Critique

Edition 67: May – June 2023

A Klass, Untitled skateboarding photographs, 2022, ‘Fix Your Pony!’, installation view; photograph by Simon Mills, courtesy of the artists and Naughton Gallery.

Niamh O’Malley, ‘Gather’

The Model, Sligo

3 February – 15 April 2023

A ROVING SHADOW appears; a haze of mist over the Garavogue River casts faint ripples through the window grille pattern, thrown up on the gallery wall at a slant. Rain-mottled windowpanes layer texture over the grain of the wooden floor and the buffed limestone of Drain (2022). A glint of sunlight picks out the yellow in Shelf (2022) and there’s a glow about it. Niamh O’Malley’s, ‘Gather’ at The Model in Sligo, includes sculptural works first presented at the Irish Pavilion for the Venice Biennale last year. Her dedication to site specificity and references to the local environment anchor the exhibition in both Venice and the west of Ireland.

By shaping raw materials often hewn from the land, and in detailing microclimatic shifts, O’Malley instigates a fresh dialogue on what it means to be connected to a landscape. The correlation and ephemeral biotic relationship between nature and culture finds expression in a number of the works. Many of her sculptures appear as descriptors for features in the landscape: a promontory, the rock spine of a mountain pass, flagstone floors, drystone walls, dense aged wood smoothed and polished. Steel, limestone, wood, and glass are utilised to consider brackish rivers and bog oak, briar thickets, gnarled branches, quarries, kelp and marram grass, ecological and archaeological curios, mounds and forts.

To orientate us, O’Malley introduces a crow. In ‘Gather’, the crow might act as a guide, encouraging us to consider alternative value systems in our surroundings. We encounter the bird through the phone-recorded video, Hooded Crow (2022), where it drinks water from a garden pond, pausing intermittently to take in its surroundings. When we understand that our human-centric pivot blinkers us, we can make space for other readings of our environment. O’Malley often builds such devices into her exhibitions, to shift our perspective and consider a reordering of materiality and form through abstraction. The mark, transposed onto the slope of the mountain from the camera lens in Nephin (2014), also functions in this way, orientating us as we circle the peak, offering a different vantage point.

The artist collaborates with several different craftspeople on the fabrication of these objects, moving through various possibilities, while celebrating a particularly exceptional piece of stone. Surface finishes and treatments emphasise its specificity. Limestone for example, which appears throughout the exhibition, has been quarried and worked in many parts of Ireland since prehistoric times, having been used in the Neolithic burial chambers found on many parts of the island. Covers (2022) is a composition of limestone set into beech veneered MDF; it looks a bit like an aerial view of a passage tomb but more directly references marble storm drain covers from the municipal drainage system in Venice. This assonance draws the two disparate terrains into dialogue with one another – a strategy of comparison which deepens our awareness of nuance.

Some of the assemblages in ‘Gather’ incorporate other building materials like textured glass. The use of the ubiquitous

Everglade pattern in Corner (hold) might remind us of windowpanes or door panels in the bungalows of rural Ireland. The leaf pattern in the glass, emulating the thick summer foliage outside, creates a perceptual mise en abyme. This familiar motif also elicits a sense of nostalgia, a collective reminiscence on the materiality of the Bungalow Bliss era, after the widely disseminated design changed the face of the Irish countryside forever.

Similarly, the steel in Shelf (2022) recollects corrugated roofs of sheds and barns, while the architecture of The Model also plays a part. Initially purpose-built as a school in 1862 and refurbished in 2001 for use as a museum, its structural idiosyncrasies converse with this series of formal sculptures and accompanying video. A thick, cumulous cloud yields to the insistence of light as rays crack through and cast contours onto the floor from Holds (2022). Titles of individual artworks suggests a nonverbal, dissociative, and decentred way of describing intensely quotidian natural objects and forms. Much of O’Malley’s work has a honed palette which emphasises the play of light and prioritises material tactility.

Throughout the exhibition, O’Malley pays homage to the natural landmarks, vernacular architecture, and geological characteristics of rural Ireland. The work in ‘Gather’ is often descriptive of such features in the landscape – expansive skies over jagged mountain tops, cliff faces in profile, refractions, and pools of light on the sea – though her depictions have been meticulously pared back in search of quintessence.

