Irish Sculpture of the 2010s

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 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 Greek Onyx Girl (2018) Kevin Francis Gray

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 diaKevin 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

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

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

Ruth E. Lyons, Iontaise/Iontas (Fossil/Wonder), 2019, granite, resin, miscellaneous objects, stainless steel; photograph by Louis Haugh, courtesy of the artist

Scale and Ambition

JANE FOGARTY AND ISABEL NOLAN DISCUSS SOME OF THE TECHNICAL AND CONCEPTUAL ASPECTS OF SCULPTURAL PRACTICE.

Jane Fogarty: Thank you for agreeing to this interview. As you know, after graduating from art college, I worked as your studio assistant for a number of years. This is a wonderful opportunity for me to more specifically discuss with you approaches to art, and sculpture in particular. Your sculptures often feel as if they are on the brink of collapse; yet they are created using industrial materials such as welded metals, modroc, glass and jesmonite. Frequently you finish the work with fabric or pastel colours which have the effect of softening the overall appearance. They are beautiful objects. What drives these aesthetic choices?

Isabel Nolan: Thanks to you also, Jane. Something that probably cuts across all of the work is that I like it to look and feel handmade – with visible brushstrokes, stitching, joints and so forth. When I’m trying to figure out how to make certain forms or images happen, special materials or technical ingenuity doesn’t appeal to me much, so works usually hover in the middle of a spectrum that has high finish at one end and found objects or ready-mades at the other. There is something about the tension of a thing that clearly is made as an artwork but is also trying to belong to the world in an ordinary way that I like a great deal. I suspect that is where the materials and the softening come in. Colour is seductive and transformative, and I think it changes the attitude, even the speed, of a work, whether it pops or withdraws. I want works to be available and pulling away, wrong and generous. In big picture terms, in the world at large, most things feel only temporarily coherent. The meaning or existence of anything is always on the verge of collapse. I want that mixture of familiarity and imminent disintegration to permeate the work.

JF: I’m thinking specifically of Turning Point (2010) in Dublin Airport T2 – when conceiving of this sculpture, how influential was the site on its scale?

IN: I think both the brief and the location required that scale. I had to push for the central location because I wanted the work to be in the midst of things, visibly if not actually ‘in the way’. It is, or certainly was at the time, the only non-functional thing in the airport and I wanted it to assert its purely aesthetic role, so it needed to be large, but not domineering. The colour changed during the realisation – originally it was to be a kind of odd lilac colour, but I realised it would disappear into the colour scheme of the terminal. In thinking about how you work with colour: on the one hand, you use pre-made coloured tissue papers to make the sculptural works, and on the other, you carefully mix egg tempera to paint with – I’m wondering where the control lies? It seems there is a nice tension between the precision and relinquishment of choice at play...

JF: Yes, I always set parameters when I begin making my work. The predetermined colour from tissue paper used in the sculptures was a way of having the form and surface continuous; the colour did not sit on top of a support – it was embedded within it. This resulted in sculptures with a friendly, pastel colour palette. I have relinquished control of the end result; a paradigm is established and must be followed through. For the egg tempera paintings, I create a very specific palette derived from colour swatches of the sculptures. The control is there, but in another way. This approach helps me when working in a wholly abstract way; it determines the framework which the artworks function in. Your work straddles figuration and abstraction. At what point do you determine which approach is most appropriate for an idea or new piece of work? a work might be doing, how it comports itself or occupies space is more interesting to me than deciding whether a form I would like to exist – to see in the world – will be either abstract or figurative. I’m not at all sure I would know how to designate a lot of my works as one or the other – I tend to think in terms of actions. Something might be opening up, or shutting in on itself, breaking apart or coalescing. Likewise, work that stays slippery within conventions or subverts them quietly is the most interesting to me. No matter what approach you settle on, people generally want to find a reference for the work or make an analogy out of it... “It’s like a... it reminds me... it’s about...”

JF: That’s an interesting point; I think we strive to apply language and terms of reference to things or artworks. Really the terms abstraction and figuration are all about language. Do we have a word to describe what’s in front of us? I like the idea of work staying slippery within conventions. Finally, I was wondering, as we face into the new decade, what do you think is the potential for sculpture in Ireland?

