Critique

Eleanor McCaughey, Learning to smell the smoke, 2022, mixed-media installation; photograph by Ros Kavanagh, courtesy the artist and Hugh Lane Gallery.

‘Bones in the Attic’ Hugh Lane Gallery 11 August – 30 October 2022

[L-R]: Gerda Teljeur, Childs Play 1, Maedhbh, 2021, cotton bedsheets, cotton stuffing, coloured cotton thread, handmade jewellery, chair; Amanda Doran, Selected paintings, 2014-2021, oil on canvas; photograph by Ros Kavanagh, courtesy the artists and Hugh Lane Gallery.

Sarah Jayne Booth, (for) All Our Grievous Doings, 2022, multi-media installation; photograph by Ros Kavanagh, courtesy the artist and Hugh Lane Gallery.

THE INTERGENERATIONAL GROUP exhibition, ‘Bones in the Attic’, at the Hugh Lane Gallery, offers intriguing opportunities to explore the recurring and ongoing oppressions faced by women. Issues such as bodily autonomy, gender-based violence, misogyny, sexism, and ageism are at the forefront of the exhibition. Curated by Victoria Evans, this exhibition brings together works from the Hugh Lane collection and by invited artists; it features works by Sarah Jayne Booth, Myrid Carten, Dorothy Cross, Amanda Doran, Rita Duffy, Jesse Jones, Alice Maher, Eleanor McCaughey, Na Cailleacha (Helen Comerford, Barbara Freeman, Patricia Hurl, Catherine Marshall, Carole Nelson, Rachel Parry, Gerda Teljeur, Therry Rudin), Kathy Prendergast, and Ruby Wallis.

Works in the exhibition turn to archetypal and female figures who do not fit easily into the roles available for women in a patriarchal society. Jesse Jones’s photo collage Though Shalt Not Suffer (2019) sets a Sheela-na- Gig mandala against a black background, summoning a space for the power of the sacred feminine. Objects from the Tremble, Tremble (2017) archive, presented in a glass vitrine, evoke how women’s embodied knowledge might subvert patriarchal law. Three larger-thanlife photographs from Ruby Wallis’s ongoing series A Woman Walks Alone at Night, With a Camera, document experiential walks through the urban landscape, disputing the misogynistic societal expectation that women bear responsibility for the potential harms they may encounter, unaccompanied after dark. Elsewhere, Dorothy Cross’s ambiguous and troubling Shark Lady in a Balldress (1988) is brought into dialogue with Glaoch na Caillí (The Hag’s Call) by Irish language poet Ceaití Ní Bheildiúin.

A famous poster by the Guerrilla Girls, The Advantages of Being a Woman Artist (1988), inspired Na Cailleacha – an art collective of eight older women – to develop the witty statement, The Advantages of Being a Cailleach Artist, which recognises women’s political agency and calls out the inequalities that ageing and older women face. Their Child’s Play (2021) rag dolls, presented in situ and as black and white photographs

documenting their placement in the Irish landscape in the Irish landscape, address tropes of Irish womanhood while commenting on the untapped power and knowledge of ageing women in contemporary society.

Recalling the dancehall etiquette of earlier generations, Kathy Prendergast’s Waiting (1980) is an observation of societal expectations of women’s inherent passivity. Myrid Carten’s moving image work, Sorrow had a baby (2021), with home-movie footage, family photographs, and an ongoing dialogue between mother and daughter, examines how a complicated relationship with the maternal figure and wider societal standards impact the development of a young woman’s sense of self. Watching a poignant pretend beauty pageant, one wonders at the futures that exist for pre-teen girls beyond societal constructs. Alice Maher’s etchings from ‘The Conversation’ explore imaginary worlds and childhood curiosities, centring on the often-invisible figure of the young girl. In Swarm (1994) a girl faces a dress of buzzing bees. Does she understand this as a warning or a challenge? A dancing girl with wild hair in Big Shoe (1994) is oblivious to the oppressive shoe looming overhead, or perhaps she dances in defiance.

