subconsciously, I was back at Candlemas in the cold of lent. I adored the mystique, the flames, the miracles – and the survival of church was never in question.

A little later, the gaunt and ghost-like figure of Day Magee appeared from the shadows, beginning an extraordinary performance within his Keening Garden Door – a wooden structure adorned with quartz stones, standing in a mound of dense brown clay. A ritual traditionally assigned to women, Day’s keening recital ushered piercing cries that tore at our very core. Mourning the recent loss of his father, the artist also seemed to be expressing emotions around the discovery of his own sexual identity. It was heart-wrenching and powerfully poignant. 

Given ample space to breath in this impressive space, Diana Copperwhite’s large polychromatic canvasses were a highlight for me at TULCA. Her paintings are an amalgam of abstract shapes, influenced by media, digital technologies and personal memory. She is a master of surface, adding and removing paint at immense speed, using large strokes. Deep within these marks are windows and portals into alternative perceptual realities. They make us think about how we construct images of the world, questioning what is real and what is not. 

Katherine Sanky mirrored some of Copperwhite’s shapes in her intricately engineered sculpture, Desmosome, which stood tall at the back of the gallery. A twisted trunk of a whitethorn tree, its extremities morphed into immaculate copper piping, circled spaghetti-like in the space. I considered how modern engineering processes may not be so removed from those of nature. The form was ‘heart-like’ and I perceived water (a symbol of life) flowing in and out of the lifeless tree. Sanky’s small video piece, entitled Transposon, also challenged our beliefs, regarding reality and digital creation.  

Throughout ‘TACTICAL MAGIC’, Guinan extensively referenced how art allows us to suspend our disbeliefs and reminded us of our understanding around nature, science, the afterlife, our own private rituals, and even how we go about making things. In his video, Slip of the Line, Anri Sala was being mischievous. The film shows a magician disrupting the uniformity of the conveyer-belt system of glassmaking – bending stems of pristine wine glasses using only his mind. I wondered about the glassblowers; their magical powers to create are now utterly lost to a contemporary system of mass production.

Across the festival, I was intrigued by many of the artists’ material references, manifested through the use of natural, found or human-made objects, transformative technologies, or even gestures of immateriality, conjured in the mind. Copper, water, plants and light were commonplace. Helen MacMahon’s immersive light installation, Scintilla, at NUI Gallery, was inspired by the divine spark of human feeling or idea-making. Pinspot lights, trained on a cluster of lead crystals, casted reflections (taking the form of tiny snowflake-like rainbows) upon the walls, floor and ceiling of the darkened room. The work referred to the incendiary potential of human ideas, including ancient attempts to transmute ordinary metals into gold. The effect was other-worldly.

TULCA has delivered a highly successful education programme over many years, and a county schools project in partnership with Galway Public Libraries. I got involved as an intern for the 2014 festival, when I saw the transformative effect of a guided tour given by the T.Ed Co-ordinator.³ I was enraptured by the responses of children and young people to the works and over subsequent years as an Education Officer, their interpretation and exchange of ideas has never ceased to amaze me. The programme is an introduction to contemporary art, incorporating gallery tours, activities and in-school projects, and all types of conversations are sparked through the shared experience of looking together. During the first week of TULCA 2019, I witnessed twenty or so nine-year-olds looking at the sizeable Climate Series mural by the art collective, SUBSET, on the gable of a building near Spanish Arch. Some children thought it looked like a computer game, while it reminded others of a spaceship or a magical island. The greener elements represented nature and new life. The grey ‘shadows’ were telling us how we are all “making the world dirty”. I could not think of a better analogy.

Other festival partnerships resulted in a display of magical artefacts in Galway City Museum and use of the Hall of the Red Earl, 126 Artist-Run Gallery and Engage Art Studios as exhibition spaces. There was a significant programme of events this year, encompassing music, film, performance, curator tours, workshops and an activity space specifically designed for families. Environmental scientist, Nikita Coulter, combined scientific and folk techniques in a unique weather-reading demonstration. We were reminded about our ancestors’ abilities to predict the weather without meteorological aids, as if by magic, reading the clouds, the movement of animals or the direction of the winds. 