IN: Bloody hell. That’s a tough question. Across every generation, there are a lot of terrific artists in and from Ireland making sculptural work – so in that sense, the potential is vast. I would love to see new studios open here: huge, adaptable spaces that could accommodate the production of very ambitious, large-scale projects. I’ve little interest in spectacle for the sake of it, but we are much too used to working in small rooms. Large studios would dramatically shift the capacities of artists here to work to their full potential. It would be very exciting to see what artists could do with superb facilities. And apart from the aesthetic/intellectual/social potential, there is a secondary sense that resource-rich artists can more easily garner curatorial (and commercial) attention that is harder to snag when you are working on three pieces simultaneously, rather than eleven or thirty. In the long term though, the appetite for that kind of work, or those ways of working look potentially untenable, or perhaps I mean increasingly inappropriate... It may be that the future for artistic activity is shaped in material terms by our collective consciousness of climate change. Dennis McNulty once posed a question during a panel discussion I was involved with, querying what it might mean to make sculpture on a small island. I think it’s a weird and interesting question to ponder and I wonder if it will become ever more relevant, as the era of cheap air travel possibly draws to a close. Is this a question that might inform your own work in any way, or more broadly, what you see as the potential for sculptural work in Ireland?

Jane Fogarty, sm no.10(s), 2019, paper, crepe paper, glue, jesmonite, pigment, installation view, ‘slow motion’, MART Gallery; photograph by Stephen Maybury, courtesy the artist

JF: I hadn’t considered the consequences of island living in relation to a sculptural practice until recently. Transporting objects abroad is costly and not environmentally friendly but I have similar concerns when producing objects full stop. I try and keep an eye towards an environmentally sound way of working but ultimately, I am adding more things to the world. Conversely, I don’t want to live in a world where certain kinds of art are no longer produced. Maybe these questions will shape the art of future generations and drive them towards new technologies and cross-disciplinary ways of working, while becoming ever more environmentally, politically and socially engaged. This may negate the need for mega-studios in Ireland, but I wonder if it would hamper our artistic potential and international presence? It will be interesting to see how it unfolds anyway.

Isabel Nolan’s work includes sculpture, textiles, paintings, drawings, photography and writing.

Critique The Visual Artists' News Sheet

Edition 49: March – April 2020

Daphne Wright ‘A quiet mutiny’ Crawford Art Gallery, Cork 15 November 2019 – 16 February 2020 ‘Past/ures’ The Library Project, Dublin 17 – 31 January 2020

Daphne Wright, ‘A quiet mutiny’, installation view, Crawford Art Gallery, Cork; photograph by Jed Niezgoda; courtesy of Crawford Art Gallery

‘A QUIET MUTINY’ by Daphne Wright is a sculptural exhibition, showcasing the artist’s skills, techniques and competencies across the materials of clay and film. The exhibition is dominated by over 30 pieces of sculpture, made from unfired clay – the epitome of a hands-on material. In order to sculpt with clay, the artist has to touch and bring close this flexible material during the process of making. Such gestures chime with the ‘humanist’ themes that are present in the exhibition, signified in large part by the clay sculptures on display, depicting an assortment of domestic objects. A fridge door, Zimmer frame, shopping trolley, clothes-horse, and rug – all of these objects surround us at different stages of life, from infant, to child, to adult and into our elder years. The sculptural depends on the forming and placing of an object, so that it stands out from the ordinary stream of our world. Making works emerge from the reservoir of the domestic world, as Wright does, plays with the limits of the sculptural.

On the back wall of the ground-floor gallery, there are 18 pieces lined-up – six upon each of the three shelves. These pieces are more like masses of material than fully formed objects – nothing identifiable, but familiar and relatable nonetheless. Some look remarkably like ginger roots in their rhizomatic form, others more like half-alien bodies. They are at the stage where forming is still taking place. Similarly, there is a strange-yet-familiar quality to the video piece, Song of Songs (2019). This work features an assemblage of two humans – a middle-aged man and a more senior woman – facing the camera, her raised hands held open by his, both connected as one. They engage in a performance that seems to be improvised in the moment of recording. She chews, he hums, he covers her eyes with his right hand and she stops chewing, sounds and gestures that allude to the warming up exercises of actors and singers. Splutters of enigmatic dialogue are emitted: “Excuse Me! … Excuse Me! … Feeds itself! Nay, nay, nay breathes itself! Nay, nay, nay.… Monster.” I’m tempted to say there is something Cthulhuesque being signified, but the characters do not emit a sinister aura. Wright has referred to her films as ‘notebooks’; as storage spaces for ideas relating to her sculptures. The video thus raises the interesting question of what is sculptural in film. If we take it that one is based on making objects and the other on movement, then here the positioning of the actors bears the clear mark of sculptural thought, exhibiting an understanding of the affects released by specific distancing and dimensions. They kneel but are framed to confuse the viewer’s sense of how they are placed.