Sarah Jayne Booth’s multi-media installation work (for) All Our Grievous Doings (2022) is a dangerous domestic interior. A long, thin cactus protruding from the middle of a plush, red velvet telephone seat or ‘gossip bench’, alludes to the potential repercussions for disclosing that which happens inside this home. Across an expanse of gold carpet, a medusa-like assemblage stands over a white animal skull like a warning. Cherished porcelain collectibles atop small wall shelves reveal miniscule subversions. A mother distractedly holds her child while engrossed in Marie Stopes’s Married Love (1918, Fifield & Co), a book banned in Ireland at the time for its birth control references, while nearby a young girl shoulders her burden, composed of two bunches of penises. There is no reprieve to be found in Rita Duffy’s perilous Sofa (1997). The hairpins protruding through its waxy, rust-coloured skin render it a proxy for body hair, portraying the potential of the female body to provoke disgust. The relational quality

between the abstract framed work with figurative elements in Eleanor McCaughey’s Learning to smell the smoke (2022) and the sculptural installation opposite – comprising large swathes of fabrics with drawings, light and sound transcending the two-dimensional – encourages one to delve into the interiority of the work and contemplate embodiment. With vibrant colours and thick brushstrokes, Amanda Doran’s paintings depict body-positive femininities that challenge prescriptive gender stereotypes. The powerful four-armed, four-breasted woman in God is a Woman (2018), gives birth while her arms occupy themselves with care duties. On a circular canvas, Doran’s Self-Soothing (2021), a mouth inside a mouth, voices an inner self, radiating a certain pleasure of being able to speak frankly.

Ambitious in its remit, ‘Bones in the Attic’ draws important interconnections between the recurring ‘othering’ of women in historical and contemporary Irish society. If one of its aims is to stimulate ideas about ‘safeguarding the future of feminism for all’, then representation matters (hughlane.ie). While this exhibition is a non-exhaustive point of departure, an inclusive future of feminism, drawn from women’s plural experiences in contemporary Irish society, cannot be imagined if we do not also recognise vital cross-cutting issues. Not all inequalities are distributed evenly, and to that extent, the inclusion of artists from underrepresented cultural or ethnic minority backgrounds would have been welcome, to further nuance the different barriers women face in Irish society. No woman is free until all women are free, and given the current international socio-political climate, now is not the time for complacency.

Dr Kate Antosik-Parsons is a contemporary art historian who writes about gender, sexuality, and the body. She is a Post-Doctoral Research Fellow at Trinity College Dublin on a cross-border project researching reproductive citizenship on the island of Ireland.

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Eithne Jordan, ‘Mise en Scéne, Part I’ Highlanes Gallery 27 August – 1 October 2022

THE FRENCH TERM mise en scéne is most often associated with cinemaphotography, referring to whatever is purposefully placed – sets, props, actors, and so on – before the film camera. It’s a term dedicated to the artifice of appearance, and the ways in which the world might be organised to tell a story. As a title for this exhibition of 16 oil paintings – with individual titles like Display, Collection, and Museum – it could refer to the situation of these objects within the distinctive gallery setting, as much as to the interior spaces depicted within the paintings themselves.

Occupying a former Catholic church, the Highlanes Gallery retains a sanctuary at one end, with ornate carvings and two light-lofting angels intact. There are corresponding figures within Jordan’s canvases, carved and cast intermediaries in silent communion. This preponderance of inanimate figures, alongside the inevitable anachronisms of historical display, made me think of Jean Cocteau’s, Orphée (1950), a film whose half-dead ciphers reprise the myth of Orpheus in postwar Paris.1 The film’s atmosphere of tainted innocence, of seemingly benign surfaces haunted by death, finds many parallels in the studied equanimity of Jordan’s careful compositions. In one memorable scene from the film, Jean Marais (playing Orpheus) dons rubber gloves to walk through a mirror and into the afterlife. Like the painter, he reaches beyond the seen world, but only so he can come back to it.

