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Project Profile
Visual Artists' News Sheet | May – June 2021
Aileen MacKeogh, Birds, 1976 (muslin, wood, stones) Dublin; All featured images courtesy the MacKeogh family.
I FIRST SAW Aileen MacKeogh’s work in 1991 when her exhibition,
After Image CLARE SCOTT OUTLINES ONGOING WORK ON THE AILEEN MACKEOGH PROJECT.
‘House’, came to Garter Lane Arts Centre in Waterford. Aileen’s work was unfamiliar, strange. It blew me away. Aileen herself, when she came to give a talk, had a big impact too. Friendly, open and kind, so different from the anxious artistes I had encountered thus far, she was a breath of fresh air. Many years on, the bones of ‘House’ – the precariousness of the porcelain and steel pieces on elongated skinny-legged ‘chairs’ – echoing in my own practice, I Googled her. I did not find her. Instead, there was an obituary or two, an image of a work in the Arts Council collection and a small picture of her at some opening long ago. Aileen had, for newer generations of artists, all but disappeared. Aileen was not a recluse or an introvert. She was active and engaged – part of a generation that gave us strong female artists like Dorothy Cross, Alice Maher and Kathy Prendergast. Her work, primarily sculptural, was ahead of its time, addressing environmental concerns, materiality and the nature of the art object. Graduating from NCAD in 1976, she went on to study and lecture in America before returning to teach in NCAD. Continuing to exhibit here and abroad, her work was selected for numerous shows. As a director of Arthouse from 1994, she was a part of the energy that revamped Temple Bar, pushed for funding for new media, undeterred when she came under fire from more traditional quarters. She would go on to become the head of IADT from 1997 onward, which she transformed before her early death from breast cancer in 2005 at the age of 52. Ironically, even though she had created the first digital archive of Irish artists’ work at Arthouse, the new media she championed would let her down. Those outside the artworld might argue that perhaps her work was not ‘good enough’ to last; however, the accolades and respect she received during her lifetime beg to differ. Others within the arts might question