Song of Songs also stood out in contrast to the exhibition’s uniform colour palette, dominated by the cool, chalky-grey tones of unfired clay. In Wright’s second video piece, Is everything okay? (2019), an old man robotically recites phrases from the worlds of business and health care. The application of face paint depicts the man as a lion, making him resemble a speaking sculpture. The face paint’s faded quality underlines the forlorn quality of the film. In fact, it should be noted that muted colour is used across all media in this show. In the eight watercolours of the ‘Little Sad Face’ series and in the clay plates, colour is deployed so faintly as to give the impression of fading away, hence adding pathos.

Many of the sculptures play with the fragility of structure. The pencil-thin frame of Shopping Trolley (2019) expresses this structure-essence-fragility motif. When light shines on it from behind, its frame seems doubly threadlike and insubstantial. Another piece, a sculpted cat on a pedestal, was so fragile and precariously set in place that it had been broken by the time I made my first visit to the gallery. It was returned when I next visited, but I couldn’t help think how the absence of this sculpture somehow underlined the compositional qualities of the collective works.

The large sunflower sculptures that form the bulk of publicity material for the show are towering examples of both the aesthetic and human themes that inform the exhibition. They are lanky yet stable, potted in very ordinary buckets, their pathos is that of the colourful and lively, gone droopy and drained of colour. These flowers cannot be separated from art historical references to Van Gogh. But Wright’s take on the sunflowers – as with her take on all the objects in the exhibition – draws our attention to the specificity of sculpture’s affects. John Thompson is an artist, art writer and researcher whose interests are conceptual art, politics and materialist philosophy. He is also a co-curator of the Guesthouse Project, Cork. ‘PAST/URES’ AT THE Library Project, Dublin, opened during the same week that over 400 farmers from all over Ireland reluctantly deserted their farms and descended on Dublin’s Merrion Square in their tractors to demand a new deal with the government and a fair increase in price for their beef. These notions of abandonment and defying the odds resonate throughout all of the offerings in ‘Past/ures’, which was curated by Leah Corbett, the recipient of the Black Church Print Studio’s Emerging Curator Award 2019.

Caitríona Leahy’s prints, Monument to Memory I & II (2011), recontextualise the familiar by extracting abandoned handball alleys from their environmental surroundings and depicting them instead as mysterious monolithic structures, floating in a timeless realm, the echoic architecture accentuated in a crisp monochromatic muteness. In our contemporary collective consciousness, these structures may now be viewed as naive as any folly, dormant of love and players, yet through Leahy’s intentions these redundant structures take on an almost spiritual monumentalism. She excavates a series of ambiguous tensions that swing between memory, temporality and utilitarian concerns around our collective occupation of architecture.

A block of salted beeswax rests on a folded rug atop of a rusting galvanised metal stand. Katie Watchorn’s forlorn sculptural work, A Calf Remembered (2018), speaks of dependency and considers the shared intimacy of an animal’s narrative in the context of farming. It quietly confronts us with a creed of vulnerability, whilst we encounter what feels like an orphaned entity. The work reads like a poem of three verses. The preserved organic substance nestled upon the domestic, momentarily shielded from the inevitable cyclical agricultural reality. This layering and the sensitive economies of language and form are what we have come to expect from Watchorn’s multifaceted practice.

A cold light convincingly bleeds, framing another galvanised structure in Dorothy Smith’s oil painting, Mathew’s Cow Shed (2009), as she interrogates the contrasting linear interior of the fallow building. On the squelch of the organic floor, lays a mysterious white object, perhaps discarded by the occupants of the composition who have now all but vanished. Smith’s second painting, The Dairy (2009), plays with similar compositional observations, this time a hefty yellow hose trails from the foreground into an open steel door, like an umbilical cord connecting us, the viewer, to the darkened interior. Smith deftly illuminates these momentary stillnesses, lending them a contemplative vigour that roots us deeply in the world she depicts.

Ronan Smyth’s Westwood Jazz No.27 (2019) is a tactile cacophony that smirks with an array of unnatural materials, yet still speaks to organic form. A series of impractical polymer clay vessels and objects adorn a circle cut from an MDF frame, brimming with mossy green fringes, defining a black velvet pit. Smyth evokes a sense of playful futility with this materiality that synergises the labour of the artist and his agricultural environs. There is a creed of campness at play here that is seldom articulated in a rural context, whilst the friction of form confronts palpable generational tensions.

“We carry the weight of the past – the gaze of someone else is always present – another viewer, another father”. Hayley Gault’s text, Things me and my father have in common (2018), is a homage to both her heritage and the resilience that she and her father share in spite of the strangling vice of global capitalism. Gault meditates on the solitary labour of the artistic and farming communities that “replicates that of many other dispersed individuals, working in their own way”. It is an emotive consideration of isolation and togetherness that is reminiscent of Seamus Heaney’s poem, Digging (1966).

