Kenny's Art
Gallery on Middle Street is not generally the place one goes to
see cutting edge art. Art on exhibition there is more of the looks-good-over-the-couch
variety. I am more likely to go down Middle Street to browse the
best bookstore probably in the west, Charlie Byrne's. Stepping out
the bookshop door, one November day, I peered into the windows of
Kenny's Gallery across the street and saw paintings beyond the usual
hanging there. I entered the gallery to get a better look to find
three triptychs, horizontally long and banner-like, of the west-coast
landscape with old Irish text running along the top and bottom.
With these
triptychs were average-size landscape paintings with similar text.
Andrew Newland, an English painter who came to the west of Ireland
in 1994, titled the exhibition Radharc Aniar: A view from the
west. The landscapes he paints are in no way original, perhaps
slightly more realistic than Paul Henry, though the viewer is given
no indication that Ireland has changed since Henry's time, given
the cows, sheep, thatched cottages, and lack of people. The text
bordering the landscapes is the Irish placename of each painted
view. Newland paints the old 'Gaelic' lettering "simply because
it's so beautiful."
Perhaps what
lured me inside this usually innocuous gallery was the fact that
they were showing art that made references outside of painting and
beyond the purely decorative. The link between land and the Irish
language has been a contemporary cultural preoccupation at least
since Brian Friel's Translations. Robert Ballagh recently
embarked on a very similar project to Newland in his Tír is Teanga:
Land and Language painting series in which he placed Irish-language
proverbs in textured or natural materials below a wide-angle landscape
view.1 Ballagh's paintings are slightly more original in composition
and in his decision to paint nonspecific, imaginary scenes with
an ephemeral and esoteric and hence 'Irish' feel.
Both Ballagh
and Newland apparently desire to pronounce and maintain a bond between
the Irish language and land. Newland, as newcomer, has immersed
himself in the Gaeltacht and is now liofa and merely wants
to "inspire others likewise," where Ballagh, a Dubliner, has grown
over the years to revere the native bond between land and language.
Ballagh, certainly well versed in the history of Irish landscape
painting and its associations with the early twentieth century cultural
revival and later Expressionist preoccupations, wisely opts for
the imaginary landscape, a future invented Ireland where a bond,
even if esoteric, can be maintained. That these landscapes might
look like his sets for Riverdance is only mildly concerning. Newland
aspires to paint the actual, given the place-names that float around
the image of the place, which implies that we too can go back in
time, live in an idyllic postcard, and simply leave behind the complexities
of the relationship between the Irish language and landscape and
between Irish people and their land and their language. This nostalgia
is probably why they sell well.
Alanna O'Kelly,
an artist who digs her hands into the earth to explore landscape
and releases the gutteral murmurings of memory to explore pre-language,
graced Galwegians when she took part in the Talking through their
Arts (try to excuse the farcical title) lecture series at the
National University of Ireland, Galway, during autumn semester.
Since the University offers no art-history courses, their new yet
sustained interest in the visual arts is welcome in Galway. The
2001 evening lecture series showcasing contemporary Irish artists,
including Dermot Seymour, Robert Ballagh, Gwen O'Dowd, Nigel Rolfe,
and Éilís O'Connell, followed on the heels of the first lecture
series on contemporary Irish art in 2000 and will hopefully become
a tradition. NUI, Galway has also begun to place more emphasis on
acquiring a collection of contemporary Irish art and recently bought
a large canvas by Rita Duffy.
The Galway
Arts Centre also followed suit on NUI, Galway Art Gallery's exhibition
of work from IMMA last autumn, by exhibiting works by Seán Scully,
Kathy Prendergast, Ciarán Lennon, among others from the IMMA collection
in September. Established Irish artists rarely exhibit in the West,
therefore IMMA's Galway excursions are welcome and offer an opportunity
to people who might not regularly visit the museum. Clearly on the
road to becoming an established artist is Ruth McHugh, whose December
exhibition at the Galway Arts Centre with Seán Cotter was polished
and mature.
It is impossible
to read commentary on McHugh's work without coming across the word
'feminine', which is apparently connected to her attention to the
detail, texture, and surface not normally seen or appreciated as
masculine, or by society as a whole. This feminine tag could also
be associated with her pursuit of a theme or subject through a variety
of media, which is a common practice among women artists in Ireland
and abroad, and in this Apparell'd show McHugh engaged in
painting, installation, and photography. The artist's intent is
to embellish upon the "extraordinary moments when very common things
are transformed or elevated," hence the exhibition's Wordsworth
title ("and every common sight, To me did seem Apparell'd in celestial
light"). McHugh's focus on the details and textures of common objects,
like a utilitarian piece of furniture entitled Apparell'd
or the interior of a poorly kept glasshouse in Last View,
create a haunting milieu in which some external narrative hovers
around the viewer.
1See
CIRCA 97, pp. 52-53 - Ed.
Andrew
Newland: Radharc Aniar: A view from the west, Kenny Gallery,
November 2001 Ruth
McHugh: Apparell'd- Galway Arts Centre, November/December
2001
Sheila Dickinson
is a Government of Ireland Research Scholar and working on her Ph.D.
in the History of Art Department at UCD.