The work incorporates contradictions that further activate the artist’s treatise, including rigid and fluid, fragile and robust, wild and cultivated. Such dichotomies speak of the romanticisation of the west of Ireland, misconceptions of modernity, and the often-mawkish descriptors that dominate its expression in art. Always on the lookout for catalysts and anomalies that offer new perspectives on hackneyed tropes, O’Malley asks how the idyllic west of Ireland landscape can be represented in contemporary art, and in so doing, she deciphers fresh narratives in the descriptions of place.

Ingrid Lyons lives and works in Donegal. She writes about contemporary art and is currently developing a number of works of fiction and creative non-fiction.

The Irish Tour of Ireland at Venice 2022 presented iterations of ‘Gather’ in The Model and TBG+S (2 March – 30 April). A discursive event was hosted in the Linenhall on 11 March, featuring readings by Eimear McBride and Brian Dillon (who wrote for the publication), a conversation with Niamh O’Malley and the Curatorial Team (Clíodhna Shaffrey and Michael Hill) and screenings of films by Jenny Brady and Ros Kavanagh. irelandatvenice2022.ie

Top & Bottom: Niamh O’Malley, ‘Gather’, installation view, the Irish Tour of Ireland at Venice, Temple Bar Gallery + Studios, 2023; photograph by Aisling McCoy, courtesy of the artist and Temple Bar Gallery + Studios.

Bottom Left: The Irish Tour of Ireland at Venice, panel discussion, Linenhall Arts Centre, 11 March 2023 [L-R]: Kate Strain (mediator), Brian Dillon and Eimear McBride (writers), Niamh O’Malley; photograph courtesy of the artist and Ireland at Venice 2022. Top Left, Top Right & Bottom Right: Niamh O’Malley, ‘Gather’, installation view, The Model; photograph by Aisling McCoy, courtesy of the artist, The Model, and Ireland at Venice 2022.

Richard Gorman, ‘Living Through Paint(ing)’

Hugh Lane Gallery, Dublin

9 March – 20 August 2023

RICHARD GORMAN IS well known for his colourful and abstract geometric paintings, prints and works on paper. He is firmly established on the international art scene, with exhibitions all over the world, from Dublin and Milan to London and Tokyo. Gorman’s current exhibition at the Hugh Lane Gallery features his signature graphic paintings in square format, spread over three gallery spaces, with a fourth space containing Japanese paper works. All presented works were completed between 2018 and 2022.

The first room contains 12 paintings. Sheelin (2022), perched high up on the wall, presents a vertiginous tension; a calm grey shadow fails to prevent the central jagged pink form from engulfing the neon green. Best viewed from a distance, other paintings are placed on the longest wall, creating an overall sense of unity and motility. Throughout the space, motifs are repeated that activate adjacent works, achieving what the artist describes as a “precarious balance”.1 Works such as Tilt Magenta (2018) and Squeeze Orange (2018) have a playful dynamism; the eye is drawn to the outer edges of forms that appear to wheel around one another. Blam (2021) echoes Wrack (2021) in terms of shapes and colour palette; their interacting motifs seem to frolic and slide back and forth, contrasting angular industrial shapes with organic or botanic forms.

Derravarragh (2022) – a large painting at 170 x 170 cm – contains geometric shapes with an overall illusion of three-dimensionality. The eye is drawn to the centre of the painting where neon green diagonal forms balance on top of blue and purple quadrilaterals, reminiscent of the gable ends of houses. The second space contains four large paintings, all named after Irish lakes or islands. The incantatory titles – Rathlin, Sherkin, Corrib, Erne – have a pleasing rhythm. The high contrast and bright colours lend a hypnotic vibrancy to the generous paintings. The star of this room is Rathlin (2022) whose palette of bright pinks and negative shapes in a luminous deep blue vibrates with energy.

Encountered first in the next space is Oscar Delta Bravo (2019), containing a humorous fidget-spinner of blue, white and black pill forms. In the diptych, Charlie Charlie (2020), the painting process is evidenced in the buildup of layers at the edges. The duo, Hum (2019) and Victor X-Ray (2020), contain purple/black central motifs with brightly coloured shapes, suggestive of overlapping coloured filters which appear to twirl around the larger central form in a clockwise direction.

The works on paper in the final gallery space have more muted colours and a calm sensibility. The dimmed lighting lends the installation a meditative atmosphere. The title, 12 dye on handmade echizen kozo washi paper (2023) signifies the importance of physical materiality and process. For the last 20 years, Gorman has had an ongoing collaboration and productive partnership with a Washi making factory in rural Japan. The technique involves dyeing paper pulp by pressing it into molds containing areas of coloured ink.

