recent solo exhibition at The MAC in Belfast

A Skylight Window

DANNY KELLY PROFILES SUSAN MONTGOMERY’S RECENT EXHIBITION AT MERMAID ARTS CENTRE.

SUSAN MONTGOMERY’S self-titled exhibition at Mermaid Arts Centre in Bray, County Wicklow, crystallises transformations in her recent practice. Geography has been important, and the Mermaid is a felicitous venue for articulating these shifts. Originally from Bray, Montgomery relocated to West Cork twelve years ago, where she started a family. These changed circumstances engendered evolution in her practice. An always-present artistic sensitivity to her surroundings is now employed pragmatically, embracing as essential the conditions in which she makes art. Montgomery reflects that, while her new work isn’t “directly” about parenthood, place or any other subject, “domestic and maternal duties and qualities have influenced the work.” Her practice could be an object lesson in artistic strategising, amid the crowding imperatives of life.

The work shown at Mermaid is perhaps slightly deceptive. Initially, it could read as abstract painting, confined to the formal aesthetics of its materials. However, the artist’s background in socially-engaged practice hints at a crucial and distinctive quality in her current painting – its vivid social contextuality. In 1997 she graduated from IADT with a Higher Diploma in Fine Art, being awarded Distinction. At the graduate show, her installation prompted visitor intervention in character narratives and the activation of sites. In 2015 Montgomery realised ‘The Democratic Trolley’, on residency at Uillinn: West Cork Arts Centre, for the Skibbereen Arts Festival. Tote bags awaited visitors, with stitched-in spending money for the local charity shops, with those purchases later being workshopped. In 2016 Montgomery was invited to curate a space at a beach cafe in West Cork for the summer season. She invited fellow painters, Joanne Boyle and Sarah O’Brien, to contribute to ‘Puffin Project Space’, which aimed to foster engagement with art in the local community. For her own workshop, ‘Space Shapers’, Montgomery helped to assemble dioramas on the walls, exuding papery summer hues.

In Berlin in 1997, researching her thesis on Edward Kienholz, Montgomery acquired a large, red wooden box. It is still circulating through her home, studio and workshops. Her children have interacted with and contributed to its multifarious contents. The ‘Bosca Dearg’ workshops facilitate children in responding to the exhibitions through the boxes’ fluid inventories. These engagements elicit social, architectural and landscape relations from the materials. Montgomery’s exhibition at Mermaid Arts Centre applies this sensibility of objects to her long-standing affinity with landscape painting. The body of work is tactile and makes you wonder about its matrices of physical interaction. There is daylight in the palette – perhaps the outside streaming in. Bric-a-brac forms are glimpsed in fuschia, scarlet and muted yellow. Ubiquitous scraping and slathering, exposed linen and paper, make manifest a studio ecosystem. These environments are not pictured figuratively. They are channelled in the wake of a painting impetus, present in nebulous coalescences, as if framed in a skylight window.

She Wants Songs (2019) is a painting in which lilac and blue-black oil paint seep viscidly on cardboard dun. A dominant area, beige-like cake mix, is scored by a wandering implement. Its breadth, light and density could suggest a mode of immersive nature painting, such as that of J.M.W Turner. Montgomery has previously shown work with such deep and natural atmosphere: ‘Prasad’ at Signal Arts Centre in Bray and ‘The Decisions We Didn’t Make’ at The Talbot Gallery, Dublin, were solo exhibitions in 2008. In 2009 she presented ‘Light falling in dark places’ at Greyfriars Municipal Gallery in Waterford. In contrast, the works at Mermaid are more resistant to illusionistic depth. They have the casual physicality of clutter. Titles like Chalk Whispered Burrow (2019) and Failing at Blackberry Crumble (2018) emphasise a confluence of home, studio and landscape. Montgomery’s oblique manner of painting these influences captures something about their liveness and durationality. Relations to environment are lived; the osmosis never stops. But paint

Susan Montgomery, night milks, 2019, oil on board 61 × 73 cm; all photographs by Paul Tierney, courtesy of the artist

Susan Montgomery, shroud tent, 2019, oil on linen, 51 × 45 cm

ing is not just a descriptive language for delineating life and its objects – its performance, in a broad sense, can be analogous to living, or even closer. Painting, too, has its intimately familiar impedimenta, which are maintained and adjusted, as life progresses. Montgomery’s performed use of her medium seems to channel her lived relations to other environments.

Yet the work is an escape from her fertile surrounds. Her studio is neighbouring to her house, so it is separate, but within the same grounds. As stated by the artist, “a lot of drawing happens in the house, sometimes at the kitchen table, in bed or outside in the rural landscape … I live near the Galley Head Lighthouse, which illuminates the landscape at night. Over the years, this has been the only time when I would have some quiet time for drawing or thought processing.”

The curator of Mermaid Arts Centre, Niamh O’ Donnell, had been familiar with Montgomery’s work for years. They were in regular contact for the 18 months or so, when Mont

Susan Montgomery, prana vayu, from the stubborn vestiges, oil on board, 60 × 76 cm

gomery was working towards the show and O’Donnell visited her studio in January. The writer Sara Baume was another visitor. She Paints, Baume’s text to accompany the exhibition, delicately relates the realms and processes which are so tangible in the work. 1 The exhibition’s intended run was cut short in mid-March, due to the coronavirus crisis. At the time of writing, it is not certain that it will reopen. Montgomery’s ongoing activities include ‘Tellurometer Project’, a remote, experimental correspondence with six other artists. She was shortlisted for the 2020 Beep Painting Prize and will exhibit in its biennial in Swansea this autumn, subject to COVID-19 developments.

Danny Kelly is an artist based in Dublin.