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| Mary McIntyre: Veil, 2006 Lightjet colour photographic print, mounted on dibond (series), 80 x 100cm |
Mary McIntyre has exhibited extensively since the early 1990s. Her photographs, whether of deserted institutional spaces or nocturnal urban and suburban landscapes, often depict the familiar and banal. Through colour and use of available light, these scenes take on a heightened reality, appearing like empty stage sets. In recent photographs of landscapes, McIntyre has drawn on the influence of German Romanticism, with the inclusion of solitary figures contemplating the landscape around them, be it rural or man-made. McIntyre lives and works in Belfast where she is a lecturer in Fine Art at the University of Ulster.
In 2005, McIntyre was one of fourteen artists selected to represent Northern Ireland at the fifty-first Venice Biennale. The pavilion, curated by Hugh Mulholland, was Northern Ireland’s first official presentation at the Biennale. The nature of things, exhibited in the galleries at the Istituto Santa Maria della Pietà throughout the Biennale, featured a diverse array of practices including painting, sculpture, installation, video and photography.
JM: What was your experience of the Venice Biennale?
MM: I have to say that everything came together in a way that couldn’t have been any better. The amount of people that came to see the exhibition was incredible. So many people who went to the Biennale said that they considered it one of the best shows. The overwhelming response to the exhibition really surprised me because I thought – it’s Northern Ireland’s first time, so we shouldn’t expect too much at this point – but from the outset it was very well conceived, extremely well organised, really professionally presented and there was a real sense of camaraderie between all of the artists. I think it did demonstrate that art being made in Northern Ireland is worthy of being seen on an international platform. From the funders’ point of view and the remit of Northern Irish art being seen outside of Ireland by a huge number of people, I think it is the most cost effective way that they could possibly ever do it.
In many of your photographs, we the viewer take on the viewpoint of yourself, the artist observing behind the lens. In works exhibited in Venice, such as Vantage point I (2005) and Reverie (2005), a new viewpoint is introduced through the inclusion of a figure through which we mediate the image. How did the figure begin to emerge in your work?
I’d made work based on the idea of starting to introduce
the figure into the landscape. The works shown at Venice
were an extension of that. I had been referencing
German Romantic painting and notions of the sublime
– using the figure’s inclusion as a device to potentially
embody some of the viewer’s thoughts or feelings. In this
work, the figure’s relationship to the space is through
architecture rather than landscape, but the principle is
the same. I’d been working previously on allegory in
terms of landscape painting, but in the new works
I was exploring that further through the psychological
character of the spaces or environments that the
architecture had constructed – because what I was
looking at was public space and how buildings, rooms
and constructed environments make us feel or behave.
As the viewer, we are not just taking on the role of
onlooker, looking at the figure as just one element
within the photograph, we may also be able to receive
the image through the figure’s eyes/ experience, so
that even though we might not be able to see what that
figure is looking at, because what they are viewing is
off the picture plane, we can imagine it without being
able to see it.
On one level, your photographs depict detailed portrayals of reality, but on another level they are images in which our imaginations and fantasies can take hold. They create a very psychological space within the viewer – an interplay between interior thought and exterior reality.
Well that’s really what I think about the work. It’s not that I have a particular meaning that I want people to interpret, but I think that there is a thread running throughout my work, particularly in a lot of the recent work, which is based around one’s internal life, thoughts, feelings. That’s why I often use titles like Reverie, which convey that idea of being lost in one’s own thoughts and the notion that a lot of the time when we should be concentrating on something in particular, we’re not really seeing what is in front of us at all. Instead, we’re actually caught up in our own thoughts. I think that has become a very strong element in the work. I would hope that there is space in my work for people to indulge their own particular viewpoint.