It is hard to counteract the urge to read meaning into Gorman’s paintings and their titles, which he insists are ‘found’, apparently at random. In the introductory wall text, Gorman is quoted as saying: “A painting is a conflict with disorder … it may not tell a story, it may not even represent an idea.” He resists any imposition of meaning on his work, preferring to say that a painting “means only that it signifies what I spend my time doing.”2 Elsewhere, he quotes Susan Sontag’s comment that “interpretation is the revenge of the intellect upon art.”3 The title of the exhibition, ‘Living through paint(ing)’, is a clue to his immersive artistic approach, having lived and worked in his Milan studio since the 1980s. Gorman mentions that he is “playing a game that has been going on for a long time.”4

Gorman refers to the Renaissance paintings of Giovanni Bellini, which also finds parallels in the Japanese concept of Ma, in which the spaces between objects

take on greater significance than the forms themselves. Gorman notices that in Bellini’s paintings, the negative shapes between forms draw his attention, containing heavier layers of paint than the forms themselves. Gorman’s contemplative practice therefore seems comfortable within both the Japanese and European traditions, while his legacy is a sense of complete absorption in the exuberant process of painting.

Beatrice O’Connell is a multidisciplinary artist from Dublin.

1 Judith Du Pasquier (director), KIN, 2013, film interview with Richard Gorman at his studio in Milan for his exhibition at The MAC, Belfast, in 2014.

2 Ibid.

3 Jennifer Goff, ‘Casa: Invitation to a Journey’, in Casa: Richard Gorman (Dublin: OPW, 2016), published to coincide with an exhibition at Castletown House, Kildare, in 2016, p. 10.

4 Judith Du Pasquier, KIN, 2013.

Richard Gorman, Derravaragh 2022, oil on linen, 170 x 170 cm; photograph courtesy of the artist and Kerlin Gallery.

Richard Gorman, Rathlin, 2022, oil on linen, 170 x 170 cm; photograph courtesy of the artist and Kerlin Gallery.

‘Richard Gorman: Living Through Paint(ing)’, installation view, Hugh Lane Gallery; photograph by Denis Mortell, courtesy of the artist and Hugh Lane Gallery.

Philip Moss, ‘Haiku Paintings and Other Works’

Molesworth Gallery, Dublin

9 March – 6 April

Philip Moss, Bog butter 2022, oil on canvas, 193 x 193cm; photograph courtesy of the artist and Molesworth Gallery.

Philip Moss, Oestrogen, 2019, oil and mixed media on canvas, 170 x 200 cm; photograph courtesy of the artist and Molesworth Gallery.

AN IMPRESSION GRADUALLY forms while moving through Philip Moss’s first solo show at the Molesworth Gallery; one that involves both presence and absence. On the presence side is a strong materiality, a lively use of colour and, as the full complement of 19 exhibits reveals, a technical aptitude that spans semi-abstract imagery and finely worked realism. This points to an artist invigorated by the possibilities of making, one who draws, often explicitly, from artists he admires. On the absence side is loss, which permeates the exhibition through a palpable nostalgia for people and times gone by.

‘Haiku Paintings and Other Works’ is an abridged version of ‘Unseen’, held in the artist’s home county at The Regional Cultural Centre, Letterkenny, last year. At its core are 14 square (64 x 64 cm) canvases whose titles riff off a shortform type of Japanese poem, structured in 17 syllables arranged across three lines. Hung triple deck in Donegal, these works are displayed individually in the Molesworth’s foyer and two downstairs rooms.

The haiku paintings feature cast-plaster elements painted in oils and mounted on box canvas. Each is contained within a Perspex case, which protects the plaster and withholds their tactility while dispersing delicate shadows onto the wall. The images are direct, sometimes even naïve – eminently readable it would seem. However, as the original exhibition title intimates, while memories are alluded to, privacy is largely retained.

Moss plays fast and loose with the number of syllables the artwork titles contain. Many are jocular, but some have deep undercuts. For instance, tragedy is revealed in the initially witty Phyllis Moss married Aaron Stein and she became a philistine. The rest of the family burned in Auschwitz. The painting resembles a simple road sign, its trio of white plaster verticals standing proud from a simple grey ground. As you read past the pun, they clarify as a section of fencing, which at once becomes oppressive and stark.