Jordan paints from her own photographs, taken, for the most part, in unidentified galleries and museums. Fixed in time, a photograph calls back to us from an increasingly distant past. Working within this poignant register, her recent paintings give account of how objects are gathered, preserved and re-presented, using recording and painterly methods that are themselves examples of these processes. Consider a painting like Collection IV (2022), a medium-sized work showing an oblique view of antiquities lined up against a wainscoted wall. At the centre of the wall, the loose folds of a heavy tapestry echo the cloak draping the outstretched arm of the Apollo Belvedere, standing before it. Not the real ‘Apollo’, but a smaller copy which, along with other ancient figures, makes up a cast of pale characters in the room. This deftly painted scene is thick with allusions to different materials and epochs, and most especially, to the enduring value of the hand. It’s how each of these objects was fashioned, not least, the handmade artifact of the painting itself.

In a further complication, the plinth supporting Apollo is painted to resemble marble, and this illusion of grandeur is redoubled by Jordan’s subsequent rendering. In touching the surface of the linen support – and by reaching beyond it – the painter references numerous ideas of tactility. Though seemingly innocuous in their period setting, these figures enact a quiet frisson of touching. We might say they are aroused by light – and the artist has gorgeous control of this – but caught, like Orpheus, between two worlds, between warm-blooded life and what Rainer Maria Rilke calls, “the strange unfathomed mine of souls.”2

Not directly represented in the paintings, the human figure appears by proxy, both as sculptural form and within the material traces of the paintings themselves. Jordan’s world is sensuous, but archaic; tactile, yet untouchable. Display 1 (2021) shows a life-sized statue of a figure hugging a cloak around herself. Though not named, for me, she is Eurydice, the wife of Orpheus, and like her, vulnerable to the overly determined gaze. In Rilke’s poem, Orpheus. Eurydice. Hermes (1907), as Eurydice is halted along the path from the underworld and guided to go back, her cloak envelopes her completely, becoming an unambiguous shroud. In the painting, whether by happenstance or deliberate irony, the paused figure is surrounded by exit signs.

Jordan paints thinly. The brushmark is visible, but discreet, with little sign of revision or overworking. In

Anatomy Room V (2022) the ghostly presence is more visceral – discreetly sheeted bundles within the gently modulating whites and greys. Here and there, the cool palette is punctuated by yellow, the buckets and bins indispensable to the anatomist’s trade. The columns in the painting play peek-a-boo with the supporting columns in the gallery. There are similar, pleasing correspondences throughout. Intelligently curated by Margarita Cappock, this presentation of the paintings brings their inner worlds and outer surroundings to life.

John Graham is an artist based in Dublin.

‘Mise en Scéne, Part I’ was presented at Highlanes Gallery, while ‘Mise en Scéne, Part II’

continues at Crawford Art Gallery (9 September – 4 December).

highlanes.ie

1 Jean Cocteau, Orphée, 1950, black and white film, 95 mins.

2 Rainer Maria Rilke, Orpheus, Eurydice, Hermes, first published in New Poems: First Part (Leipzig: Insel, 1907); quote from trans. J.P. Leishman, Selected Poems (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1964).

Eithne Jordan, ‘Mise en scène: Part I’, installation view, Highlanes Gallery; photograph by Eugene Langan courtesy the artist and Highlanes Gallery.

Eithne Jordan, Museum XXV, 2020, oil on linen; photograph courtesy of artist and Highlanes Gallery.

Michelle Malone, ‘O, to have a little house’ The LAB Gallery 9 September – 5 November 2022

All images: ‘O, to have a little house’, installation view, The LAB Gallery, October 2022; photography by Louis Haugh courtesy of the artist and The LAB Gallery.

O, to have a little house! To own the hearth and stool and all! The heaped up sods upon the fire, The pile of turf against the wall!