In 2000, McIntyre created a series of photographs of institutional spaces. These ‘interior landscapes’ depicted interior spaces in a state of transition: desolate and abandoned workplaces that were disused; schools that were about to be pulled down, or redeveloped. The diptych, Space of doubt (2000), photographed at this time, was recently exhibited at the Goethe Institut’s Return Gallery in Dublin, as part of the Samuel Beckett Centenary celebrations.
How did the work Space of doubt come about?
I was in the process of taking photographs of
institutional spaces and at the time I was photographing
in a disused school. The assembly hall was one of the
spaces that I photographed and later I made that diptych
of the curtain images. I was unsure about why I was
interested in them, but I was reacting instinctively to
things, photographing something quite banal, but at the
same time having faith in the instinct that something
would come out of it. Afterwards, I began to think of the
psychological dimension of the work or what that work
could possibly mean. I think it had to do with the idea
that these curtains perhaps represented a separation,
something that divided one space from another. For me
that work presented a sense of unease about what is
behind that partition – and I don’t mean that in a real
physical sense of what is behind the curtains – but more
in terms of consciousness or the subconscious. It’s as
if the image started to embody ideas about the division
between different aspects of one’s thought process,
the thoughts we are conscious of or the thoughts
we are less sure of or suppress. So that the curtains in
the image acted as a shield or partition separating two
opposing states, like the present and the future or
the conscious and subconscious. I find that image
unnervingly still. But maybe that is reflected in the
spaces themselves, because when I was photographing
those buildings, I would be alone in the space for periods
of time. Sometimes people have commented that they
find those photographs incredibly lonely or melancholic
– and it’s funny, because that is contrary to the
experience I had in making the work. The spaces seemed
to me very peaceful, very still. Even now that many of
those buildings have been demolished, it feels almost as
if those places still exist in some sort of parallel setting
– but I think that it is because they have been recorded
and now exist in the photographs and seem to be
representative of a kind of psychological space.
In most of your works, even if they are devoid of human presence, it is implied in some way, whether in the representation of objects, traces of human activity, or through the feeling that somebody could walk into the scene. In Space of doubt (2000) and photographs from your recent Fog series (2006), that presence seems to have gone.
I think that in those images – although it wasn’t intentional, as I wasn’t looking at Caspar David Friedrich at the time that I was making Space of doubt – the viewer could become that person standing in front of the scene. Whether, as in Friedrich’s Wanderer, it is a landscape, or in my work it is fog or the curtains, it’s about the viewer’s relationship with what is being presented to them in the image. Although the view presented may be an external setting, it could actually signify for the viewer an internal view, introspection. It depends on the viewer’s outlook. The work, I think, embodies contradictions and dualities. Maybe that’s one reason why people have often linked my work to Beckett. Beckett’s work seems full of words, but at the same time can seem emptied of meaning; it has that duality. To me it has always seemed to constantly fluctuate between something seeming mammoth and yet at the same time, diminutive, important and unimportant – and I think that has always been a characteristic of my work. It can appear banal, empty, full of nothingness, but at the same time it could also seem to be the opposite of that.
Photography is very good at that – of making us look closer at something normally ubiquitous and banal. Your night photographs of suburban spaces, for example Afterwards (2004), are places that seem very familiar, but at the same time our interaction with these spaces is altered by the concentration of our gaze.
That’s something I hadn’t really considered until
I exhibited the work at the Arte Ricambi Gallery in
Verona. There the work received an unexpected response
because in my photographs of Irish suburban scenes,
the houses, streets and street lights were different to
those in Italy. Italian audiences almost seemed to
consider our yellow street light as having an exotic
quality to it, which I found a bit amusing. Certainly for
audiences in the UK or Ireland, these images present the
quality of the familiar – but at the same time they might
seem slightly unfamiliar, because the atmosphere in the
images is heightened due to the way that lighting can
dramatise a location at night. Certainly the locations are
very familiar to me; they are all close to where I live and
work. Sometimes I have to see a thing a number of times
before I think it’s worthy of being photographed, so these
locations are places I pass on a daily basis, maybe have
even been passing for months. On some days these
locations can seem incredibly photogenic and then at
another times the exact same place can appear really
uninteresting. During the day they are generic, incredibly
mundane locations, but at night they become transformed.
