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Visual Artists' News Sheet | May – June 2020
Exhibition Profile
Both images: Helena Walsh, live enactment of Áine Phillips’ Buttered up in the Couch, Friday 6 March 2020, MART Gallery; photograph by Ewa Pypno, courtesy of the artists and MART Gallery
CENTERED AROUND THE short film, Buttered Up, this exhibition by Áine
Buttered Up KATHERINE NOLAN REFLECTS ON ÁINE PHILLIPS’S PERFORMANCE-BASED EXHIBITION AT MART GALLERY, DUBLIN.
Phillips explores embodied domestic femininities through performance. The form of the work varies across sculpture, painting and moving image, as well as live performances on the opening night by Phillips, Rachel Fallon, Helena Walsh and Ella Bertilsson. What does it mean to be buttered up? On opening night audience members were offered a viscerally charged, dynamic experience of the concept at the heart of the exhibition. Entering through the red doors of MART Gallery, visitors inescapably encounter a woman in a red pillbox hat, ensconced in a sink. Phillips, as the absurd hostess of the exhibition, rubs a mound of butter blocks and extends a warm but slippery hand. Before the formal introduction of social distancing measures, the intimacy of the handshake, now under scrutiny, further electrified this request for the viewer to break the fourth wall. Enlivening and lubricating not just hands but the social context, she orchestrates a room alive with exchanges and encounters. She is “trapped in a domestic underworld”, she explains, and is trying to get out using this butter as “lubrication”. The audience is welcomed and offered “ways in”, as she alludes to the other artists performing in the space. Enabling access through this explanatory mode of the address is directly and strategically oppositional to the reticence so dominant in contemporary artforms. The next encounter is Rachel Fallon’s Things Break Down/Altered Ego, in which she shapes a ball of steel wool. Under her hand it is moulded into the shape of an old woman’s hair. A mundane domestic object becomes memento mori and conjures archetypes of mother and grandmother. In a cream and gold apron, Fallon begins to work the material into a long plait. The acrid smell of apple cider vinegar rises, which over time will rust and degrade the strength of the steel. Evoking both the bristle of domestic toil and the warm feeling of watching a mother’s hands at work, this poetic honouring of women’s invisible labour is at once deeply individual and collective, affective and symbolic.