Social engagement was celebrated in a newly commissioned film and installation by folklore collector Michael Fortune, entitled The Plants, Flowers and Trees of our People, which recorded “plant-based beliefs” in East Galway. Made in collaboration with a district heritage group near Tuam, this gently paced film shows local people describing the origins and magical powers of plants in their gardens and surrounding landscape. Some talked about their guardianship over certain trees, and why some specimens have survived because of local folklore or connections to past events. As a viewer, I felt the effects of this footage intuitively – that the footsteps of previous generations still resonate, thus influencing our belief systems. 

As I immersed myself in ‘TACTICAL MAGIC’, it was hard not to be convinced by Guinan’s proposition – that we can open ourselves up to the possibility of art as magic, by suspending our disbeliefs and investigating the intangible caverns of the mind. In honing our ability to look, to imagine and to trust the instincts of artists, we can indeed be transported to magical places. 

Hilary Morley is a visual artist, curator and the editor of MAKING.ie. She has worked as an Educational Officer with TULCA Festival of Art for the last five years.

Notes
¹ Extract from opening speech by Kerry Guinan, TULCA Festival Gallery, 1 November 2019.
² ‘TACTICAL MAGIC’ festival catalogue, p.28.
³ T.Ed: TULCA Education Programme was originated by Joanna McGlynn. After six years, she has handed the baton to Dee Deegan, who co-ordinated the 2019 programme.

Feature Image: Helen MacMahon, Scintilla, 2014, light installation, dimensions variable; cut glass crystals, motor, tripod, LED pinspot lights,installation view, NUIG Gallery; photograph by Jonathan Sammon, courtesy TULCA Festival of Visual Arts.

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Rathfarnham Castle, Dublin
14 November – 21 December 2019

Arriving late to view ‘Over Nature’ at Rathfarnham Castle means settling into a very particular viewing condition – namely one of silence. First encountered in this group show (curated by Valeria Ceregini) is an installation by Shane Finan. In an unrestored dining room, a projector casts landscape video footage onto a faint and skeletal painting that spans two large canvases. The projector is controlled by the viewer through a small touchscreen device, upon which a grid of options appears, displaying geometric symbols. Each of these options is linked to a separate video. The painting – a somewhat ghostly transposition of William Turner’s Rye, Sussex (1794-7) – is at times almost buried under the strong fluttering hues of the videos cast onto it. In quieter frames however, its marks become more apparent, and there is a back and forth of pictorial prominence, fluctuating between states of visibility. 

This optical dichotomy is effective at first but soon becomes drawn out. These fluxing visuals repeat without building anything, and unfortunately there is little introduced in the way of textual connection to engage with outside of this mechanic. However, these particulars tell only half of the story. External to the work is the dining room itself, unrestored and engulfed in deep and old silence. The echoes and reverberations that would normally carry in a white cube seem to have been subsumed into these cold bare walls. In this potent silence, the work resonates in some way, but through means outside of its own intervention. 

Continuing on, the viewer enters the Long Gallery where the majority of the works are on display. Again, the space as it exists, independent of any artwork, is powerful. The silent void of the previous derelict space has given way to a restored, yet comparably intimidating, Elizabethan parlour. Embedded into the decorative ceiling are ten paintings by Patrick Touhy, commissioned by the Jesuit Order in 1913, which depict the life of Christ. They peer down onto the exhibited works in an unforgiving manner, imbued – as iconography often is – with a weight through that which is unsaid. 

Louis Haugh presents a visual display of a spruce tree on a monitor, framed centrally and only mildly disturbed by a breeze on an anonymous hilltop. Placed next to the fireplace is Haugh’s second work: a jagged-edged collage of silver gelatine prints that coalesce to depict a scene of dispersed branches and twigs. Meanwhile, paintings by Beata Piekarska-Daly, titled Arras I and Arras II (2019), line the floor and crawl up the far wall. These sprawling linens, saturated with heavy applications of acrylic, are at once inviting but tonally subdued. Shown alongside them is a more measured and similarly decorative effort – this time with oil and gold leaf on canvas. 

Reflecting the prominence of mixed media processes in her work, Kathy Herbert presents several works based on the Dodder River in a stripped-back and straightforward manner. A large drawing of rippling water is draped in front of a window; a process notebook sits on a plinth; a series of small vials containing water samples is displayed on a table, and a linear series of digital photographs capture instances of the river’s flux. Opposite these, the graphite of some smaller river drawings glisten and reflect the November sun. Further up this opposing wall, Mary O’Connor’s abstract canvases attempt to flatten and cool with subtle motions of blue.

