Visual Artists' News Sheet | Special Issue: March – April 2020
us closer, closer, closer… Placing one’s head through each opening we encounter nine different video works made by the artist between 2007 and 2016. These short films explore the artist’s ongoing concerns with the uncanny, the gothic and the horror of domesticity, being provocative and humorous – characteristics often missing from sculptural practice. For me, the installation functions as the perfect metaphor for contemporary art in Ireland and its shifting positions from the formal, rigid and often conservative approach of fine art education, to the reality that many artists no longer exist within a single discipline. Yes, these are video works, but the artist has transformed them into a single cohesive sculptural intervention that will resonate and influence for many years to come. Eamonn Maxwell Western Flag (Spindletop, Texas) (2017) John Gerrard IN AN ARID landscape, a tall flagpole bears a flag made of
thick black smoke, continuously belching its toxic vapours. Commissioned by Channel 4 to mark Earth Day in 2017, Gerrard’s work is an entirely digital creation, built as a virtual simulation and recreated using sophisticated computer game software. The work was informed by meticulous research into the location. Spindletop marks the site of the first significant global oil strike in 1901 – the Lucas Gusher – and the beginning of the petroleum age. Western Flag is a non-durational video work, originally broadcast on Channel 4, and via a large screen in the courtyard at London’s Somerset House, though it was also widely disseminated through social media. Its black smoke flag is a portent of an unresolved future, mourning the exhaustion of natural resources. The work slowly reveals the smoking flag in the round, monumentalising this menacing totem – this warning to humanity. Anne Mullee O. Winston Link (2018) odd wires (2018) sisters (cloche) (2018) tools and rags (2018) Aleana Egan
WHEN THE WORD ‘poetic’ is used to describe an artwork (though I’ve probably employed it myself ), it feels like an evasion, shifting the demand to describe or even to criticise, into a register of dreamy imprecision. So, it may not be helpful to note that sometimes poetry I admire, or the writing about it, brings the work of Aleana Egan to mind. And yet it does. Certain poems are Egan-esque. In 2016, reading a lengthy review, in London Review of Books of Colm Tóibín’s On Elizabeth Bishop, I copied into my notebook multiple phrases or ideas that resonated with my own aesthetic desires. Foremost amongst those notes is a quote from Bishop that flags the immense difficulty of wishing to write justly about works such as Egan’s, works that feel beautifully resistant to one’s petty propensity to narrate work into meaning: “It is annoying to have to keep saying that things are like other things… even though there seems to be no help for it.” One recurring form in Egan’s works is an organic, midsize, linear, wall-mounted sculpture, latterly cast in bronze. They compel and puzzle in equal measure. Resolutely static, they seem yet to have shifted, shrugged or even shimmied into being, making and occupying odd spaces in space. The titles – some examples from 2018 being O. Winston Link, odd wires, sisters (cloche), tools and rags – shed little light on what might be at stake in their making, though the text somehow amplifies the figuration that the abstraction of the works seems to make light of. In part the immense appeal of her work is its utterly convincing illegibility (even when engine parts, blankets or clothing feature). This reads not as an irritating will to obfuscate but rather a paean to the complexity of lived experience and a polite refusal to be dragged into clarity, into being a substitute or an idea of anything other than itself. And magically they feel very much of the world. They are works that are themselves, which is I find quite rare. The reviewer describes Bishop’s poetry as a “blend of stealth and appeal, of patience and need” a fitting match for both Egan’s work and the perfect frame of mind for trying to take it in. Later comes the line, “Bishop said the art she admired most contained three qualities: “Accuracy, spontaneity and mystery.” In my notebook from that year, I drew a Venn dia-
Four Decades of Irish Sculpture
