VISUAL ARTS/SOUTH

"Up against a stone wall"

Some time ago the Observer's Life magazine ran a photographic feature on British design.  It ranged rather further than fashion or interiors, and it wasn't at all chauvinistic in tone.  It aimed to identify a number of diverse things, from buildings to utensils, that might be said to share a characteristic Britishness in the quality of their design.  It was an intriguing thing to attempt and, perhaps because of the obvious constraints of space and resources, it didn't really work.

It reminded me of John Pawson's terrific book Minimum, and perhaps it was inspired by it.  Regardless of your opinion of minimalism as a rigorous design philosophy, Minimum is exceptional because it marshals a huge range of visual material and yet remains remarkably coherent.  It is an extraordinary visual essay that cumulatively articulates an aesthetic far more successfully than any text could manage.  That is because Pawson's aesthetic cuts through numerous standard criteria of classification and is continually manifested and elaborated in his preference for one object over another, even one landscape over another.

The Observer piece did contain one apparent error, classifying Gallarus' Oratory on the Dingle Peninsula as British - and, more, as distinctively British.  The feature, and this mistake plus, perhaps, Pawson's book made me wonder if a comparable exercise in an Irish context might be worthwhile.  The particular value of Pawson's example is that he works from an aesthetic rather than, say, a nationalist perspective.  And usually such surveys are motivated by, and become bogged down in, the chauvinistic desire to articulate not an aesthetic per se but a nationalist cultural identity, or a commodified cultural identity, rather in the way the image of the West of Ireland is tailored to a Bord Fáilte pattern of Irishness (reasonably so, it should be said, given the nature of the Bord's job).

This is not to argue for a formalist, abstract view of cultural artifacts, to deny them their legitimate historical context.  But why not attempt to consider Irishness in terms of the diverse expression of a particular aesthetic sensibility related to environment? The shops are full of innumerable photographic books on Ireland that, despite their merits, succumb to a sentimental, complacent idea of Irishness.  The trick is to disassociate objects from this debased framework and see if they might exemplify a distinctive aesthetic sense.

Part of a list of possible contenders might read: passage tombs, stone forts, oratories, round towers, dry stone walls, turf stacks and their thatch coverings, the sleán, towerhouses, clocháns, currachs, the St Brigid's cross, thatch roofs, Donegal tweed, limewashed cottages within the landscape, sean nós singing, the bodhrán and the uilleann pipes, spades tailored to the soil of each region, Aran knitwear, the crios, pampútaí, the hurley stick, the pub...

In architecture, Niall McCullough and Valerie Mulvin, and the Shaffreys, have broached this issue with invaluable surveys of vernacular Irish style.  One of the salient, indigenous features of the Irish landscape is the ubiquitous but diverse dry stone wall.  Different styles of stone walling developed in different areas for obvious reasons, depending on such factors as the nature of the material available, the function to be fulfilled, and the individual ingenuity of the builders.  Walls characterise regions and are aesthetically striking.  When the O'Brien Press published stonemason Patrick McAfee's Irish Stone Walls in 1997 it was an unexpected bestseller, indicating that there is an enormous implicit awareness of and interest in vernacular design.  Is this relevant to today's visual artists? I think it should be, and to some extent it is anyway.  To take one striking example, James Scanlon's work in Sneem displays great sensitivity to this invisible communal awareness of the rich aesthetic properties of everyday environmental design.  And the work of Nigel Rolfe, Tom Fitzgerald and Alan Counihan is variously alert to this underlying but powerful current.

Aidan Dunne