A similar push-and-pull dynamic animates The home. A large field in front of the farm house, hard won and fought over, a charming evocation of a patch of land with good road frontage. But the title conflates a home with the field it stands in, bringing to mind newspaper stories about lives lost over contested ground. The side-on, ‘crow’s feet’ tufts of grass, pressed fondly into an aerial view, speak unequivocally of childhood – is Moss suggesting his was overshadowed by conflict? Was there a cloud hovering in the unseen sky?

An overcast vista arises, too, in Self-consciously I cut the grass as my father did before me. His grass was cut in 2011. Sayonara Dad, so it must be. While at first the two-toned lawn, mown back and forth, seems benign, upon reading the title, the spectre of inevitable death emerges from within its wavering stripes. Sweet comfort radiates from the candy pink The Mikado, more a duvet than a biscuit, while sources of guilty pleasure converge in the Philip Guston-esque piece (an appropriation confirmed in the title) Plagiarised city of the red night, full of sin: pastries, porn and paintings.

Upstairs, the larger-scale and compositionally similar Oestrogen (2019) and Just a wee shower bear titles written in a Magritte-style script, reminiscent of The Treachery of Images (1929), a work that famously exposes word-image-meaning dissonance. Opposite, is Cremnitz White, a mash-up of the spatial staging and painterly techniques of Francis Bacon and Lucian Freud, both of whom Moss has met.1 Within a composition that appears to be closing in, a limp-looking Freud with lurid flesh tones languishes beneath a recreation of a typically unyielding portrait of his elderly mother. Echoing the ‘sayonara’ (goodbye) of Moss’s haiku painting, it presages the artist’s inevitable demise.

The final work is a detailed rendering of the veiled stage at the Paris Opera House, complete with sensuous red and gold swags and a tantalising glimpse at what lies behind. Moss has positioned a circular ‘spotlight’ low down within the folds, a disc inscribed with the outline of a female crotch. It at once recalls Gus-

tave Courbet’s L’Origine du Monde (1866) – which was secreted behind a curtain by its original owner2 – and, as the title Étant donnés (2019) acknowledges, references Marcel Duchamp’s controversial last work. A diorama which similarly foregrounds the body of an unidentifiable woman, intimate parts visible through peepholes in a wooden door and a gap in a brick wall, Duchamp’s enigmatic work continues to court interpretation. This is consistent with an exhibition that has much going on, one that withholds and reveals, using a language forged from an unfolding art history and a playful approach to materials.

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

1 See: Nick Miller, ‘Unseen’, The Visual Artists’ News Sheet, November/December 2022, pp 26-27. (visualartistsireland.com)

2 See: Tim Smith-Laing, ‘Who Commissioned the 19th Century’s Most Notorious Painting? The origins of Gustave Courbet’s ‘Origin of the World’’, Frieze, Issue 8, September 2019 (frieze.com)

Bernadette Kiely, ‘A NEW LANDSCAPE – Cork or Venice, Who Cares, Who Can Tell’

Lavit Gallery, Cork

23 March – 15 April

Bernadette Kiely, ‘A NEW LANDSCAPE – Cork or Venice, Who Cares, Who Can Tell’, installation view; photograph courtesy the artist and Lavit Gallery.

VIEWERS OF BERNADETTE Kiely’s paintings often presume they are acrylic on canvas. In fact, she paints in oil. Kiely is an oil painter who floods her surfaces with liquid, pouring white spirit so it pools on canvases laid on the floor. But she uses water too, spraying it directly onto oil compositions to which she has sometimes added charcoal, pastel, and chalk. If the surfaces of her paintings look watery it is because they go through a process of wetting, soaking, and drying; a series of actions that allow pigment to separate, suspend, move, and travel in ways that are frequently unpredictable –just like the water-sodden landscapes she paints. Gravity and evaporation play a part too, which means the manner of their making is neatly attuned to her subject matter. Her recent show at the Lavit Gallery in Cork featured paintings of rivers and floods.

