At The Gates of Silent Memory

At The Gates of Silent Memory

COLIN GRAHAM REVIEWS CLARE LANGAN’S EXHIBITION AT LUAN GALLERY.

Clare Langan, ‘At The Gates of Silent Memory’, installation view, Luan Gallery; photograph by Louis Haugh, courtesy of the artist and Luan Gallery.

WHILE CLARE LANGAN is best known for her film work, her photography constitutes a distinctive strand of her practice, highlighted in a solo exhibition at Luan Gallery in Athlone. ‘At The Gates of Silent Memory’ (18 February – 20 April 2023) presents an excellent selection of the artist’s work since 2007, drawing on a wide range of subject matter, and bound together by the consistency of Langan’s aesthetic.

Langan’s photography is characterised by a dream or vision-like quality, also apparent in her film work, in which an often foreclosed and disorientating perspective works within a monochrome that tends to sepia. The effect is of a timelessness, not quite nostalgic, not quite of the present, and of work that seeks generalities and universalities rather than specificity and referentiality. Add to this Langan’s interests in myth and metamorphosis – the place of the human in relation to landscape and ecology, and a concentration on the aftermath of (actual or perhaps impending) catastrophes – and there is intense drama to much of her work, made more intense by the purity of her image-making.

‘At The Gates of Silent Memory’ includes three images from the series ‘Orphèe’ (2014), in which Langan alludes, it would seem, to the most well-known and Ovidian story of Orpheus as the traveller to the underworld. Langan allows the myth to visually intermingle with ideas of birth and re-birth (Orpheus as charmer of the animate and inanimate), as a foot and hands (almost foetal, almost dead), and a head are seen behind glass or some transparent, liquid barrier. The title, but not the images, implies transformation and a return to life, and the tension between the two gives the work its undecidability as a re-writing of the Orpheus/Orphée myth. That ‘Orphèe’ may, at least in part, be a contemplation of the power of the maternal, is emphasised by the inclusion in the same space of Cocoon (2015), an

image of a mother and daughter, embraced and almost submerged in water, as if about to be born together having been nurtured as one.

Another aspect of Langan’s work is landscape photography, though the shift from the semi-mythical subject matter to the landscape is not a jump from one genre to another. Particularly striking in this exhibition is the image The Heart of a Tree (1) (2020). The image is of a mountainous, though largely featureless landscape, with a path, worn in places and deliberately stepped in others, passing along the ridges of the hills and up out of the frame. Along that path, tiny in the image, is an enigmatic human figure in white, wearing what is more like protective clothing than a druid’s cloak, and with a bulbous white package on their back, as if it were a parachute or scientific instrument. This image, which was made in Iceland, has a deeply unnerving effect – sci-fi, in some sense – in an unreal landscape with unknowable action taking place, but suggestive of a deadened natural world which has been changed by, and is now hostile to, the human.

A similar human figure, also in white, this time with the package on their back, flowing above them in the wind like a mushroom cloud, appears in Songlines 2 (2018), which was made in Lanzarote. The black volcanic mountains of the island create a blurred foreground to the image, with a rock mirroring the shape of the human form. This approach to landscape, in which the human is disjunctive and yet yearning to be part of the natural environment, is seen differently in Elizium (2014), a cross between Caspar David Friedrich’s Wanderer Above the Sea of Fog (1818) and a still from a black and white adventure movie, in which a human figure, standing on a rocky outcrop above a valley, is blown melodramatically and despairingly by the wind.

The existential blast from the landscape in these

images – and a recurring interest in islands as condensed metaphors for the general state of ecology – is carried over into more documentary form in Langan’s work from Monserrat, that very real post-catastrophe place, in which half the island is now deserted. Across the galleries of the Luan exhibition there are images from Monserrat – interiors of dereliction, dust and desertion, made to look unreal with that characteristic looming and claustrophobic perspective which Langan achieves. The only moment of colour in the exhibition is an eery green which, algae-like, infects the largescale image of a Monserrat street, with collapsed powerlines tending to the image’s centre, and signifiers of the mutability of our petrochemical-dependent society.

Langan’s work is powerful, distinct, and driven to render in deeply felt visual terms the estrangement of the human from the natural – contemplating routes of return to nature, but never naïve enough to be convinced of them. ‘At The Gates of Silent Memory’ is a beautifully-curated entry point to her vision.

Colin Graham is Professor of English at Maynooth University.