Abstract Intra-Actions

Abstract Intra-Actions

GIANNA TASHA TOMASSO REVIEWS TWO RECENT EXHIBITIONS AT LIMERICK CITY GALLERY OF ART.

Celine Sheridan, Latch Labour Love 2019, and Co-sleeping 2019, ‘Mammalia and the Psyche’, installation view; photograph by Roland Paschhoff, courtesy of the artists and Limerick City Gallery of Art.

MEL FRENCH AND Celine Sheridan’s two-person exhibition ‘Mammalia and the Psyche’ at Limerick City Gallery of Art (25 Feb – 16 April 2023) emerged from a process of the artists thinking with each other through research. Curated by Catherine Marshall, the 27 mixed-media works were individually produced yet jointly situated, challenging the audience to decode the artists’ intellectual affective activity of using ‘thingness’ to provoke intra-actions.

According to American philosopher, Karen Barad, intra-action understands agency not as an “...inherent property of an individual or human to be exercised, but as a dynamism of forces in which all designated ‘things’ are constantly exchanging and diffracting, influencing and working inseparably.”1 This inseparability challenges the binary thinking which separates the subject from the object, the human from non-human, and is a recurrent theme across the exhibited works, which suggest that any sculptural claim towards ‘thingness’ is tactical.2

French’s Hitchcockesque sculpture, Hinder (2022), provides an ominous welcome in the lobby gallery. Four black crows and lifelike human tongues emerge from a three-metre-tall dead tree. The acute attention to detail and finish of Hinder is reflective of French’s overall approach to all her sculptural assemblages, whether made by her own hand – evidenced in the sculpture Mother (2022), a life-size plaster Gorilla, breastfeeding an appropriated human baby doll – or her use of found objects, including an antique rusted steel cot in the dark installation, Curtail (2022).

The erotic and animalistic nature of the surreal, oversized, kinetic tongue in French’s If Truth Be Told (2022), is discomfortable amongst the softer materiality of Sheridan’s fabric and foam works. The timed thudding of the mechanical tongue licking a line of charcoal resonates periodically through the gallery, at once

human, animal, and machine. When the tongue is not activated, it is missed. When activated, the noise diffracts on Sheridan’s blue, foam, foetal shapes, From the Mould (2021). Audio of the poem, A Charm to Call a Cow into Your Dreams, written and read by Annemarie Ní Churreáin, emerges from inside Sheridan’s multi-udder, Rebond foam sculpture, Cow (2021).3 The intermittent thudding of French’s tongue is again dulled and absorbed by Sheridan’s exquisite, large-scale tapestry rug, While on Her Knees (2022), which hangs from the gallery wall. Sheridan’s compact two-part bronze sculpture, Woman and the Worm (2022), resembles both a worm and the intestinal tract. The tongue is an organ strategically situated at the beginning of the gastrointestinal system, and again the collective works intraact in a mutual constitution of entangled agencies.

In the corner of the South Gallery, fabric wadding and pillows form Sheridan’s human-like floor installation, titled Co-sleeping (2019), a reminiscence on the psychological challenges of mothering. Sheridan’s acrylic painted triptych, Latch Labour Love (2019), is particularly strong, displaying three and four breasted embryolike beings nursing other embryo-like beings. French’s larger than life charcoal drawing Lament (2020) features a naked faceless figure with blood pouring from both nipples. Collectively informed by evolutionary theory, psychoanalysis, zoology, anthropology and a shared post-feminist perspective on mothering, the individual artists become partially dissolved within the interactions of the collective works.

Casey Walshe’s concurrent exhibition of paintings, titled ‘Come on Baby’, spans three areas of LCGA and is not entirely isolated from ‘Mammalia and the Psyche’. Walshe’s works share similar socio-material, temporal, and spatial concerns, presenting

floral and abstract multi-scale portraits that play with the binaries of soft and hard, light and dark, human and non-human. The Last Embrace (2020) is almost unbearably delicate in its simplicity of form and colour. For Susan (2022) is a large-scale composition of maternal love and comforting embrace. Two abstract white roses on a muted palette are contrasted with a dark blue flash of colour extending from one form to another.

Perched on impossibly thin stems, a duo of moon-lit white roses in Night Walk (2022) act as symbols of sensuality. Confidently facing the viewer the large blooms bask in the night glow. A third rose is indicated only by its stem which leans out of the composition. The absent rose adds a layer of tangible complexity to the sensual narrative of forms. Walshe’s large and smallscale oil paintings speak of love and love lost, of life and of death – concerns which span the entirety of these two powerful and challenging exhibitions at LCGA.

Walshe will be showing in the RHA Ashford Gallery in November. French and Sheridan will present their exhibition, ‘Anthropomorphia’, at The Complex, Dublin (9 – 23 June) and the Zoological Museum in Trinity College Dublin (5 June – 1 September).

Gianna Tasha Tomasso is an artist, writer, and Assistant Lecturer in Critical and Contextual Studies in Limerick School of Art and Design.

1 Karen Barad, Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning (Durham: Duke University Press, 2007) p 141.

2 Colin Gardner and Patricia MacCormack, Deleuze and the Animal (Edinburgh University Press, 2017) p 1.

3 Annemarie Ní Churreáin, The Poison Glen (The Gallery Press, 2021) p 62.

Top Left: Casey Walshe, ‘Come on Baby’, installation view; Top Right: Casey Walshe, Libertine, 2021, oil on board; Bottom Right: Mel French, Hinder, 2022, Timber, steel, jesomite; all photographs by Roland Paschhoff, courtesy of the artists and Limerick City Gallery of Art.