THE
CONTEMPORARY PRINT IN IRELAND
September
9 - October 10
Curatorial
Essay
The
West of Ireland is an inspiring and beautiful place.
Stark, remote and sublime, its rolling terrain is punctuated by verdant,
saturated patches of sod that abruptly terminate as turf and rock collide with
the sea. Wind and precipitation are
thrust on by the vast Atlantic and the elements are a constant preoccupation.
It has been this way for a long time.
Pockets of civilization from Viking, early Christian, to Celts have
endured throughout its famously rugged history.
This is a crag in the
midst of the great sea, and again and again the blown surf drives right over
it before the violence of the wind, so that you daren’t put your head out
any more than a rabbit that crouches in his burrow in Inishvickillaun when the
rain and the salt spume are flying. Often
would we put to sea at the dawn of day when the weather was decent enough, and
by the day’s end our people on land would be keening us, so much had the
weather changed for the worse. It
was our business to be out in the night, and the misery of that sort of
fishing is beyond telling
Excerpt
from Tomas O’Crohan, The Islandman, 1937
County
Kerry is situated in the southwest. The
small village of Dunquin, near Dingle, is where Maria Simonds-Gooding (born in
India) has lived since 1947. The
concept of an artist in isolation, perched on a cliff overlooking the ocean is
where I would like to start this essay on THE CONTEMPORARY PRINT IN IRELAND.
This
exhibition comes out of my interest in the Irish and to examine printmaking as
one-facet of the emerging visual-culture being produced in this small country
– in the midst of the great sea – on the edge of continental Europe,
between the old world and the new.
I
learned of Maria’s work while exploring the rural character of the Dingle
Peninsula. Her imagery communicates
the essential sublimity I’ve made reference to, born out of her relationship
to the land and proximity to the Great Blasket Islands.
The Blasket Islands were settled since medieval times, but uninhabited
since 1957. Its former Gaelic
population, sparse in numbers, often doubled to accommodate starving peasants
fleeing from the mainland. It is
where Simonds-Gooding spends weeks at a time, alone, immersing herself in the
experience of nature and isolation, living on the edge as she says, “To feel
at one with the land.”
Her
print Road on the Blasket Island gives evidence of the past inhabitants,
a place that now looks inhospitable and bleak.
Her description of such an environment is amplified through the graphic
muse of the etching medium. In
another work titled The Dolphin Rising with the Sun, homage is paid to
the famous Dingle dolphin Fungi, a folk legend that is seen as a marine
ambassador of friendship and courtesy, and is familiar to all in Ireland.
It
is in stark contrast to the capital of Dublin, the historic backdrop to writers
such as James Joyce, Oscar Wilde and George Bernard Shaw.
Urbanization and phenomenal economic growth (10% in the year 2000) has
been the subject of international envy since the early 1990s, and transformed
this once broken down, hard on its luck city.
Other cities of the Republic of Ireland, such as Cork, Galway, Limerick,
and Kilkenny, exhibit the signs of a newly urbanized country.
There is a newfound prosperity, and with it, a new sophistication in
lifestyle, cultural activity, and an emphasis on material possessions.
Stores proliferate, real estate has gone through the roof and,
symbolically, luxury car dealers cannot keep up with the demand.
This turn around began in 1973 when Ireland joined the European Union,
which in turn funded improvements in the country’s decaying infrastructure.
The Irish Arts Council was also established that year.
Another factor was a drastic change in economic policy initiated in the
late 1980s. Taxes were cut, labour
peace was established, and foreign corporations and investments were encouraged
(Canada has
taken
an active role in the latter). Gone
is the sentimentality of old rural Ireland, the image of cottage, donkey and
church. Also gone are the
poverty, unemployment, isolation, censorship and self-doubt that characterized
Ireland for a good part of the 19th and 20th centuries.
The high-tech industry has made a huge impact to Ireland and resulted in
a near miraculous transformation from an agrarian past to an economy driven by
information technology and accompanying services.
Yet,
as this sudden and dramatic turn is celebrated, there is also a re-examination
of the Irish identity and some uneasiness with the clash of the new and old.
What does it mean to be Irish in an Ireland that is revising the
perception of itself and the world? Alan
Riding of the New York Times asked, “Can the Irish become modern without
becoming less Irish?” The young,
who emigrated from a stagnant Ireland and its problems of the past, are
returning with knowledge, criticality and creative talents cultivated abroad.