– Padraic Colum, An Old Woman of the Roads

LOCATION IS EVERYTHING for Michelle Malone’s first solo exhibition. Her multidisciplinary practice draws on her own personal experiences and those of her extended family, growing up in social housing in Dublin’s inner-city. The LAB is tucked away behind Talbot Street in the historic heart of the city, its modern custom-built gallery space a sharp contrast to the old Georgian Quarter where the tenements once stood. Turning the corner, passers-by are ambushed by a large cut-out of a familiar statue. It is a representation on a grand scale of the Child of Prague – a religious icon traditionally put outside by Irish mothers for good luck and sunshine on wedding days. The colour and absurd size echo the appearance of a shop window display, but the sturdy plywood cut-out holds a poignant sense of human absence that subverts any advertising potential.

Malone’s installation in the main gallery space is angled towards the enormous windows and is presented to the public in the form of two ‘rooms’. The ‘good room’ is complete with a familiar 1970s carpet with a pattern of brown swirly leaves; there is a staircase with the same carpet, while a large tapestry of a domestic interior hangs on the wall. The ‘garden room’ contains a matching tapestry and newly dug soil, suggesting the possibilities of a garden or vegetable plot. A pile of neatly folded tea towels sits on a cosy wooden chair. The optimum view from the street outside brings to mind a stage set for a Seán O’Casey play.

Upon entering the gallery, visitors walk around the installation as the ‘rooms’ have their back to the white walls, and seemingly force us to almost press against the windows or walk across the freshly laid carpet. This smell evokes strong memories of the excitement of moving house. A woman’s voice recites the poem An Old Woman of the

Roads by Padraic Colum, evocative of family parties, where everyone prepared a ‘party piece’ to entertain relatives and friends.

In a witty refusal of the white cube, the upstairs gallery space has floor-to-ceiling white net curtains. This traditionally gendered domestic space shows pride in a new home, through the carefully chosen furniture, the chair and the dresser with matching blue and white delftware. Visitors discover that the installation is in fact a personal interrogation of home. The artist’s grandmother moved from the tenements to the inner-city flats and eventually to her own home in Finglas. The artist found photographs in her grandmother’s archive of the interior of the new house. In a clever appropriation, Malone has reproduced these photographs as tapestries.

The focal point of the exhibition is the staircase. In the tenements, where large families often shared one room, the staircase was an important place to have private conversations. This habit of sitting on the stairs to chat is central to the action in Malone’s installation. A sense of community through suggested conversation is inherent in the staircase, emphasising the disenfranchised voice. Here, the women do all the talking.

The back gallery space screens an RTÉ documentary about the move from Dublin’s tenements into the suburbs. A young woman with a buggy is pleased that her children sleep much better in the peaceful suburbs. According to the exhibition press release, Malone aims to “enter authentic working-class symbolism into the (artistic) canon” (dublincityartsoffice.ie). Indeed, we find plenty of symbolism here, from the materiality of the swirling carpets to the giant Child of Prague. By including personal narratives, Malone goes beyond stereotypes of the witty working-class Dubliner (courtesy of writers like Roddy Doyle) to bring an intimate and embodied understanding of the working-class experience to new audiences.

Beatrice O’Connell is a multidisciplinary artist based in Dublin.

Caoimhe McGuckin, ‘Fathom’ Riverbank Arts Centre, Newbridge 9 September – 28 October

Caoimhe McGuckin, Blink of an eye, 2022, Grandfather clock, treated mirror, image, tags, negatives; photograph by Brian Cregan, courtesy of Caoimhe McGuckin and Riverbank Arts Centre.

IN 2017, CAOIMHE McGuckin graduated from NCAD, and in 2019 she received Kildare County Council Arts Service and Riverbank Arts Centre’s Emerging Visual Artist Bursary Award. This September saw the opening of her first solo show, presenting a series of 40 artworks on the theme of measurement – though the year in which each artwork was made was not disclosed. Whilst disabling any chronological reading of her practice, careful and at times delicate installation suggests that this was a deliberate sidestep. The exhibition statement refers to the intervening years (including the Covid-19 pandemic) as an inspiration, with measurement serving as an “ordering principle […] in the face of uncertainty and powerlessness”, out of which the artist sought to construct her own “personal system of measurement as filtered through an imperfect metric”.