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| Mary McIntyre: Space of doubt, 2000 C-type colour photographic print (diptych), 128 x 154cm; courtesy the artist |
Have you noticed a different response to how photography is perceived in other countries?
Absolutely. Particularly in commercial terms, which
could be seen as a barometer for how photography is
valued. In my experience, photography is taken seriously
in other countries, and is purchased by collectors
without question in a way which does not happen in
Ireland unless you are an extremely well known artist,
whose work has managed to transcend that narrowness
about what is acceptable as an art form. My experience
recently in Europe was of photography selling very well
there, because they don’t have the same misgivings
about photography not being comparable to painting
– their decision to purchase photography is based on
whether or not they appreciate the work. I’m not saying
that in all quarters of the Irish art scene photography is
not taken seriously, but in terms of purchasing of work,
there is a completely different attitude. I didn’t realise
that until I’d exhibited a lot in other galleries abroad and
experienced the difference.
You seem to make very deliberate choices in the way that you display your work. For instance, in previous exhibitions you have used lightboxes to display your photographs, stapled large prints to the wall and leant framed photographs against the wall.
There are so many categories of photographer and
I’ve always felt like a fine artist first and photographer
second. I think that comes from my having worked in
a sculptural, installation background at art college.
I came to photography by an accidental route. It was a
by-product of my working process at that time, so with
that sensibility I would never be comfortable with the
idea of having all my photographs made to exactly the
same size, and displayed in exactly the same way. I’ve
always been very aware, in every gallery space or sitespecific
location that I’ve shown in, of working with the
dynamics of that particular space. Even though a gallery
space might seem like a neutral white cube, to me they
all have inherently different qualities and atmospheres.
What are you currently working on?
There are a number of different series of work ongoing,
as I tend to have different series running simultaneously,
so I might return to a previous idea or body of work after
a period of time. Currently I’m working on about four
different series – one set of images is related to the new
Fog series, but I am also continuing to develop landscape
images that relate more closely to painting. There are
also the night-time images that I’ve been continuing to
work on and I’ve recently started to take photographs
of interior spaces again, but those works are at a very
experimental stage. I’m photographing domestic
interiors at night in complete darkness, using exposures
that can last up to hours. These new images extend the
work I’ve been doing on night time imagery, but push it
much further, because I suppose in attempting to
photograph a subject that is in total darkness I am trying
to photograph things that you don’t imagine you should
be able to photograph. These images are almost in
contrast to the Fog images, which are so pale, and full of
light, whereas the interiors are intensely dark with just
little areas of detail visible.
Your work, from your earliest photographs, has shown the influence of painting. What else has influenced you?
The two things that have influenced my work the most
are painting and cinema. I’m not really influenced by
many photographers. I find some photographer’s work
very interesting, like Jeff Wall, whose work I really enjoy,
but the things that I would refer back to most are books
that I’ve read, films that I’ve seen and definitely painting.
Painting wasn’t a conscious reference until recently.
Like a lot of students in school, in the past I was quite
dismissive of painting as being uninteresting and
conservative. It’s interesting to me now that it’s almost
like déjà vu, when at times I see something in my work
and I think – what is that reminding me of? And then
I realise that it is reminding me of a painting by Corot,
or Jacob van Ruisdael, painting that I probably dismissed
years ago when I was on a school trip, wandering, bored,
through a museum. Cinema and literature, I’ve always
been conscious of having influenced me, but the
awareness of the impact that painting has on my work
has crept up on me, and I now realise that it’s been there
in the work all the time.
Jacqui McIntosh is a visual-arts writer based in Dublin.
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| Mary McIntyre: The lough, 2006, Lightjet colour photographic print mounted on dibond (series), 80 x 100cm; courtesy the artist |
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