Critique

Fiona Kelly, No Such Thing as Away #3 (Dug, formed, fired, used, discarded) 2023, sea eroded brick, copper etching & aquatint, bell jar, reconstituted concrete, bitumen screen print, salvaged shipping crate, 22 x 22 x 32 cm; photograph by Kate-Bowe O’Brien, courtesy of the artist.

John Beattie, ‘Reconstructing Mondrian’

Hugh Lane Gallery

1 February – 8 August 2023

John Beattie, Reconstructing Mondrian 2013-2022, 4K colour video projection with surround sound, 60 mins, produced and directed by John Beattie; image © and courtesy John Beattie

John Beattie, Black (Depicting oil paint on canvas) 2022, large format colour negative film, hand printed on darkroom C-Type colour paper, framed with museum glass, 100 x 100 cm; image © and courtesy the artist.

MAKING A NOTE of the exhibition title, I wrote “Reconstructing Modernism”, before quickly realising my error. ‘Mondrian’ and ‘Modernism’ may be synonymous, but until I saw Mondrian’s paintings for myself, I mostly associated them with advertising. The painter’s primary colours and no-nonsense straight lines sold everything once, except for themselves, of course, which, untethered from their canvas supports, meant precisely nothing. In filming a reconstruction of the artist’s Paris studio (circa 1921 to 1936), John Beattie reminds us of the paintings made there, but also of everything that has happened since – our fables of reconstruction, our endless era of aftermath.

“Who’s afraid of red, yellow and blue”, Barnett Newman famously asked, riffing on Edward Albee, while confronting his audience with acres of flat colour. “John Beattie is”, I might flippantly answer, on the evidence of the five large photographic prints included in his pristine show. Respectively titled, Black, White, Red, Yellow and Blue (all 2022), these hand-printed photographs, covering the spectrum from pale to dark, are resolutely grey. Taking a closer look at the labelling, one learns that the flat, square shapes (all are subtitled “Depicting oil paint on canvas”) of Black and White have been shot on colour film, while the series named for the primaries have been shot on monochrome. “What you see is what you see” Frank Stella said, but it’s not always as simple as that. Newman and Stella both owe a debt to Mondrian, but then, we all do.

Primarily a utility, artists’ studios can also have mythic dimensions, especially when transformed into a repository. In his writing about archives, Achille Mbembe suggests that the reassembling of remains can be a kind of miracle, “bringing the dead back to life by reintegrating them into the cycle of time.”1 This resurrection comes at a price, though, as the spectre (as rem-

nant of death) is removed from their own lifetime and put into the service of history. However sensitive and respectful – and Beattie is both – when artists make work about other work, a paradox inevitably ensues; the original is highlighted, but only to be overwritten.

The heart of the exhibition is an hour-long film showing the arrival, construction, and eventual deconstruction of a life-sized version of Mondrian’s former workplace. The film is beautifully shot and edited – put together like the flat-pack version of the building itself – and has the unhurried atmosphere of real time. The surround sound makes you feel like you’re in the space of the reconstruction, sharing in the verbal exchanges, the thumps and whizzes of assembly. There is an emphasis on measurement, as we see a tape drawn across the empty floor and the careful placement of hand-drawn marks. By circumstance, we are invited to think about the reconstructed Francis Bacon studio, permanently housed in the Hugh Lane. Bacon must be smiling at that forensic accounting of his trashy den, its catalogue of dust, but like Mondrian, he knew the surfaces that counted.

On the hangar-like film set and site of the reconstruction, a stocky figure, bald and sporting a bluestripped Breton top, is in charge. He looks strikingly like Pablo Picasso. Is this merely a coincidence? The imposter is Frans Postma, Dutch architect and founding director of the STAM foundation.2 Calm and methodical, he orchestrates the building process – one inevitably compared to the compositional process of Mondrian – and offers final touches like the delicate placement of the artist’s pipe and spectacles. We see him dressed differently later on, but I couldn’t shake the impression that Pablo was roaming about in Piet’s careful house.

