CIRCA 113 Obituaries
Aileen MacKeogh
The untimely death of Aileen MacKeogh, head of the School of Creative Arts at Dún Laoghaire Institute of Art, Design and Technology, occurred on 23 May, 2005. Aileen became head of school in 1997; since then, with formidable organisational skill and vision, she transformed what was then known as the Dún Laoghaire College of Art into the dynamic institution of creative practices it is today.
Aileen graduated from the National College of Art and Design, Dublin, with a BA in Fine Art in 1976. She took an MFA in Southern Illinois University in Sculpture in 1981. She returned to Ireland where she became one of a number of pioneering women artists who came to prominence between 1975 and 1985, such as Cecily Brennan, Kathy Prendergast and Dorothy Cross. Up to the mid-sixties, Irish art was emphatically insular. It tended towards the nationalistic, with a predominantly rural perspective, shored up by a conservative educational system. Aileen contributed significantly to breaking this mould, as both an artist and an educator.
As a young teacher in NCAD, to which she returned in 1982, Aileen was to the fore in broadening the work practices of the Sculpture department to include video, film, photography, sound, installation, assemblage and performance. She was a gifted and inspiring educationalist.
Her early relief sculpture was mainly concerned with landscape. Exhibitions such as Forest Fragments , Project Arts Centre, 1982; Thedral Thicket , Triskel, Cork, 1983; and Landlesions , Hendriks Gallery, 1986, explored different aspects of land and nature as the repositories of meaning. The early multi-media landscapes are often cut away or cross-sectioned to reveal what lies beneath - what is normally unseen - peeling away layer after layer, to get to the heart of the matter. There are recurring binary oppositions evident within the work: inside and out; above and below; nature and artifice; revelation and concealment. Increasingly anthropomorphic, landscape eventually gives way to manmade structure in House , Project Arts Centre, 1991. This dramatic shift in direction was caused by a life-changing event in Aileen's own life: the death of her son, Luke, in 1987. What emerged two years after she resumed working was a hugely challenging corpus of work in which she seems to have shifted from a naturalistic to a humanistic world-view. As the practice of art is a primal instinct, Aileen was unable to remain silent. Although intensely private about her own life, she set about a remarkably difficult task. She wanted her work to express her own deepest thoughts and emotions while, for public consumption, she wanted the distillation of her experience to create the opportunity for her audience to reflect on more universal concepts and meanings, concerned with disaster, mortality and renewal.
In relation to one of her installations, Deadheading - in which she explored conflicting emotions evoked by confronting issues surrounding life, death and beauty - with poignant prescience, Aileen wrote:
From the very beginning of our lives the only certainty is that we will die. Yet there is an unnatural fear of death. We are happy to look at life. We take delight in documenting its various manifestations. But we are uncomfortable looking death in the eye. We are even more uncomfortable looking at something beautiful dying. There is a time and place for death and everything should be in its proper time and place.
Three years ago, when Aileen was diagnosed with cancer, she started that journey herself. What was so remarkable about her was the courage with which she faced her own illness and death. When she first told me she had cancer, she declared that while she could not pretend that she would enjoy it, she intended to live her illness to the full. She had an unflinching capacity to confront the huge tragedies dealt her in her too short life - the unbearable loss of a child, her own illness and pain, and even her own death. She had so much more to give, not least to return to her own art practice. Within days of her death, she was still looking forward to all the things she wanted to do. She was a remarkable woman, with huge personal qualities, a most cherished friend.
Niamh O'Sullivan
Gerald Davis
I first met Gerald Davis in the early 1970s, at an opening in the Dawson Gallery. Having been a painter himself for a number of years, he realised that there was no gallery in Dublin showing the work of young artists and was about to open the Davis Gallery in the rooms above his family's rubber stamp shop in Capel Street. I had just left NCAD and, in spite of the fact that I was working in an unusual and unproven medium (batik), he gave me my first show and I began to imagine, how, just how unusual the Davis Gallery was in its early years. It showed new as well as established artists, ceramic and textiles as well as traditional painting and sculpture, and all on the north side of the Liffey. Gerald made buying art fun: there was often food (smoked salmýn, cream cheese and bagels which he called a Jewish New York breakfast) at Sunday morning openings, sometimes music - usually very good jazz. I bought my first painting there as did many who are now established collectors. And Ð best of all for us, the artists - the Davis Gallery paid us within a few weeks of making the sale. Alongside all the work he was doing on behalf of other artists, he was also painting and exhibiting in galleries both in Dublin and around the country. He loved the act of painting - the smell of oil paint on canvas and the sheer thrill when work was going well. He was far too often flippant about what he did; hiding how much his painting mattered to him, how important it was. He hated the fact that painting as he knew it seemed to be in the doldrums and had no time for the sort of shoddy, unimaginative and downright dull work that he felt was being shown in many galleries - especially those in receipt of state funding. He wrote long and elaborate letters in the newspapers, to IMMA, to the Douglas Hyde Gallery (and probably to CIRCA too), bemoaning the demise of well crafted and well worked-out painting and sculpture. He fought hard for what he believed in. When he was diagnosed with cancer of the larynx in 2003 he treated the news in quite a matter-of-fact way. He had it, it had been caught early, he would have the treatment and he would beat it. He continued painting, went to Annamakerrig, made more paintings and had more treatment. He had one operation, then another. When he could no longer talk, he wrote in a reporter's spiral notebook. He never gave up or lost his sense of humour. I still have, in my phone, the last text he sent me. I asked him could he come to lunch and he texted back, "Probably, but I am a lousy conversationalist!" Gerald David lived his life as he wanted to. He gave gave encouragement to me and to many other artists over the years. He was a good friend. I miss him.
Bernadette Madden
