Tracing the Border. Nigel Swann, Visual Artist. Highlanes Gallery. Aoife Ruane, Director

Tracing the Border

Nigel Swann Visual Artist

Highlanes Gallery

Aoife Ruane Director

I’M A PHOTOGRAPHER and live on the Cooley Peninsula. Although based in County Louth since 1999, much of the last two decades I have been oscillating between bases in Ireland, Central Europe and the Vaucluse in South-Eastern France. As a freelance producer in the photographic advertising industry, my main work destinations were Ireland and Budapest; however, a family situation added France in 2011. These three locations, defined by work and family, have consequently seen individual projects develop in each region. Before outlining my main inquiries, I want to share the simple advice given to me by photographer, Annie Leibovitz, while working on an American Vogue production for her: “stop taking photographs and spend the next six months revisiting and editing your archive”.

I can’t stress enough how useful this was, in honing my practice. The first project to benefit was entitled ‘The Yellow Star Houses of Budapest’. I’d been creating ‘architectural portraits’ of Budapest’s extraordinary buildings for over a decade, intrigued by the visible traces of its history on their facades. Many of these buildings were built during the patriotic, optimistic construction boom of the 1880s and 1890s, others are early Art Deco masterpieces, while later buildings were the pioneering works of interwar Bauhaus disciples.

Local research led me to Dr Gwen Jones of the Central European University (CEU) and archivist at Budapest’s Open Society Archives (OSA). She immediately brought to my attention that the buildings featuring in the majority of my photographs had only recently been identified, through the release of Hungarian government papers, as designated ‘holding sites’ for the city’s Jewish population during World War II. This forced mass relocation was in preparation for deportation to the death camps and unique to Budapest. Dr Jones says: “How can we read and understand the afterlife of atrocity in the contemporary urban environment? Nigel’s photographs provide one answer to these questions. They allow us to picture the human lives and deaths that these yellow-star house doors conceal.”

The next project, ‘Borderlands’, has been ongoing for many years but gained new impetus with the prospect of Brexit. Since the Good Friday Agreement in 1998, travelling along and across this border, there has been no physical expressions, no watchtowers, fences or walls; the border was unseeable, a virtual and psychological construct. However, in the run-up to and after Brexit, it has become discernible again and has started to evoke renewed questions about identity. An overgrown Iron Age linear earthwork acts as a conceptual starting point for this inquiry. This intriguing location, known locally as ‘The Black Pig’s Dyke’, is a 2000-year-old boundary that runs parallel to the present-day Irish / UK border. Post-Brexit, it now shadows another border – that between the European Union and the UK.

The ‘Dissenting’ tradition within Irish culture also comes under a new and careful examination. This is my cultural tradition, a culture that was once Ireland’s enlightened Republican vanguard. A disused Presbyterian Church, known as Cahans Meeting House in the border county of Monaghan, anchors the project. Built in 1840 on the site of an earlier 17th-century Meeting House, it was from here that the Reverand Thomas Clark led 300 of his congregation on the ‘Cahans Exodus’ to pre-revolutionary America in 1764, in the search of religious and civil freedom. Freud’s theory on ‘the narcissism of small differences’ resonates throughout ‘Borderlands’, throwing light on the binary cultures of ‘forgetting’ and ‘remembrance’, so prevalent in Irish life.

Finally, to South-Eastern France and ‘The Nono Zone’, a body of work with a proud Irish relevance. During the German occupation of France (1940–1944), the region under the control of the collaborationist Vichy regime was known as ‘la zone non occupée’ – nicknamed ‘the nono zone’ by the French Resistance. Wanted by the Nazis after his Resistance unit was betrayed, Irish writer Samuel Beckett fled Paris in 1942 for the Vaucluse mountains of Southern France. He remained there, an active member of the Resistance until the end of the war. Very little is known about Beckett’s time in hiding and there are no visual records, yet the experience is acknowledged as crucial in mapping the coordinates of his future aesthetics. Born of deficit, this work was created in those refuge landscapes.

nigelswann.com HIGHLANES GALLERY WAS dreamed up just after the end of World War II in 1946, by artist Bea Orpen and her husband, businessman, Terry Trench. Bea, who was the niece of Irish artist William Orpen, moved to Drogheda with Terry and their young family and set up home, close to where Highlanes Gallery is situated today, which at that time was the popular Franciscan Church. Bea taught art at many levels of education and was keen to inspire and encourage children and adults to experience the joy that visual art offers.