Mondrian, in his own way, was also an architect, but

his best buildings were entirely facade. In his actual atelier, the living, breathing Mondrian was fastidious, practicing the fox-trot in the mirror before getting down to work in his neat, white coat. In the glow of Beattie’s film, I reminisced about seeing his paintings for the first time in New York. I was extremely jet lagged, but it was an afternoon of revelation upon revelation. You have to look carefully, but when you do, you see that his fragile, human geometry is more real than any reconstruction can convey. You have to look hard to see, and John Beattie makes a place for that.

John Graham is an artist based in Dublin

1 Achille Mbembe, ‘The Power of the Archive and its Limits’, in Carolyn Hamilton et al (eds), Refiguring the Archive (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 2002) p. 25.

2 STichting Reconstructie Atelier Mondriaan (STAM).

Anthony Luvera, ‘She / Her / Hers / Herself’

Belfast Exposed

2 February – 18 March 2023

IN LATE 2017, socially engaged artist Anthony Luvera presented ‘Let Us Eat Cake’ at Belfast Exposed – an exhibition of photographs created by the artist and LGBTQ+ people living across Northern Ireland, which I reviewed at the time. The artist has returned to the gallery this year with ‘She / Her / Hers / Herself’, presenting more in-depth work on Sarah Wilson, one of the participants in Luvera’s previous series.

Luvera’s self-directed portraits of queer people in 2017, against the backdrop of the bigotry of the Democratic Unionist Party’s enduring anti LGBTQ+ stance, were intimate yet provocative. This newer body of work continues the humanised provocation of simply existing as a trans person in Northern Ireland, and is a culmination of the continued collaboration between Luvera and Sarah. This exhibition is timely; mainstream news outlets are stoking a moral panic in which trans people are the cultural collateral in the right’s attempt to put a wedge in feminist and queer communities. Consequently, this exploration of Sarah’s experience as she navigates her evolving identity, has become even more political.

Griselda Pollock reminds us that we cannot remove our identities from our context: “all socialised subjects participate in socially constructed positions that are endlessly undone by the fundamentally fractured and equivocal nature of subjectivity and sexuality themselves.”1 Pollock offers that the cultural subject is in constant process, and that psychoanalysis is embedded in our understanding of culture and ourselves. Artists often use that knowledge to play with ideas of self-image and desire as a woman.

On the surface, Luvera’s photographs chart Sarah’s new life, her personal milestones, her self-awareness, her careful joy in her new way of being, her new job, and her evolution as a beautician. Photographs capture the visible surface and use a range of approaches to hint at something below it. Luvera’s approach is dialogical, continually referencing the construction of the image. He often features himself in mirrors, reflections, and backgrounds in deliberative portraits, breaking the fourth wall as a way of negotiating authenticity. The inclusion of images made with Luvera and phone selfies is another strategy the photographer uses to corral deeper reading.

The Luvera-assisted videos are reminiscent of ubiquitous YouTube make-up tutorials. They rely heavily on the contemporary lingua franca of social media, but what do they add? The slow, contemplative speechless moments in the videos are the most intimate of all the works. They allow the process of looking to unfold between us – the image maker, the subject, and the viewer. There’s a brightness from the make-up ring light that offers clarity and lucidity; on occasion a subtle smile grows on Sarah’s face, as we hear them interacting. These powder-pop coloured films remind me of Rineke Dijkstra’s videos of teenagers in nightclubs, The Buzz Club, Liverpool, UK/Mystery World, Zaandam, NL (1996-97), where decontextualised moments are isolated to increase our engagement intensity.