An accompanying text offers individual descriptions for this body of work, pointing to historical eras as diverse as twelfth-century Europe, pre-Christian Ireland, and pre-Islamic Middle Eastern trade routes, while exploring size, weight, length, and various suppositions made between the body and its relationship to the material world. With all of the works situated in one room – from handcrafted and repurposed objects, to castings, dioramas, and looped screening – one is never too far from curious allegory. The source of each work is the rich heritage of human invention. Whether ancient, academic, or folk in nature, these roots offer added dimension to McGuckin’s work, as they do to

the human story.

As standardisation of measurement arose from trade, forming the basis of agreements and cultural exchange, power predictably remained with those who set the scales. In King’s Reach for example, we learn that a yard is the measure of King Henry VIII, from his nose to his outstretched hand. A disembodied plaster cast nose, linked to a thimble by a simple chain, ably illustrates the tale. Knowing the king first-hand would appear to provide a category of proof in all matters where the yard measure was applied. With calculations related to trade and land tax settled in this way, clergy and noblemen gained particular advantage over lower subjects, who could only trust what they were told.

Comprising distinct and evolving practices, ranging from the exact, but no less poetic, to the practical and irreverent, ‘Fathom’ assembles a picture of people in dialogue with the world as they find it. So, while we learn of a group of twentieth-century Harvard students employing one of their fellows to measure a public bridge, we are also told how 12 thumb lengths was the size of an Irishman’s ‘foot’, and how a ‘geansaí load’ is the number of apples that can be secreted away in an upturned jumper. Presumably none of these are conceived with trade in mind, language and discourse serving instead to fix their anecdotal method into living use.

Throughout the work, linguistic markers appear as starting points, from which the artist has made devices

suited to her own needs. McGuckin’s works present a visual language whose character is often personal, as outlined in Blink of an Eye and Crow’s Feet, A Privilege – each common language terms for the appearance of time. Where the former is represented through a grandfather clock, whose face has been replaced with mirrored glass, the latter repurposes a fishing net to function as a wall hanging, upon which cards and envelopes are attached. Encountered through reflection and memory alike, the personal is re-established in forms that evoke trust. Through a daughter’s closed eyes, photographed and placed to meet the viewer’s gaze from behind glass, or the close friend whose laughter lines did not have long enough to develop, the passing of time appears as an elusive but inescapable fixture of life.

The ancient Greek mathematician, Euclid, postulated that a straight line can be drawn between any two points. Although not directly referred to, this expression shadows McGuckin’s Unreliable Rulers. While space may be linear, experience is less so. With numbers replaced by emoji transfers, the line drawn between ‘happy face’ and ‘sad face’ seems to playfully mock our attempts to measure emotion. Altogether, ‘Fathom’ is a kind of wunderkammer or cabinet of curiosities; it shows how measurement connects, but also why it is connection and not measurement that we ultimately seek.

Darren Caffrey is an artist based in Kilkenny.

Caoimhe McGuckin, Rate of knots, 2022, Riverbank Arts Centre, September 2022; photograph by Brian Cregan, courtesy of Caoimhe McGuckin and Riverbank Arts Centre.

Caoimhe McGuckin, The wind out of your sails, 2022, wood, aluminium, silk, small accordion book; photograph by Brian Cregan, courtesy of Caoimhe McGuckin and Riverbank Arts Centre.

‘Braid’ Lord Mayor’s Pavilion, Cork September – 1 October 2022

THE GROUP EXHIBITION, ‘Braid’, is a collaboration between four artists, developed during the Covid-19 lockdown. Samir Mahmood, John MacMonagle, Edith O’Regan, and Amna Walayat all live in Ireland but have different cultural backgrounds. South Asian aesthetics are blended here with a western visual lexicon, and this activates the space in unsettling ways. There is solidarity and friendship in the enterprise, made palpable by the common theme of loss, which is felt and treated differently by all.