Kiely grew up next to the River Suir. Swimming, fishing, flooding, and the ever-changing, ever-present nature of water are integral to her sense of memory and place. In her studio next to her home in Thomastown, County Kilkenny, she paints the length of the River Nore that can be seen from her front door. But she also finds watery subject matter in her travels, and in images sourced online and elsewhere. Passing through the flooded midlands on a train, she took photographs of the Shannon-soaked fields through the windows. This series of images led to the canvases that opened this show: Crossing Over (Shannon River in Flood) i, ii, iii (2016). These paintings hang together as an effective triptych but can be bought separately. Kiely did not envisage them as a single work at the time. Hung like this, they present a reminder of their origin story, mimicking the series of train windows through which the flooded land was seen. Shimmering patches of green grass emerge from these pale, near-monochrome vistas which have a sepia feel. The land resembles swamp as much as floodplain, with intimations of human habitation in the rooftops and spire that share a horizon line with silhouettes of trees. The question Kiely is asking here, and everywhere in this exhibition, is a kind of what next? What about a time when the water does not recede after the flood? What then?

The titles of her paintings sometimes reflect that overwhelming despair for which we have new words like eco-anxiety, global-dread, or solastalgia – a term coined by environmental philosopher Glenn Albrecht in the early 2000s with a combination of solace, des-

olation and nostalgia at its root. Initially intended to describe a type of homesickness, felt while still at home because the changing environment no longer offers comfort or solace, it has been co-opted more broadly to indicate existential distress caused by climate change. Albrecht also coined the term terrafurie, to describe anger felt towards those whose actions contribute to environmental destruction. There is no terrafurie in Kiely’s work, but there is a form of solastalgia and with that comes a perhaps counter-intuitive feeling of love.

Paintings entitled The colour of anxiety (flooded fields) (2016-17), A Hopeless Struggle with the Elements (2020), A Savage Flood – what use (is) geography now (2021), or the canvas that gives the show its title, might variously indicate despair, but this body of work is more about observation and feeling. It’s about noticing change and capturing it.

Kiely’s 2023 video work, The writing is on the wall, demonstrates the relentless power of a body of water in motion. She paints water where it shouldn’t be, as in No Parking (2022), in which the river has flung open and entered through a pedestrian gate. The metal uprights of the fence are an ineffectual grid through which water moves at will. The No Parking sign is absurdly redundant. In River Lee – (Cork) (2022-3) café chairs are stacked on a flooded street. A man stands, visible only from the neck down, up to his shins in water, hands in pockets, as shadowy figures move in hi-vis vests behind through the worryingly frequent but still for-now temporary inconvenience.

Two monotype pastel drawings made in 2013 and based on old maps, Liable to flooding – The Kings River i, ii, point to the ways in which water has always shaped our relationship with land and how we navigate. Inspired by images from Pakistan and Bangladesh, Kiely painted Save what you need (2017), in which a woman carries a goat as she wades through waist-high water. It’s a reminder that this is a whole-world problem, not just one visible from her own front door. The forms in her small canvas Sandbags (2023) look at first glance to resemble a figure, huddled in a doorway and wrapped in a sleeping bag. It’s another jolt to the consciousness; a reminder that these paintings are a slow seeping cry to open our eyes and to pay attention now.

Cristín Leach is an art critic, writer and broadcaster based in Cork.

Bernadette Kiely, Rebuilding, 2022, oil on canvas, 50 x 70 cm; image courtesy of the artist.

Bernadette Kiely, No Parking, 2022, oil on canvas, 100 x 70 cm; image courtesy of the artist.

‘Fix Your Pony!’

Naughton Gallery, Queens University Belfast

9 February – 6 April 2023

‘FIX YOUR PONY!’ is the fifth iteration of the Naughton Gallery’s ongoing sports exhibition series, featuring works that, according to the gallery literature, tackle “race, gender, politics, sexuality and beyond.” While arguably a broad claim, there is no denying the breadth of sports, nationalities and ethnicities represented, from Frankie Quinn’s black and white photographs of football fans in 80s and 90s Ireland – one memorable shot from the stands showing silhouetted children suspended from the chain-link fences, installed around the pitches – to Bram Paulussen’s extraordinary action shot of what appears to be a modern-day chariot/bull race in West Bali, all rippling flags, dust clouds and raw sinew. Furthermore, reading the backstories of some of the personalities that feature in the show adds weight to that claim of tackling multiple issues. For example, WNBA All-Star, Brittney Griner – depicted in Rachelle Baker’s digital painting – was used as a political pawn and sentenced to nine years in Russia for a minor drug offence. Likewise, the iconic track-andfield sprinter and “proud member of the LGBTQ+ community”, Sha’Carri Richardson – the subject of a specially-commissioned portrait by Irish illustrator Laura Callaghan – was barred from the 2020 Summer Olympics for a similar transgression. Finally, tennis star Naomi Osaka – here portrayed in a photograph by Justin French in a traditional Japanese setting, wearing an upcycled Nike sportswear belt and gown – is wellknown for her Black Lives Matter activism.