There’s an über performativity in some of the other images, collaborations and self-portraits alike, which seem to move us away from Sarah’s personhood. Much of the context is abstracted, which feels unlike Luvera’s previous work. There’s a notable lack of any other people, even hinted at in the background, bar Luvera – not even the occasional blurred co-worker of Sarah to suggest her interpersonal realisation as a new woman beyond the lens or the private domestic sphere. This skips over one of the things that LGBTQ+ survival relies on – the recognition of our interdependence in and outside of our communities. This would be too high an expectation for one portrait, but in a large series of works, it is clearly an editorial decision.

That said, there are some absolutely stunning images, one reminiscent of a Nan Goldin portrait, depicting

Sarah in a car, with the colourful streetlights outlining her profile and hinting at something beyond four walls. The image of the neon makeup palette with Sarah in the mirror is glorious, but also deft and touching, while the window-lit portrait of Sarah in her voile-sleeved black dress gives us Almodóvar heroine-at-a-funeral realness. Then we have Sarah in full ‘sofa-burrito’ mode, wrapped in her duvet and offering one of the sweeter moments of the series.

Anthony Luvera has said that he sees this body of work “not only as a representation of one individual’s experience of their trans femininity but as a reflection on the way cultural influences can shape and determine the expression of gender and identity more broadly.” The intimacy in the five-year journey that Anthony and Sarah have made together and shared with us is insightful, beautiful and tender. The best parts offer contained flickers of trans joy in self-preservation.

Emma Campbell is a Research Associate at Ulster University, working on Reproductive Citizenship with partners in Trinity College Dublin. Emma is a member of the Turner Prize-winning Array Collective and has exhibited in international solo and group shows. Emma is also co-convenor of Alliance for Choice. emmacampbell.co.uk

1 Griselda Pollock, ‘What Women Want: Psychoanalysis and Cultural Critique’ in Nancy Princenthal (ed.), The Deconstructive Impulse: Women Artists Reconfigure the Signs of Power, 1973 – 1991 (Munich: Prestel Verlag, 2011) p. 74.

Anthony Luvera, Sarah, February 2020 from the series ‘She / Her / Hers / Herself’ (2017-22); image courtesy of the artist and Belfast Exposed.

Anthony Luvera, Sarah, November 2022, from the series ‘She / Her /Hers / Herself’ (2017-22); image courtesy of the artist and Belfast Exposed.

Fiona Kelly, ‘A Demarcation of Time’ RHA Ashford Gallery

12 January – 28 February 2023

IN THE MID-1800s, the newly formulated second law of thermodynamics undermined a long-held notion that the universe is eternal by predicting that its lifespan would end in a ‘heat death’. Written about in newspapers, this harbinger of cosmic doom captured the popular imagination, while introducing the notion of ‘entropy’ as a measure of disorder in an isolated system. The universe at maximum entropy, with all of its energy dissipated through doing work, would reach a homogenous state.1 There could be no order, since nothing would remain to be understood in relation to anything else. It would be a cold, dark, meaningless place.

This brought new insight to familiar scenarios, including why, over varying timescales, things degenerate, homes become untidy, people age and die. A hundred years later, re-assigning ‘entropy’ to associate with ‘noise’ and ‘information’ seemed to circumvent the gloomy prognosis – until it was realised that dissipation would result from the work required to dispose of newspapers, and the stuff of information generally, since it doesn’t disappear when no longer needed.

Coincidently reading about this later take on entropy proved a useful primer for a visit to ‘A Demarcation of Time’, with its evocations of ‘slowscapes’ and waste accumulations. Bearing titles such as Matter Out of Place, Kelly’s works variously shed light on the effects of over-production, reflect on how resources and waste are dealt with, and probe the forms materials can take as they persist over years, decades, millennia. Made using salvaged wood, bitumen and other discarded or reconstituted products, the exhibits mobilise different parts of the gallery through a choreography of leaning, resting and hanging.