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gram comprised of these three words and beside them (most probably enviously) scrawled “Aleana’s work!” Isabel Nolan Iontaise/Iontas (Fossil/Wonder) (2018) Ruth E. Lyons THERE’S SOMETHING REALLY particular about the idea of a school community. It has a leader who usually sets the culture, and this ripples out through the staff, students and parents whose lives are completely intertwined for an intense but relatively brief period of ‘formative experiences’. Many school’s percent for art commissions work very hard to create a sense of ownership for new works, often through participation; but with every invitation, someone is excluded. The idea of making a work to be enjoyed by generations after that participating school community is gone is challenging, but for me, Ruth E. Lyon’s Iontaise/Iontas (Fossil/Wonder), both acknowledges a specific moment in time, with its time capsule qualities, while also reminding us that we’re all just part of a much longer story, encapsulated in the granite boulders. Commissioned by Kildare and Wicklow ETB and curated by Wicklow Arts Officer Jenny Sherwin and curators Jennie Guy and Eílis Lavelle, this gathering of sculptures, embodying the stories of our ancestors, have been adopted onto the grounds of Coláiste Raithin, with embedded gifts (given by the students) cast in clear resin, which complement the original wonder of the pigments in the stones, but also add their own imprint upon the ecosystem of the stone’s surface. The resulting characters are both impressively epic, gently inviting and filled with wonder, like a big hug just when you need it. And who wouldn’t like that in their school yard? Sheena Barrett
Kevin Francis Gray, Greek Onyx Girl, 2018, carrara marble and onyx on bronze pin and marble & corten steel base, 178 × 98 × 63 cm; © Kevin Francis Gray, courtesy Pace Gallery
Greek Onyx Girl (2018) Kevin Francis Gray Kevin Francis Gray’s Greek Onyx Girl (2018) was first exhibited at Frieze London 2018, marking the début of a new body of work. After the success of his three solo exhibitions in 2017 – in Marketplace Gallery, Northern Ireland; Pace Gallery, New York; and Villa Santo Sospir, France – Gray embraced the task of pushing his work forward, ever challenging the physical limitations of stone. Displayed on an elegant bronze pin and marble base, Greek Onyx Girl gives the illusion of a modern artefact, echoing classical Roman statuary or the lost treasures of Ancient Greece. Those familiar with Gray’s earlier works will recognise the supple manipulation of the stone, particularly in the delicate contours of the lips. However, the incorporation of the striking slab of jade-green onyx, slicing her portrait, shows us the tensions boiling under the veneer of her beauty. There is an emergency; an urgent need to literally destroy and break through his previous bodies of work, as well as those of sculptors from past generations. Joanne Laws
Ruth E. Lyons, Iontaise/Iontas (Fossil/Wonder), 2019, granite, resin, miscellaneous objects, stainless steel; photograph by Louis Haugh, courtesy of the artist
Screw Protruding Tubes (2019) Nero Profondo (2019) Fergus Martin IN ALL OF his work, Fergus Martin is concerned with scale and space and light as reflected in his paintings, photographs and sculptures. The sculptures I am referencing are his most recent, included in the exhibition ‘Then and Now, Fergus Martin’ (15 February – 13 October 2019) at the Irish Museum of Modern Art. The titles are very apt as Martin aims to present the work as it is and his preoccupation with ordinary everyday objects, especially those relating to industrial materials. The material in these sculptures is plastic covered in car paint. The visual response as you approach is one of infinity and up close of serenity and sensuality. The high gloss finish daringly invites touch. The tubes are placed on the wall in such a way as to give a sense of floating and yet the reality is that these are tough objects. They reflect an aspect of our culture that can be seen as hard and unyielding and yet they have a magnificent beauty that can defy description. The artist himself has said “I would like the work to have a real and material presence, to contain my feelings about the weight and density of things, their expansion and contraction, containment and release as well as their fragility and impermanence”. Oliver Dowling
Fergus Martin, Screw Protuding Tubes, 2019, plastic pipe, plastic spacers, carpaint, 15 pipes, each pipe 100 x 7 cm (left). Nero Profondo, plastic pipe, plastic spacers, carpaint, 1 pipe, 100 x 7cm (right); photograph by Ros Kavanagh, courtesy of the artist