In 1946, an exhibition initiated by the Department of Education came to Drogheda, and was well received by the local community, not least because there were a number of artists from the region featured in the exhibition, such as Nano Reid and Simon Coleman. Bea took this interest as a marker and, with Terry, approached the Town Clerk of the Drogheda Corporation to set up a Museum and Gallery Committee in June 1946. Over the next two decades and through Bea’s strong friendships with many contemporary artists – especially her women friends, and Bea and Terry’s appeal to organisations like the National Gallery of Ireland, who provided much support and advice – the Dorgheda Municipal Art Collection received donations of artworks from organisations like the Friends of the National Collections of Ireland (FNCI) and bequests from people like the Celtic Studies Scholar, Richard Irvine Best, as well as work directly from artists. This, together with work that had been originally commissioned by Drogheda Corporation – like two majestic panoramic views of Drogheda in the 18th century by Italian artist Gabrielle Ricciardelli – amplified the local, national and international strands of the collection. Thematically, Drogheda and its townscape and topography features strongly, as does the work of 18th and 19th-century artists from the area. Due to Bea’s connections, there is also a strong presence of Irish women artists, from Sarah Purser and Mary Swanzy to Evie Hone.

Today, in Highlanes Gallery’s 14th year, the collection continues to grow, with new acquisitions, including the late Janet Mullarney’s hugely ambitious installation works from My Mind’s i. This work was developed with us, through the support of the Arts Council of Ireland, for a national tour in 2015 and was recently featured in a retrospective of Mullarney’s work at IMMA last year. Another recent acquisition is the breakout video/installation work by Droghedean emerging artist, Gary Reilly, titled Dunaire, for which he was selected for the RDS Visual Art Prize in 2019. This mesmeric work saw Reilly collaborating with composer Michael Holohan and a members of a local brass band, exploring the history of Drogheda Port.

We have also acquired Mary A. Kelly’s painting, Snow Falling, from her solo exhibition ‘Chair’, which was also initiated by Highlanes, and toured nationally in partnership with Uillinn: West Cork Arts Centre and Custom House Studios & Gallery. The exhibition marked a significant departure for Kelly, as she transitioned from two decades working with installation and photography, to working with paint and canvas. With support from Culture Ireland, ‘Chair’ opened at Galerie Voss, Düsseldorf, on 13 March, but with appropriately limited audiences, due to the spread of the coronavirus in Europe. Another important exhibition we have

‘Two Painters’ (1 February – 11 April), installation view, Highlanes Gallery, Drogheda; photograph by Eugene Langan, courtesy of the artist and Highlanes

recently developed is ‘Elliptical Affinities: Irish Women Artists and the Politics of the Body 1984 to the present’. This exhibition, which was developed with art historian Dr Fionna Barber, recently toured to Limerick City Gallery of Art.

At the time of writing, we have had to close doors on a wonderful exhibition, ‘Two Painters: Kathy Tynan and Andrew Vickery’, which brought together two very different artists, sharing subtle connections through their interests in memory, emotion and recollection. We have also begun to reprogramme some forthcoming exhibitions, one for the annual Drogheda Arts Festival (May Bank Holiday weekend), in partnership with the Science Gallery and Science Foundation of Ireland. ‘Plastic’ will now open in early 2021, and we look forward to engaging a new crossover audience for this timely and fascinating exhibition, which explores our complex relationship with this powerful material. The second exhibition, ‘Justice: Never Enough’ by Abigail O’Brien, was going to be shown offsite in the former Methodist Church, but will likely be postponed, due to the logistics of the show. The exhibition continues O’Brien’s series on The Cardinal Virtues – ‘Fortitude’, ‘Temperance’ and ‘Prudence’, with ‘Justice’ focusing on the Aston Martin car, exploring power and chauvinism and the sex symbol persona of James Bond, carefully juxtaposed with the era of #MeToo. Nevertheless, we hope to present a national tour of Margaret Corcoran’s work, in a solo exhibition titled ‘A Further Enquiry: Independence and Love’ on 4 July. Later in the summer, we plan to present another two-person exhibition, as yet without a title, featuring new and recent work by Raphael Hynes and Carey Clarke.

In the meantime, like many colleague institutions, we are busy learning what it means to try and deliver our programme remotely, to offer our public programme of workshops and talks online. We are indebted to artist/facilitator Claire Halpin and Julie Duhy, and Community Historian Brendan Matthews for braving this new world. It won’t be perfect, but we believe the arts are important during times of crisis.