The artist’s reference point is the Split Hills Esker in County Westmeath. Eskers are narrow elevations that wind through flatlands, and the term is derived from the Irish eiscir, meaning ridge. Formed through processes involving glacial meltwater, they are comprised of strata holding deposits of sand and gravel. Despite fostering unique biodiversity as wildlife corridors and sites of native woodland, in the 170 years since the conception of the ‘second law’, they have been “widely extracted and dismantled” to supply aggregate to the construction industry.2

Kelly’s show mirrors the activities of a reprocessing plant, now located at the site’s disused quarry. This repurposes matter that would otherwise go to landfill, and the artist’s parallel reworking of form and function (exploring possibilities of change over time) permeates the exhibition.

At its centre, the floor-based A Temporary Iteration, Stage 2 (2020-23) is a huddle of birch-ply polyhedrons, arranged as though deposited naturally. Referencing the calcite crystals found in eskers, they allude to the fallow land on the steep sides of these ancient landforms, which, as Kelly has remarked, is “demarcating a space for something beautiful to happen.”3 Bitumen-printed flora, secreted in ‘cracks’ between crystals, hint at new life springing from dormant potential. Also built-in, a tiny looped video pans over waste material embossed with honeycomb patterning, before ending with a sequence in which a bee lands on a scabiosa flower. Balancing resiliently as the plant pivots in the wind, its micro activity becomes emblematic of macro precarity.

Nearby, a copper etching and aquatint from 2022 shares the exhibition’s title while demarcating time through the multi-phase process of printing. Suspended on a white ground, Kelly’s fine-line mark-making and monochrome tonal patches manifest that most entropic of residues and familiar memento mori – a bag of dust. There’s no Such Thing as Away #2 (2023) is one of three layered compositions made from substances that are discarded but not gone. Its shadowy cinders, displayed in a bell jar, look organic but are revealed as plastic in the materials list. Two other iterations present

a shard of glass as a flower-like thing of beauty and a fragment of brick as a worn-smooth pebble.

‘Noise’ is introduced to the looking process by distortions in the glass jars and deliberate smudges in the bitumen-on-plywood piece Ceaselessly Shifting (2023). Here, this quality, along with the retained dot-matrix of the screen used in its making, recall the experience of reading newspapers, when ink invariably ends up on fingers. These details combine with the grain of the support to lend nuance and interest to its flat surface. At a time when the media is awash with stories about the future of the planet, Kelly’s measured approach to engaging with pressing issues resists being shouty. Instead, in her work, the excesses of our time are contrasted with the potency of pared-back means.

Susan Campbell is a visual arts writer, art historian and artist. susancampbellartwork.com

1 The term ‘dissipation’ is used here to describe occasions in which energy is irreversibly wasted. Rather than being transferred to useful energy stores, it is lost to the surroundings.

2 Exhibition text (rhagallery.ie)

3 A comment made by the artist during an online public conversation with Dr Robert Meehan on 10 August 2022, as part of her exhibition ‘A Temporary Iteration’, at SIRIUS.

Fiona Kelly, Ceaselessly Shifting, 2023, bitumen screen print on birch ply, 77.7 x 77.7 x 3.5 cm, Edition 1/3; photograph by Kate-Bowe O’Brien, courtesy of the artist.

Fiona Kelly, ‘A Demarcation of Time’, 2023, installation view, RHA Ashford Gallery; photograph by Kate-Bowe O’Brien, courtesy of the artist.

Raymond Watson ‘Apis Mellifera: The Honey Bee’ ArtisAnn Gallery, Belfast 1 – 25 February 2023

ANN MCVEIGH AND Ken Bartley, the team behind ArtisAnn Gallery, are no strangers to the NI Science Festival or indeed science for that matter – Ken has a degree in physics. Every February sees them contributing a welcome contemporary art component to the festival and, with the inclusion of Raymond Watson’s solo show ‘Apis Mellifera’, this year is no exception. As I arrive at Watson’s show, Ann asks someone just leaving if she listened to the recordings of the bees. “No, I’m scared of bees!” she replies. Everyone laughs and I think to myself, as I ascend the stairs to the first-floor gallery space, “well, I’m not scared of bees…”

Taking its title from the Latin name for the European honeybee, the show focuses on the activity of beekeeping and comprises two audio pieces, nine oil paintings, and three bronze castings. Watson is perhaps most associated with the latter medium ever since the initiation in the early 2000s of his ongoing body of work ‘Hands of History’, in which the artist casts in bronze the hands of key figures involved in the Peace Process.