Notions of ‘The Anthropocene’ drive the exhibition, and there is an implicit call (as stated in the exhibition press release) for the collective to grasp at “the material formalisation of the possible”. Relative to this end, Herbert, for example, specifically references Félix Guattari’s Three Ecologies as a formative work in her process. This text presents a sensitive case regarding ‘selfhood’, claiming that as we are increasingly reliant on forms of mass signification, we will be continuously and increasingly reduced to a subjectification of passivity and repetition. With art, the sort of narrowed subjectification Guattari is referring to proliferates through the usual tropes we encounter, whether they be material or conceptual. Considering then that as an exhibition ‘Over Nature’ seeks to formalise new possibilities, one would assume these tropes to be subverted, or at least tested, where and when they are devised. Instead, there is little that emerges throughout the show, formally or otherwise, that could be construed as effective when considered in this light. As such, ‘Over Nature’, despite honest efforts, at times falls prey to the sort of passivity it seeks to stage itself against.

Philip Kavanagh is a writer on art based in Dublin.

Feature Image: Guillaume Combal, Ubiquity, 2019, video installation; courtesy of the artist

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Custom House Studios & Gallery, Westport
19 October – 1 December 2019

Any exhibition featuring Camille Souter’s work is going to have immediate visual impact, and her recent retrospective at the Custom House Studios in Westport was no exception. Curated by her biographer, Garrett Cormican, the exhibition featured 24 works, ranging in date from 1955 to 2015, grouped by decade throughout the ground floor gallery. Several paintings – including When the Mist Comes Down (1964), The Musical Clown at Duffy’s Circus (c. 1966–67), My Father’s Garden (c.1970) and My Father’s Greenhouse (c.1970) – engaged with the concept of memory, and were shown alongside work that explored environmental and political issues, all of which confirmed Souter’s artistic status among her peers, and among her viewers. 

The exhibition encompassed five sculptural works by Souter’s late husband, Frank Morris (1928 – 1970), which were a revelation for their quality. Carved from wood, Morris’s sculptures are quietly monumental. Four of the works, abstract in form, were displayed together. The fifth, a figurative work, titled Busheltits, was exhibited on its own in the second room. Well-known in artistic circles during his lifetime, Morris died young and has been somewhat sidelined since. Now fifty years since his death, Morris is a prime candidate for further research, and a larger-scale exhibition of his work.

The central focus of the show is Souter, for whom the figurative, or rather elements from reality, form the initial basis of her work, from which she then creates her highly individual style of abstraction. Influenced by international abstract expressionists, Souter paints on various types of paper (including newsprint) and board, using various combinations of oil paint, printers’ ink, plaka paint and aluminium paint. Harlequin (1955), for example, painted on newsprint, calls to mind the work of Cubist artists, several of whom worked directly onto text or sheets from contemporary newspapers, as a means of commenting on political issues and war. Souter visually comments on war too, evident in Target Aim and Fire (c.1982–84), which at first glance, is an attractive landscape, until the grey aeroplane and the red, poppy-shaped fields emerge. Another example, Desert Shield (c.1992), the title of which references the Gulf War, features a caravan of combat vehicles in formation across the scorched desert. Landscape, particularly that of her home, Achill Island, is a recurring theme for Souter; The Rape of the Achill Quartz Quarry (1992), for instance, demonstrates the artist’s ability to investigate landscape in cross section, and yet it visually criticises the physical destruction and environmental devastation caused by commercialism on the island. So too, and although gaily titled, The Achill Wedding (1989) quietly remonstrates against the number of cars on the island, while Now Find Shannon Airport (1979), painted as if from a bird’s eye view, encourages viewers to question the obliteration of the natural world for the purposes of imposing a modern runway. At the same time, Souter’s sense of humour is evident in a small painting, titled Self-Portrait as a Cod’s Head (1993), in which she plays with ideas of being a ‘cod’ or ‘codding’, an Irish expression for having a laugh, or making a joke. 

