Maolíosa Boyle , Slide , Context Gallery, Derry, July/August 1998

Maolíosa Boyle's show is an installation that brings the banal centre-stage. The installation comprises two large cibachromes, two looped videos on monitors and in the centre of the space a long table covered with an oilcloth. Displayed on the tablecloth is a disturbing and quietly frantic display of folded paper napkins. These napkins/serviettes are folded in different styles, such as 'candle', 'princess', 'fan', 'envelope', 'coxcomb' and 'slide', the last giving the exhibition its enigmatic title. 

One monitor shows a close-up of the artist folding the napkins and the other shows a close-up of her knitting, the sound of the knitting kneedles methodically echoing the metronome hanging on the wall of the space. It is this emphasis on measured time and process which helps create within this installation a presentation of domesticity alarming in its banality. The cibachromes extend this, one showing a bright orange ball of wool, "Bright Orange shade no 651 dye no 7653," the other showing some knitting in process, of indefinite length. The everyday irrelevence of these objects is quietly pushed by Boyle's presenting the quotidian as monotonously obsessive.

Boyle investigates this obsessive domesticity without the safety net of 'artist observer' but rather implicates herself in this obsessive insignificance. This self-implication is evident within the installation by her videoing herself folding the napkins (and knitting) but also in her own process in researching this project. Boyle's main source of reference for this work was the Buy and Sell magazine in which she became 'obsessed' with the things people choose to collect and the reasons they want to sell them.

Looking at the arrangement of these cheap paper napkins (bought from Buy and Sell ) and the variety of their different patterns and colours (paisley prints etc) is a sort of visual assault (for me) by this accumulation of kitchy gentility. However they also function as mnemonic devices as I start to pick out particular patterns I remember so well but which are no longer available/fashionable. The reference to time, and its controlled articulation by the metronome opens an avenue in which these napkins, as throw-away consumer products, become important as a means of investigating the most lowly examples of commodity fetishism. What is it about these napkins that made them so collectable? 

The unfashionableness of these fussy patterned napkins creates a strong tension with the Bright Orange Shade No 651 Dye no 7653 ball of wool and also the orange of the tablecloth, both of which shout loudly of the high street. This collision presents the viewer with the unwelcome option of reading style and the meanings we invest in consuming and acquiring the appropriate 'look' as ultimately futile. unless we approach the excessiveness of the folded napkins through what Michel de Certeau refers to as "tactics of the weak". The weak are the users/consumers who although not having any say in the production of cultural products nevertheless are active in doing something with these cultural products rather than just being passive consumers. Emphasising this trajectory offers a means of analysing this installation as a space that attempts to map the relations of power within the domestic space making 'control' visible by pushing domesticity to its limits.

Boyle presents a space in which the processes of domesticity are questioned, their constructed nostalgias held accountable. There is a sense in which the casualties of this particular obsessive domesticity are being mapped by Boyle as a means of articulating a silence, a muffling (those napkins) not of her generation but an older generation. The oilcloth for example, although re-acquiring a certain chic, is more reminiscent of grandmothers' parlours. Knitting also harks back to an older generation's domestic activity, its popularity long since dwindled and yet, the ball of wool—its colour is fashionably now. Somewhere in this fleeting and ambiguous dialogue between past and present what is available in this installation is the possibilty of reading the present through the past, recalling Walter Benjamin's recentring of the second-hand, the best-before and ur-history.

Orla Ryan

Review reproduced from CIRCA 86, Winter 1998, p49