Amna Walayat shows three self-portraits in the style of modern neo-miniature – a traditional Pakistani painting practice1 revivified by modern artists, who eschew historical rules to fabricate their own narratives. In Self-portrait with Lock, a veiled Amna in profile holds a tiny padlock; her wrist is tethered by a ribbon that drifts out of the picture frame. In Building a Home With Thread, Amna is in a sumptuous setting, but is enmeshed in a cat’s cradle of thread, suggesting domestic entrapment. In the final portrait, Amna has a luxurious moustache, no veil, but holds up a long, sharp, threaded needle. Standing back from the work, it is clear that the threads have significance – they expand each painting into three glass jars of formaldehyde that lie beneath the works and below the normal line of sight. The result is disconcerting. What is lost here, and what is preserved? Walayat’s work is about gender, race, tradition, migration, identity and belonging. By employing self-portraiture and triangulating between herself, the frame, and the symbolic objects that she holds, she is foregrounding the loss of agency felt by minor categories in every culture, conjuring a model of cross-cultural empathy. These paintings are intriguing, arresting, and exquisite.

Edith O’Regan utilises gold leaf, gold wax, gold, dyed thread, and blown glass. Her visual language is abstract and spare – a contraposition to the neo-miniature style. Like Walayat, she has made a cage of thread. See how the unknown merges into the known, is a wooden, hand-dyed indigo silk and gold thread sculpture. The artist’s intention is to document and to invoke memory. She is interested in the unconscious human mind and how this affects perception. In On a day when the wind is perfect, she echoes some of the decoration of neo-miniature by inscribing personal symbolic markings onto a gold circle, thus thrusting the viewer into a state between reading and looking, thereby transcending the limits of conventional language. The work conveys something ineffable. Final Breaths (a requiem) is comprised of 22 suspended blown glass orbs. The amount of air in each orb correlates to the quantity of air in a human breath. This commemorates the last breath of 22 health care workers who sadly died as a result of Covid-19.

Samir Mahmood is a multidisciplinary artist who exhibits digital collages, and artworks that incorporate photographs into Indo-Persian miniature painting through acrylic image transfer. Using traditional methods on panel and canvas, the paintings are full of symbolic motifs. The result is complex and intriguing but also incendiary.

The subject of the queer male body would never have been acknowledged in traditional miniatures, and so this work calls out the broken narratives of patriarchal and homophobic societies. It mourns the resulting loss of agency and personal sovereignty. It critiques cultural, legal, and moral fictions, and yet the work is sumptuous and beautifully crafted – these images are objects of contemplation and objects of desire.

John MacMonagle’s mixed-media sculpture and paintings invoke the tree from Waiting for Godot, which symbolises a world that is meaningless. This is existential nihilism – a painful feeling familiar to anyone who lost a loved one in a care home or hospital during the pandemic. MacMonagle works in acrylic on canvas and paper; his marks are broad sure lines made with a thick scratchy brush, very different to the tiny brushes of miniature painting. He repeats the same imagery in the same colourways and style, evoking repetitive prayers – three small black plastic bags tied with red ribbons, the sum of a life. MacMonagle seems to support a defiant and important voice: power is illusory in the face of a pandemic.

Jennifer Redmond is an artist and writer based in Cork.

1 Miniature painting is characterised by tea staining and layering of colour and gold, methodically applied to handmade wasli paper. The colours are luxuriant, the work is highly decorated, and lines are made with purpose and meditation.

Amna Walayat, Self-Portrait as Bride 2, 2022 [detail] 24 gold, tea wash, pencil, watercolour, gouache, neem rung (half tone), thread, on wasli paper; photograph by the artist, courtesy Sample Studios.

Samir Mahmood, Ewer Issues, 2022 [detail] image transfer on panels, acrylic paint, crinoline tubing; photograph by the artist, courtesy Sample Studios.

John MacMonagle, Three Bags On a Beckett Tree, 2022, mixed-media sculpture; photograph by Sinéad Barrett, courtesy the artist and Sample Studios.