Garrett Cormican, and the team at the Custom House Studios, are to be warmly congratulated for the excellence of Souter’s retrospective, installed to celebrate her ninetieth birthday. All of the paintings, with one exception, were on loan from private collections in Ireland. The selection of work was well thought out, and well-grouped. While Cormican’s biography of the artist was available to purchase, a minor gripe was that the handout for the exhibition was disappointing; the images were too small, and the information about the artist and her work was sparse. Souter is one of the most significant artists of her generation. A Saoí of Aosdána, she is widely considered to have made a “sustained contribution to the visual arts in Ireland”, to quote Cormican’s text. In my view, the excellence of the work on show highlights the merits of a far larger, full-scale retrospective, that would situate her 64 years of sustained practice within its national and international abstract expressionist context. As the Custom House Studios exhibition proved, Souter may live far from the perceived artistic centre, but her artistic sensibility merits universal celebration.

Dr Éimear O’Connor HRHA is a curator, art historian and author.
eimearoconnor.ie

Feature Image: Camile Souter & Frank Morris, installation view, Custom House Studios & Gallery; photograph by Conor Mc Keown, courtesy of the artists Custom House Studios & Gallery.

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Rua Red, Tallaght
6 September – 5 October 2019

‘Open Minds’ featured over 70 artworks made in Irish prison education programmes, with the installation at Rua Red furnishing a metaphor for imprisonment. We know nothing of these artists’ lives. They were necessarily anonymous, with artworks attributed not to the artists, but to the institutions that confined them. No context concerning them was available, save for the titles they had given their work. It was rarely clear quite what was on show. Prison Staircase, a spiralling, assiduous pencil drawing from Wheatfield Prison, was typically enigmatic. But a sense of the privileged intimacy of the disclosure prevailed, and the works were recast by this public encounter. 

Across the exhibition, rampant natural themes frequently channelled darkness. Blood of Abel is a pastoral painting made in Midlands Prison. Its stippled impasto of violent, autumnal oil paint struck me before I noticed the title, which relates virtue, vice, punishment and striving. A sizeable contingent of ceramic animals appeared stuck. In forty-odd tiles from Arbour Hill Prison, flora and fauna burgeon outward, recalling the sensual benevolence of Judy Chicago’s The Dinner Party. Yet context petrified them, their symmetrical alignment suggesting some institutional chamber. In three paintings from Cloverhill Prison, tall windows are stifled with thick, milky light. Their similarity could signal derived technical commonality, or simply the facing of shared confinement. Matchstick Wagon with Whittling from Castlerea Prison was installed on a plinth, its doily curtains pulled shut. 

Elsewhere, nature appeared splendid and wild. A ceramic work from Cork Prison, Monet’s Garden on TV, was magnetic, its bevelled screen images the subject in fuzzy saturation. Monet’s footbridge resembles burnt toast; its reflection underneath as red as blood. All over is cadmium yellow, eggshell and ultramarine, with watery plants rendered in insouciant dots and stripes. The painting seemed to suspend a manic recollection of isolation, rushed by a frenetic cultural stream. Impressive animals also came courtesy of Cork Prison. One of several feathered, piebald Gypsy horses veered audaciously in a massive acrylic painting, like one of those cosmic biker images.

The exhibition title recalls the dreary platitude of ‘keeping an open mind’; but it was also invaded by vital purpose, reminding us that we are open and alive to environmental influence. In the crowded installation – where attending to works felt like hauling them out in haste – one also sensed an ongoing defining and nurturing of self. Identities and social relations were examined; pain was explored and experimented with. In Life Inside (a plaster sculpture made in Castlerea), a spectral torso and head of cropped hair were seen from behind, hung from an old-fashioned, curlicued coat hook and disappearing into the wall. Between the shoulder blades is a six-sided, jagged hole – a murky window, like a Magic 8-Ball – in which little specked stars can be discerned. The exhibition curator, artist Brian Maguire, who has previously worked extensively with prisoners, stresses that art “is a means of resistance, albeit a legal one.”¹

‘Open Minds’ relates to the concept of ‘outsider art’ – what art-making looks like, untouched by academic influence – but privilege and welfare marked a more important distinction. It’s not hard to imagine that many of these artists had to go to prison to find conditions conducive to making art. Here they lacked the freedom to enter the gallery, or to even identify themselves. First Impressions, ceramic and wooden sculptures from Priorswood House in Coolock, displaying large fingerprints on bamboo-like tree stumps, offered a thoughtful treatment of this absence. Meanwhile, a greenish ceramic hand from Arbour Hill was scored with brick wall – one of many such allusions to this motif. It looked as though a flattened hand had been used for a template. Although viewers could not know the exclusion and adversity of these artists, the oblique visibility of these experiences was provocative and memorable. A related exhibition of creative arts made by people in custody is currently showing at the Hunt Museum, Limerick, until 24 November. 

