C101
Article
Dublin:
Caroline McCarthy at Temple Bar Gallery
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Caroline
McCarthy: Escape, 2002, installation view;
courtesy Temple Bar Gallery & Studios
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Port Sunlight is a Unilever research and development centre in Wirral,
Merseyside, responsible for innovations in the company's personal-care
product range and global laundry brands. Long before they discovered
the wonders of moisturising creams proven to be clinically milder
on the skin, the place was a model village founded by William Hesketh
Lever for his soap-factory workers and named after his famous Sunlight
Soap.
As the title for Caroline McCarthy's AIB Prize exhibition it locates
her work in this utopian domesticity rather than as a critique of
corporate philanthropy and R&D. Having said that, there is something
wonderfully perverse about spending her prize money on toilet paper
and anything she could find with leopard skin printed on it.
Escape,
2002, was retail therapy run amok. A timber-frame room with no solid
walls was decorated with leopard-skin-pattern furniture and fittings.
Strangely enough, the home of the designers Dolce & Gabbana,
as featured recently in Hello Magazine, is similarly overloaded
with animal-skin patterns and exotic-pelt upholstery. McCarthy's
work, however, is not just about the elevation of kitsch to haute
culture. With the accumulation of all things leopard skin into a
cage-like bed-sit structure, and with no intervention other than
placing them where they should be in the room, mass consumption
suddenly became quietly neurotic. It represents all that is wrong
with a global economy; it's the exotic other tamed, repackaged and
made redundant; it's sameness eliminating difference; freedom trapped
by excess.
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Caroline
McCarthy: Composition 3, 2002; courtesy Temple Bar
Gallery & Studios
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With the remainder of the exhibition issues surrounding representation
become more central. A series of medium- to large-scale colour photographs
depict classic still-life compositions of fruit and vegetables.
It's clear they are not real as they have the charm of marzipan
sweets, yet those hues come not from almond, sugar and food colouring
but from toilet paper. McCarthy used a huge range of toilet-paper
colours to render these delights in wet papier-mâché. Backed by
black bin liners and littered with plastic flies, they luxuriate
in their artificiality. The photographs are presented as evidence
of temporary sculptures, documents of these ephemeral arrangements.
The images obviously reference the still-life tradition, from seventeenth-century
Dutch painters like Jan van Kessel through to Claude Monet in the
last century, but let's not forget photography. Like any new media
it mimicked previous representation systems. Starting with Nicephore
Niepce's Set Table, ca. 1827 heliograph, or the Impressionist
orgy of colour in Henrich Kuhn's Pictorialist gum-bichromate print
Still Life, 1904, and ending maybe, if we widen our definition,
with Sam Taylor-Wood's 2001 film Still Life, showing fruit
rot in a bowl. McCarthy's work, however, is determined to follow
a different path. Here, the photograph becomes a trompe l'oeil,
an impossibility really when all photographic description is a form
of fiction. Sharing more commonality with Mark Dion's cultural archaeology
than Juan Fontecuberta's fake flora and fauna, the photographs overcome
their own visual deception to thankfully side-step the simulacrum
and enjoy their mnemonic potential, entering history with a delightfully
laborious slight of hand.
Alan
Phelan is an artist and curator who lives and works in Dublin.
Caroline McCarthy: Port Sunlight, Winning Exhibition, AIB
Art Prize 2001, Temple Bar Gallery and Studios, May-July, 2002
Article
reproduced from CIRCA 101, Autumn 2002,
pp. 62-63.
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