‘Past/ures’ is a contemplative window offering us a view of contemporary rural life that brings together a group of artists who are very much immersed in the culture of cultivation. Corbett’s consideration of the fertility of both the Irish soil and the artist’s perspective goes beyond the poetic and the metaphorical. ‘Past/ures’ does not romanticise our agricultural heritage. It speaks of solitude and collectivity, of loss and resilience without ever leaning on nostalgia. It depicts an Irish landscape, without the saturated green pastures of optimism; it problematises the precarity of both artist and farmer as they look upon a shared horizon, and yet press on with the practice and production of hope. Brendan Fox is a writer, curator and visual artist based between Dublin and Rome.

Maria Loboda ‘Hearing Otherworldly Music’ The Model, Sligo 1 December 2019 – 2 February 2020

Sarah Lewtas ‘Dearest, Someone Was Asking for You’ Regional Cultural Centre, Letterkenny 7 – 25 January 2020

Maria Loboda, The Omniabsence, 2019, high fidelity equipment, fake snow; photograph by Daniel Paul McDonald, courtesy of the artist and The Model, Sligo

“SHITE-TALK”, A woman remarked, as she passed me and a group of art students discussing Maria Loboda’s enigmatic exhibition. Loboda has a fondness for ‘verbal sculptures’ and might have appreciated the hewn simplicity of the woman’s curt assessment. 2 We were standing around a stack of silver audio components covered in fake snow. Perhaps it’s a miniature tower block, a student suggested, its inhabitants sealed in ice. It’s as though the sound has been dampened, someone else said; snow-covered things are quiet and soft. Consisting of several cassette decks and amplifiers, the waist-high tower also included a graphic equaliser – an outmoded component from the recent past. Called The Omniabsense (2019), the piece was strikingly reminiscent of Rodney Graham’s Rheinmetall/ Victoria 8 (2003). Also focused on outmoded technologies, Graham’s work stages a stand-off between a 35mm film projector and the images it projects of a snow-covered typewriter. We wanted our own stand-off, but the curt critic wasn’t hanging around.

Suggesting the slatted light and shade of film noir interiors, a wall of grey and white horizontal stripes leads you into the main exhibition area. Once inside, the evocation of film continues with a series of obliquely connected objects and texts, giving the impression of an extended mise-en-scéne. Huge and exotic looking bugs crawl across many of these set pieces (not literally crawling – the bugs were either fake or dead, I wasn’t sure) instilling an entropic, mildly nauseating air. Perhaps the bugs are being curious on our behalf, I thought, feeling their way into the cryptic zones our minds find it difficult to enter.

In dOCUMENTA (13), Loboda moved twenty potted cypress trees through a parkland under the cover of darkness. In last year’s Venice Biennale, she draped lumps of wet clay in shirts and sheets of plastic. Her work tends to remain protean and shifting, changing with each presentation and context, the viewer a protagonist in a game of hide and seek. A group of framed, photographic prints is titled, Sleeping with Gods (2019). Under the cover of blankets, a figure (we see only the hands) holds a book open on an image of a clay pot. Different in each image, the ceramic centrefolds are illuminated by torchlight, lending a surreptitious, slightly forbidden air to the perusal of otherwise innocent looking containers. The idea of containment carries into the central exhibition space, where a black and white painting, The Business Vase (2019), extends across several walls. The painting describes the outline of a curvaceous vase, draped with a man’s tie at various stages of unravelling. The unravelling seemed to figure a transformation of some kind – but of what, and into what, remained stubbornly opaque.

Less opaque, but remaining somewhat impenetrable, A Man Takes Down a Painting while Standing on the Sofa (2019) is a stained glass panel, depicting the action described in the title; a scene bathed in the same striated light found at the exhibition entrance. This large panel covers a window overlooking the gallery café below. From the vantage of the café, the stained glass panel appears like a magic window, at once obscuring what’s inside and inviting you in. The image is fashioned from a moment in Paul Schrader’s American Gigolo (1980). Loboda cites Schrader’s film, and particularly John Bailey’s distinctive cinematography, as an important influence. Bailey’s photography tends to draw attention to its own facture, his knowing, theatrical artificiality chiming with much of Loboda’s work here. 2

The Model’s largest room is left mostly empty and in semi-darkness. A handful of alabaster wall lights, The Chosen (2019) – crawling with the aforementioned bugs – offer a glimmer of illumination. An enormous, stylised painting, Grand Interiors (2018) partially blocks access to the room. Such grand gestures are accompanied by little ones – a discreetly positioned cocktail, Note the Old Fashioned in the Rafters (2019) – adding up to a show that teases while keeping you at a distance. A vinyl wall text, Untitled (2019) cites a passage from a Raymond Chandler novel, “… We make the finest packages in the world, Mr. Marlowe. The stuff inside is mostly junk.” It’s a blunt note to end on. But you get the feeling that Loboda’s work doesn’t really end. It continues to be unwrapped, again and again, prompting speculations and intrigues, devoid of definitive answers.