Most of the disciplines referenced in the exhibition are individual sports. Exceptions include the tag-teams, lovingly-illustrated by Jaime Hernandez as sturdy, female, comic-book wrestlers. From weightlifting and skateboarding to surfing and tennis, the exhibition invites reflection on the uncompromising levels of commitment required, alongside the intense scrutiny of professional sportsmen and women and their interior lives, often from a very young age.

Although inhabiting very different contexts, two video works, in particular, highlight moments of being observed, yet necessarily oblivious to the gaze of others. The first is Thenjiwe Niki Nkosi’s Suspension […] from 2020 (the full title of which names all 28 gymnasts depicted). The video montage comprises footage from all over the world, showing black female gymnasts preparing for their respective routines on the vault, bars, beam or floor. Each clip hones in on that moment of complete concentration before the action begins. Deep breaths and nervous facial movements alternate with fleeting smiles of confidence, whispered prayers perhaps, or words of self-encouragement. As with any portrait, we’re compelled to read internal thoughts from visible signs flickering on the surface; it’s also a moment of empathy and humanity.

The second is Niall Cullen’s Three hours for three seconds (2023) in which a skateboarder and filmmaker try to capture a complicated manoeuvre on the busy streets of Dublin’s Temple Bar. Through countless attempts, the skater strives to remain focused as passers-by intervene – from hecklers and curious kids to one very vocal man’s overbearing encouragement. While the feat being recorded seems inconsequential at first, one is gradually won over on a human level by the skater’s dogged determination in a very public arena, and the (literally) bruising attempts to achieve his goal, which seem as genuine as that of any other athlete. M.S. Harkness’s black and white comic-strip weightlifter, on the other hand, feels less observed – in training, perhaps. As she works through her reps, her thoughts are voiced through a series of captions that reveal a world not of psyched-up self-talk, as one might assume, but one of meditative contemplation.

Striking a similarly contemplative note are two oil paintings by Dougal McKenzie, on what appears to be repurposed sailcloth; strategically placed cringles and larger apertures reveal painted stretcher bars beneath.

Their verbose titles refer to actors, Burt Lancaster and Richard Harris, within arenas of competition – swimming and racquetball respectively.

Although skateboarding is an official Olympic sport since 2020, looking at A Klass’s Untitled skateboarding photographs (2022) feels like peering into a subculture of a subculture. The unnamed figures from L.A.’s women, non-binary and queer skate scene – depicted wearing skirts, fishnets, face paint, wigs and butterfly wings, many captured mid-flight among chain-link fences, back alleys and parking lots – are like vigilante superheroes in an alternative Beastie Boys video.

As a sports ignoramus, I was far too pleased about simply recognising two of the figures depicted in the show as Shaq O’Neal and Magic Johnson (albeit as collectible pot-bellied figurines with transparent, Mickey-Mouse ears). I was also reminded of professional sport’s inextricable entanglement with big brand sponsorship. Adidas and Emirates feature in the presented works, as does the ubiquitous Nike; Osaka’s portrait and Sonny Ross’s illustrated montage of tennis legend Serena Williams rack up 14 ‘swooshes’ between them.

Nonetheless, with over 40 individual pieces by 15 international artists across multiple disciplines, ‘Fix Your Pony!’ attests to sport’s enduring ability to inspire not only intense human emotions but also thought-provoking, beautiful and entertaining works of art.

Jonathan Brennan is a multidisciplinary artist based in Belfast.

[L-R]: Frankie Quinn, Scooped at Windsor Park c.1990 (top), Garda at GAA match, 1996 (bottom); Rachelle Baker, Portrait of Brittney Griner, 2023, ‘Fix Your Pony!’, installation view; photograph by Simon Mills, courtesy of the artists and Naughton Gallery.

Sara Perovic, My Father’s Legs 2020, ‘Fix Your Pony!’, installation view; photograph by Simon Mills, courtesy of the artist and Naughton Gallery.