I begin with the paintings. Each one is self-contained, vibrant and centres on a single aspect of beekeeping. They provoke an immediate sense of nostalgia; something about their style and clarity of vision takes me back to the encyclopaedia illustrations I would pore over as a child. The visual affinity with science imagery is fitting, even beyond the show’s inclusion in the science festival. The paintings have a schematic quality in their drive to illustrate and explain ideas and phenomena, especially ones which cannot be seen with the naked eye. For example, The Tree Hive shows a swarm of bees that have formed a home inside a hollow tree – a natural habitat in contrast to the beekeeper’s functional construction depicted in The Blue Hive. The bark of the tree has been ‘cut away’ by the artist, seemingly seared clean off with edges still glowing red. It enables us to ‘see’ inside the tree’s hollow trunk where worker bees crowd around the queen, like seeds dotted about the core of some exotic fruit sliced open.

In The Dances various shapes are scattered over an intense orange background – some like raised insect wings, others like cross-sections of apples or simple concentric circles. They show the pattern of steps that bees perform to communicate to the rest of the hive where the best nectar pickings are to be found. Again, Watson illustrates something which cannot be seen;

these dances take place in the darkness of the hive, the visual pattern of no concern to the bees who interpret solely the rhythm and vibrations. Above the ‘dancefloor’, in the upper section of the canvas, is a pattern of lines and dots – it’s like a dance-step diagram but is actually the molecular structure of honey. In the Cell is yet another example, here illustrating stages in the bee life cycle from egg to larva, each step depicted neatly in sequence.

The stars of the show are the three bronzes – The Brood Frame, Three Queen Brood, and Super Frame –frames from working beehives which Watson has cast in bronze. The oblong pieces dangle from wooden supports, suspended much as they would be in the hive, like filing cabinet dividers. Watson is rightly proud of the process he has devised to turn these extraordinarily delicate objects into solid artefacts. Hundreds of honeycombed cells are visible on both sides of each frame, from queen cup cells to worker and drone cells to those brimming over with honey. Yet each has its own character, from the almost fractal energy of the first, to the softer topographical undulations of the second brood

frame, and to the smallest yet most voluminous of the three – the beekeeper’s ‘super’ frame from which honey is harvested. Colours range from a rich, warm brown to a shimmering polished gold. They provoke questions about the co-authorship of their creation, the human-animal relationships at play, and the organic-industrial nature of this 10,000-year-old activity. Even to the non-apiculturist’s eye, the works are intricately fascinating and beautiful.

The two audio pieces, Bee Life and The Swarm (of five and four minutes in duration respectively) are short immersive journeys: the former a droning bee sound from which manipulated samples gradually emerge and coalesce into a melody; the latter more abstract, moving from birdsong to a single bee, to innumerable bees and returning to birdsong at its conclusion. On leaving the gallery, I pop my helmet on and, while unlocking my bicycle, something brushes my cheek – I flinch, jerking my hand to my face. It’s not some stray February bee –just an unfastened strap tickling my cheek and making me question my earlier assertion…

Jonathan Brennan is an artist based in Belfast.

Raymond Watson, The Smoker, oil on canvas, 48 x 38 cms; photograph © and courtesy of the artist and ArtisAnn Gallery.

Raymond Watson, The Dances, oil on canvas, 48 x 48 cms; photograph © and courtesy of the artist and ArtisAnn Gallery.

Raymond Watson, ‘Apis Mellifera, The Honey Bee’, installation view; photograph © and courtesy of the artist and ArtisAnn Gallery.