I believe the artistic discourse is stimulated when informed from beyond
the national borders. There is, as
a consequence, an undeniable shift in art announcing the new vision that emerged
in the mid 1970s. Declan McGonagle, Director of the Irish Museum of Modern Art
(founded in 1991) wrote an essay (Artforum, 1993) titled Ireland’s Eyes,
New History from Beyond the Pale.
Ireland
and its artists are in the process of assembling a new cultural matrix that is
of particular significance at the end of the 20th century, when it
is suddenly growing possible to pass through the network of classifications
that normally locate and hold positions in cultural space.
New navigations of identity are emerging internationally;
perhaps unexpectedly, Ireland is in their forefront.
The deep cultural and therefore political fault lines that invisibly
underpin the Modernist imaginative space of the West are exposed at the
surface in Ireland, which still inhabits that moment of shift from the
pre-Modern to the Modern. We have
sought to overcome this condition through something called “progress”;
actually it’s what we have to offer the world.
The negotiation of identity is a familiar process in Ireland, for the
articulations of modernity have never been resolved here.
The territory has remained contested.
The condition that made Ireland especially Northern Ireland marginal in
the recent past now makes them and other like them central.
This
translates into an open forum of social inquiry, manifested by sweeping change
that has introduced a new sense of liberty.
Artists are addressing sensitive topics such as the traditional power of
the Catholic Church and the oppression of the Irish woman (the work of Siobhan
Piercy and Sue Cunliffe), subjects that not long ago were considered taboo.
Beyond the Pale is, in fact, a telling expression. McCongale
writes, “it was actually coined in Ireland where, in the 15th
century, British colonizers built a palisade or ‘pale’ in a wide arc around
Dublin. Within the fence was
civilization, authority, order, outside it were chaos and the barbarians.”
The
two works by Joy Gerrard refer to order and authority.
Arteries positions the viewer at the heart of the city complex
(Dublin), examining systemic structure and pathways of urban commerce and
movement. Gerard’s work can also
be viewed as an historical document in time, appearing strangely archaeological
as old buildings are obliterated, and massive gentrification and redevelopment
makes way for the new. An architect
told me,” There has never been a greater time in Ireland’s history to be an
architect.” I counted over a
dozen construction crane towers along the River Liffey waterfront on the eastern
half of the city. At the same time,
Joy’s printmaking also counters the romantic tradition of isolation and
landscape discussed earlier.
The
etchings of Niall Naessens take a different perspective in interpreting the
land, the Irish coastline and the constant change of weather patterns (always a
topic of conversation amongst the Irish). His
mechanical renderings of crosshatched line, meticulously etched and printed from
the copper plate, build descriptive colour and atmospheric density.
With titles like Wind South South East
Force 2-4, they
“report” on climatic conditions in a manner that parallels that of a
meteorologist.
Niall
and Joy are emerging artists who, along with John Graham, Stephan Lawlor, James
O’Nolan, Taffina Flood and Marc Reilly, represent work done at Dublin’s
Graphic Studio, the oldest communal print workshop in Ireland.
Founded in 1961 by the late Patrick Hickey, the studio has been situated
in the city’s industrial warehouse district since 1983 (neighbouring the
supergroup U2’s recording studio headquarters).
It has played an important role in facilitating the progression of
printmaking to its recognized status within contemporary visual art.
Printmakers
at Graphic Studio developed the carborundum print that mixes fine grit with
acrylic polymer. When deposited
onto a plate base, the results can produce characteristics that parallel the
dense saturation and surface texture found in painting.
Two nationally respected painters are included in this exhibition,
through carborundum print work executed at the studio, Tony O’Malley’s Lanzarotte
Suite No.4 and Felim Egan’s Inish Eoghain.
Egan, the first Irish artist to have a solo exhibition at Amsterdam’s
prestigious Stedelijk Museum, has become a prolific maker of prints, seeing a
vital symbiosis between his painting practice and his press.
Nobel laureate Seamus Heaney has said of Felim’s work, “when I look
for metaphors to represent his vision, I think on the one hand of a lantern room
at the top of a lighthouse, a place full of prisms and precision, a Euclidean
system; but I also see the offing
veiled in mist, the withheld commingling with the revealed, the solitude of a
self standing wide open.”
John
Graham’s carborundum prints produce a quality of shallow relief.
Unity and coherence are revealed through the process and structure with a
clear intent to work within and around defined parameters.