John Graham is an artist based in Dublin. ‘DEAREST, SOMEONE WAS Asking for You’ is an exhibition by Sarah Lewtas in Gallery 2 and the Atrium Space of Regional Cultural Centre, Letterkenny. The work is conversational and reflective; there is dialogue between artworks themselves and within the trajectory of the artist’s practice – new work references older work and materials from 20 to 30 years ago. This creates an atmosphere of continuity and coherence, while simultaneously making individual artworks difficult to fully reconcile as standalone entities. Everything is intertwined and related; the work is multi-layered in terms of materiality, production and referents. Lewtas often addresses another person (mostly unnamed) in her pieces. In this case, there is a favoured addressee, endearingly referred to as ‘dearest’, with no further information supplied.

The exhibtion was conceived as a site-specific response to Gallery 2. The viewer enters the gallery at an elevated level, accessesing the space below via a ramp. Lewtas saw this as a “sympathetic atmosphere for the components of the installation”. 1 These sculptural elements are intended to communicate an abyss or transitory space. Lewtas’s title for this main installation is ‘Dearest’ and she includes a lengthy subtitle to reflect her primary thoughts on the space: “Abyss, Labyrinth, Mystery, Myth, Revelation, Lost, Found, Time space continuum, Key, Open, Close, Echo, Yoni, Tea cup, Taj Mahal, stuff like that…” She also references ‘Yoni’ from Sanskrit, meaning ‘abode’, ‘source’ or ‘womb’ – the feminine generative power. This subtitle also includes a dialogic between opposites, such as lost/found and open/close. ‘Abyss’ is important, in referencing a deep immeasurable space or cavity, and also linking with the sea. The gallery is an otherwise confined space, yet the artist sees it as much more. The installation consists of a centrally-placed assemblage, a handmade seat created from horse bones (these were found 25 years ago by the artist’s daughter on Magheraroarty Beach), upholstered with velvet and placed on a black pinth.

The ‘abyss’ could be that of the black net canopy, placed above the central sculptural element. There are six concentric circles of black netting and each varies in length. Their edges are weighted with small pebbles sewn into the netting that give the impression of sea forms, particularly jellyfish, further emphasised by the transparency of the netting. The jellyfish could act as a cogent metaphorical counterpart for Lewtas here, as the species can detect stimuli and transmit impulses throughout the nerve net and around a circular nerve ring. Many jellyfish have ocelli – light sensitive organs to detect light and dark. The artist’s placement of the seat, spot-lit on a plinth below the net circles, is interesting; there is an inherent dialogue created between the nets and the plinth object. The activation of the netting in terms of its nerves and light sensitivity strengthens the relationship between these sculptural elements.

On the walls there are a series of plaster reliefs. These feature the face of St Gobnait, the patron saint of bees, each within a hexagonal shape, referencing the cells of a beehive. On one wall there is a linear sequence of reliefs and opposite there is a configuartion of nineteen reliefs, arranged to reflect the structure of a hive. There is a final solitary relief visible on the wall as the viewer enters the space. There is a general ambience of light and dark in this gallery. The installation has a reflective, almost spirtual dimension; the abyss referred to by the artist might be the space of the imagination, entered when viewing this sculptural construct.

The final element is a series of eight drawings that the artist has entitled ‘Epigynes’, featuring the external genital structure of a female spider. These were previously exhibited in 2002 at Context Gallery (now called CCA) in Derry, and are part of Lewtas’s inspiration for her ‘Dearest’ installation. She observes: “I relate to them in different ways, as with many things their strange symmetry gives them a meditative mandala like quality which is what first appealed to me”. 2 Lewtas is an artist who works slowly. Her sculptural installations are often products of an extended period of time, consideration and reflection. This sustained engagement and self-investment by the artist combine to create engaging and thought-provoking scultural realms.

Marianne O’Kane Boal is a writer and curator. She is expert advisor on art for the Ministerial Advisory Group for Architecture and the Built Environment.

Notes

1 Author email interview with the artist, 31 January 2020. 2 Ibid.