Oonagh Latchford

Oonagh Latchford

THE SMALL BUT very punchy exhibition of paintings that Oonagh Latchford put together for the 2022 Wexford Opera Festival revealed an artist who has a real connection to her medium and her content –an impression strengthened by the modesty and understatement of its delivery.

The exhibition at Studio 4 in Wexford’s Creative Hub was titled ‘SPF 50’ and presented a series of canvases, painted since the Covid-19 lockdowns, that fall into two overarching but closely connected categories. The first group, often painted in sepia tones, refers very loosely to family photographs, snapshots really, with all the intimacy but also the almost haphazard arrangement of people and forms that are a feature of such photographs. This is joined by images of more recent experiences, connected to the first by theme but painted in sizzling hot tones against brilliantly coloured grounds.

The two groups have much in common; they tend to record summer days by the sea and an almost desperate desire, in the more contemporary ones, to hold onto those apparently carefree moments when sunshine, sand, and water blur the boundaries between generations. That desire is all the more acute, when juxtaposed beside the family memories, which are evermore precious as the detail disappears and time fades the colours.

Was childhood ever really as good as this, they seem to ask? Did the sun always shine or is this a trick of our minds? And what about the blurring of the sunburned bodies in the water now? As the title of the show reminds us, we now need protection from the sun in ways that our parents never expected, just as our memories need the artist’s protection to preserve them for us. Latchford’s strategy is to surround each figure group with an aura or halo that separates it from her generally monochrome backgrounds, stripped of narrative detail, so that it is only the sketchy figures and time

itself that are presented.

By contrast, the contemporary figures are clearly outlined, if blurred and unrecognisable, but the forces of water (represented by sparkling blue or aquamarine paint) and heat that forces sun bubbles on each figure or onto our vision, remind us inexorably of the threat of climate change and global warming. Should we really be enjoying this or should we be rushing to firefight? These images are full of allure, but they also remind us of the threat that Dylan Thomas outlined in his poem, Fern Hill (1945), when he imagined dying as he “sang in my chains like the sea.”

Photography is not only a vehicle for providing source material for Latchford; it also has a fundamentally important aesthetic dimension. She has been influenced for many years by Japanese Bokeh photography, which employs the kind of out-offocus background and blurring of form that you get when shooting a subject using a fast lens with a wide aperture. In Latchford’s work this allows her to further separate her subject from its surroundings, making them timeless but, as in baroque painting, forcing them into the viewer’s space, multiplying the drama. One thinks of Caravaggio’s theatrical, spotlight effects, achieved here through a painted camera lens.

Latchford’s climate crisis concerns are reinforced by the data visualisation graphics of heat effects on the environment, climate stripes as they have been called, in the work of the climatologist, Professor Ed Hawkins from the University of Reading. What this adds up to is a body of work that is unmistakably modern, but which carries that same burden of history that made painting so important in the first place.

Catherine Marshall is an art historian, freelance curator, and member of Na Cailleacha. She is co-editor of Irish Art 1920–2020: Perspectives on change (Royal Irish Academy, 2022).

Video still from a conversation between artist Oonagh Latchford and Curator/Art historian Catherine Marshall, 2022, with the support of Wexford County Council and Wexford Arts Centre’s MAKEcurate programme.