Here, an imagined grid coolly governs the articulation of a pictorial
system, inferred and unobtrusive. A
compelling aspect of his work is the interrelationship between opposites,
conducted through improvisations that alter in tempo and vary in rhythm.
This type of virtuoso authorship is contrasted by Fiona McDonald’s two
intaglio works, influenced by her background in biological chemistry.
McDonald’s approach to image development is of interest because she
forsakes the more deliberate practice of grounding, drawing, etching, inking,
wiping, and printing the plate in the traditional manner of intaglio.
Using an electrolytic process that decomposes the metal plate (by
electric current), she prints imagery that is determined by the chemical
transformation. As McDonald writes,
the work takes on ‘an organic quality both in its appearance and its ability
to grow and change.”
The
Black Church studio where McDonald produces her prints -- is a more recent entry
into Dublin’s cultural sector. Relocated
in the heart of the Temple Bar District, Black Church offers an alternative to
Graphic Studio. The Temple Bar district is also the home to an assortment of
pubs, clubs, eateries and shops, numerous galleries, artist and musicians
studios and collective centers such as the Art & Technological Art House,
the Dublin Institute School of Photography, Film Institute of Ireland, and the
Temple Bar Music Centre.
The
younger group of artists involved with Black Church have focused more on
lithographic and screenprinting processes whereas the majority of work in this
exhibition indicates that intaglio is the medium of choice at the moment (the
Irish seem to almost superstitiously distrust lithography).
The Black Church produced works include Colin Martin’s figurative
colour aquatint Cosin and Anthony Lyttle’s complex, metaphorical Boundary
Lines.
Cork
is the Republic of Ireland’s “second city” and maintains a rivalry with
Dublin to the north. (Dubliners
will respond to an individual’s unusual behaviour by commenting ‘They must
be from Cork!’) The
Cork-based works were produced at the printmaking faculty at the Crawford
College of Art & Design and the Cork Printmakers workshop.
The latter has recently
moved into a complex of artist spaces and exhibition areas that are located
along one of the city’s picturesque canals.
There is a different wave of consciousness towards print work, an
intoxicating mix of influences from popular culture, the allegorical and Celtic
mythology that can be identified in the work of Peter Dobson – King Kong,
Ping Pang – Debbie Godsell –Order – and Sue Cunliffe (done at
Crawford), It’s Safe to Come Out Now.
Dobson and Cunliffe utilize the relief manner of image construction. Lino
is the basis and multi-layered with a slick skin of colour oil pigment.
Brian Kennedy (work also produced at Crawford) is represented by one of
his modernist emblems, a colour field monotype meticulously crafted with bands
of saturated colour. This is a
dramatic juxtaposition to the work of his colleague Tony McLure, a black
photoetching that “depicts cows in snow.”
Two
instrumental print artists, both born in England, but now working in Ireland,
add to this diverse cross selection. Terry Gravett (currently based in Belfast)
is known for his body of mixed media prints – screen and woodcut.
Museum Series X salutes the institution as an exciting repository
of historical artifacts.
Siobhan
Piercy has migrated back and forth across the Irish Sea for her education and
professional work, and is now a full time lecturer at the Galway Regional
Technical College. Piercy’s
enigmatic screenprint titled I Was Still (Momentarily) in my Argument with a
Life Without Contradiction, makes obvious reference to self-role-identity in
an allegorical or parable form, unfolding between figuration and symbolism.
Her work brings back a topic raised earlier – the oppression of women
and the evolving role of the Irish artist renegotiating identity.
Like the Irish, Canadians have in common a newly developing contemporary
visual culture that has yet to achieve a concise status or full understanding.
There is s unique instructional relationship, Ireland to Canada , as both
countries are developing a visual cultural identity.
Doug
Biden
Professor,
Fine Arts Dept.
Okanagan
University College
Acknowledgements
I
would like to thank those who were instrumental in making this exhibition
possible. Okanagan University
College’s Grant in Aid funded my research abroad and provided the shipping of
work from Ireland. Margaret Dryden,
Director, and Ihor Holubizky, Senior Curator of the Kelowna Art Gallery showed
enthusiasm for co-hosting the exhibition with Okanagan University College.
Finally, my deep thanks to Jenny Tully, Administrator, and James
O’Nolan, Director at Dublin’s graphic Studio for providing assistance in
co-coordinating the consolidation of work from around Ireland, and sending it
onward!
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