Danny Kelly is an artist based in Dublin.

Notes
¹ Hadrien Laroche, ‘About the Experience of Violence and Violence as the Destruction of Experience’, Open Minds, Rua Red, 2019. 

Feature Image:
Castlerea Prison, For you to be here, installation view, ‘Open Minds’, Rua Red; photograph by Tommy Clancy.

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Mermaid Arts Centre, Wicklow
13 September – 26 October 2019

Joanne Boyle’s solo exhibition at Mermaid Arts Centre can be viewed as a testing ground for her ideas around material processes and display. The exhibition comprises oil paintings and glazed porcelain pieces, reflecting Boyle’s attempts to “articulate the non-everyday occurrence alongside the everyday”. The idea of an exhibition as an installation is also evident. As Boris Groys observed in his essay ‘Politics of Installation’: “Today, there is no longer any ‘ontological’ difference between making art and displaying art. In the context of contemporary art, to make art is to show things as art.”¹

The exhibition articulates a preoccupation with the concept of ‘the object’, emphasising that paintings are also objects. When they are named and framed as ‘paintings’, they are read differently, in contrast to being seen as objects. Process emerges as the connecting thread between Boyle’s paintings and ceramic objects, while her use of materials is playful and process driven. In the ceramic pieces, gravity is allowed to do its work. The clay slumps and falls into place with little intervention. In the paintings, a muted palette emerges through the mixing of wet into wet paint. It all appears to happen very spontaneously. The quick handling of paint on canvas surfaces allows form to emerge. There are suggestions of mounds or hills – simple shapes that could allude to landscape. This motif is picked up strongly in the large painting, High Winged Woman, which shifts between a sheaf of hay or a small mountain. 

A series of delicate porcelain wands are placed on a table in front of this painting. The wands could be individual sheaves of hay, or perhaps a set of paintbrushes, saturated in the colours just used on the canvas. There is a nice open-endedness to the imagery here, while the connection of the ideas moving between painting and sculpture is clear. Boyle’s ceramic wands remind me of Manet’s 1880 painting of asparagus, whose form and quality continues to captivate viewers. His focus upon small areas, with a few deft brushstrokes, directs our focus as viewers to experience its power. There is similar precision of focus in Boyle’s ceramic wands, through her use of colour, as well as the simple modelling of form and display. 

The installation of the work also alludes to improvisation: one painting is tacked to a board and leans against a wall; another canvas is hung from the ceiling; while the ceramics are displayed as a series of test pieces, just out of the kiln. Each artwork is at play within the environment of the exhibition, rather than being enclosed in worlds of their own. The materiality of the ceramic pieces leads the viewer back to the paintings, to wonder at this relationship. The nature of the respective materials is explored, as well as the nature of form itself. On the whole, the exhibition appears to be testing out ideas ‘on the fly’; emerging possibilities and connections are invited through the display of the work. 

This juxtaposition of objects and materials, paintings and ceramics, make me consider the intrinsic nature of each. Medium specificity has started to lose its prevalence in contemporary critical debates surrounding art practice; arguably, it regularly goes in and out of fashion. However, the intrinsic qualities that both mediums inhabit shouldn’t be overlooked. The power of individual mediums is in the ideas brought to them by artists – they don’t necessarily need to be in dialogue with one other. Another recent trend in exhibition making is to frame painting as an auxiliary ‘player’, suggesting that painting is not enough to be considered on its own merit. Some argue that painting exists as part of a network of ideas and systems. However, it is still worth considering the intrinsic power of a medium, because to focus on a material or medium is to realise its infinite creative potential. 

Alison Pilkington is an artist based in Dublin who completed a practice-based PhD in NCAD in 2015. Her work is featured in the forthcoming exhibition, ‘Mountain Size’, which takes place at the Pineapple Black Gallery, Middlesbrough (1 – 30 November).

Notes
¹ Boris Groys, ‘Politics of Installation’, e-flux Journal #02, January 2009. 

