C111 review

Dialogues: Women Artists from Ireland

Frances Hegarty: Auto Portrait #2, 2001, video installation; photo: Andrew Stones 2002; courtesy the artist

This book is a researcher’s dream, two hundred pages of primary material - was the thought that crossed my mind when I heard of the publication of this book. And so it is. Dialogues… functions as a recording device, giving voice to this group of artists whose works are normally analysed, interpreted and interceded with by art critics. Here they speak for themselves.

Deepwell sets out clear parameters, ones which the book title does not do justice to. She selected these sixteen women artists based on “the location of their major exhibitions on the island of Ireland during the 1990s.” The interviews therefore focus around these exhibitions, but then naturally progress to the artists discussing their very diverse and eclectic practices. Deepwell, through her questions, does not aim to link these artists with some forcibly perceived Irish female aesthetic and rarely brings up the topical issue of gender and nationality. She explains her wariness of either above category in the introduction by stating,

This book does not set out to establish a singular, coherent or fixed set of identities for these artists…In relation to both art practice and the idea of the woman artist, this book offers such a diversity of practices and political / cultural views that it refuses any singular notion of Irishness or Irish identity either amongst or between artists.

Whatever links might be made are left entirely to the reader. Or the reader might be captivated instead by the artists’ life stories that emerge. Almost all the artists discuss developments in their life in association with developments in their art practice. Orla Barry, as the first artist due to alphabetical order, sets up this art-in-relation-to-life model as a result of the nature of her art practice, which has its base in free-form daily journal writings. In this way, the book becomes performative and enters the process of art, writing and performance itself.

Dialogues… transformed, after reading the first several interviews, from an art-research book to a ‘good read’, a compelling book of mini art autobiographies offering brief openings into these artists’ lives and practices. By linking art and life, Dialogues… participates in a feminist precept that operates behind such a book: that their art articulates the experience of being an Irish woman artist and that art cannot be disassociated from its roots in the cultural and social climate of creation. Putting these personal artistic tales into the public arena follows upon that earlier feminist mantra ‘the personal is political’. The book is a manifestation of this statement, especially when one considers that no comparable book exists for Irish contemporary art as a whole. The book makes it clear that women have richly contributed innovative and influential art to the Irish art scene during the 1990s. Dialogues… is itself therefore a serious contribution to the arena of contemporary Irish art practice. It should be read by art-industry people here in order to learn what it is that makes worthwhile art that enters exhibition spaces and reaches audiences.

Sheila Dickinson is writing a dissertation on gender and art practice in contemporary Irish art in the History of Art Department at University College Dublin.

Artists covered in the book: Orla Barry, Maud Cotter, Pauline Cummins, Rita Duffy, Frances Hegarty, Jaki Irvine, Sandra Johnston, Sharon Kelly, Mary McIntyre, Susan McWilliam, Alice Maher, Alanna O’Kelly, Catherine Owens, Vivienne Roche, Anne Tallentire, Louise Walshe

Katy Deepwell: Dialogues: Women Artists from Ireland London and New York: I.B. Taurus, 2005

Article reproduced from CIRCA 111, Spring 2005, pp.104–105

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