Feature Image:
Joanne Boyle, Initiation, oil on linen, 60 × 60 cm; courtesy of the artist

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Olivier Cornet Gallery, Dublin
12 September – 6 October 2019

Claire Halpin’s exhibition, ‘Raw War’, is a mystical interpretation of the horror of war. Using miniature retablo-style compositions, Halpin captures the human instinct to contain tragedy within defined boundaries of understanding. In one series, small square panels feature sharply edged circular paintings of disaster on the Mediterranean, as refugees crowd vessels in search of safety. Halpin pins these events within a telescopic lens, referencing surveillance by the military, governments and news media. With startling clarity and expression, she skilfully renders the confusion of people clambering into sinking boats or attempting to swim to other vessels out of the frame, using the tiniest of textured brushstrokes. Halpin exercises restraint with scale to respectfully avoid spectacle; the obscured horizons and glassy blackness of the water powerfully contextualises the hopelessness and terror unfolding. This infinite depth of sea and sky is punctuated with high-viz life jackets, sea splash and confusion. Despite their miniature execution, the intensity of these exquisite paintings expands their impact exponentially.  

A strange set of paintings are made on panels in the form of pie-shaped segments from a circle. They are lined up in a row of six, each one inset with a painting of a young boy seated on a cushioned or carpeted floor against a curtained backdrop in an alarming jihadi tableau. Some even have weapons. But this is softened by the colourful and patterned staging of ethnic textiles and gentle expressions of the boys. These works have an overt message of the vile normalcy of conflict and its exploitation of children. Such horrors are hidden in plain sight within Halpin’s illustrative and folksy depictions of home, family and cultural pride. She avoids sensation by embedding her message into layers of visual subtext.

Included in the exhibition are slightly larger panels in which Halpin brings into focus isolated and distant structures again in miniature scale, set against amorphous apocalyptic environments. One of these, Seed Vault presents a barely visible outline of the Svalbard Global Seed Vault – AKA the ‘Doomsday Vault’ – emerging out of a cold and misty arctic fog. Halpin could be referencing the first withdrawal of seed deposits in 2015, only two years after having been deposited by the Syrian authorities, an unintended direct consequence of four years of conflict. 

Other works present Halpin’s stated interest in clandestine and drone surveillance, and unmanned warfare. In Farewell Palmyra a Roman theatre rises up on delicate stilts out of the shadow of a drone, while floodlights sparkle and 4 July bunting streams across the structure. Another boat loaded with desperate souls sits within this festive milieu. Bedford Bedouin morphs a Bedouin tent into a festival marquee, erected on a manicured green lawn that levitates in the night sky as fire and smoke of explosions billow around it. Pop Up Palmyra is another nocturnal desert scene, with discarded military vehicles scattered across the darkened terrain. Light from an unknown source illuminates plumes of dust, as a HIAB crane reinstates ancient ruins destroyed by ISIS. 

All three sets of paintings – the circular, pie-shaped and rectangular panels – place the viewer in a covert and safe surveillance point, some distance away. Even though ‘Raw War’ is a collection of paintings driven by biblical-scale narratives, and Halpin’s treatment is that of a detached voyeur, she achieves an intimate one-to-one encounter with human suffering by virtue of sensitive composition, sympathetic figuration and sublimely rendered glazed depths of sea and sky.  

These play homage to the dominant centrepiece of the show, Syrial Serial – a Guernica-style vista, executed across a much larger, elongated landscape panel. Halpin dramatically changes key with an impasto collage of ravaged and burning settlements; crashed public transport vehicles; invading fleets of ancient galleys and modern destroyers; fallen fortifications; a grid of freshly dug graves; market stall displays of missiles; military parades; and tent cities – all laid out across a rolling mountain, sea and desert landscape. Every inch of the painting is loaded with references to war and conflict, from ancient to modern times. In some ways, the other works tell of the ‘apocalypse now’ – visible across our TV screens and newspapers, but in Syrial Serial the phrase could be ‘apocalypse before, now and forever’. Halpin has produced a very fine exhibition that distils and compresses an enormous weight of ideas through the relatively humble act of painting and picture-making. 

Carissa Farrell is a writer and curator based in Dublin. 

Feature Image:
Claire Halpin, Raft VIII (Van de Velde), 2019, oil on gesso on board; courtesy the artist and Olivier Cornet Gallery

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