Lismore Castle Arts

22 March – 26 October 2025

The kunstkammer or wunderkammer, the ‘cabinet of curiosities’, is, by its very nature, ostentatious. It represents wealth and worldliness, a capacity to not only collect various rare treasures but to showcase them in a suitably resplendent setting. There is a vanity to such endeavours, as noted in Samuel Quiccheberg’s 1565 advice to Duke Albrecht V of Bavaria on assembling a “repository of artificial and marvelous things”: “We are not dividing up for philosophers, precisely in line with nature itself, all natural objects: rather, we are sorting out for princes, into certain uncomplicated orderings, objects that are mostly pleasant to observe.”¹ The kunstkammer is intended not just to be shown, but to be shown off.

The current exhibition at Lismore Castle, owned by the Duke and Duchess of Devonshire, would thus seem to qualify on account of its prestigious lineage alone. Yet, rather than simply presenting family heirlooms, ‘Kunstkammer’ invites Robert O’Byrne to curate “a re-creation and a re-invention of the genre,” combining historical artefacts, everyday accoutrements, contemporary artworks and esoteric oddities – as per Gabriel Kaltemarckt’s 1587 definition, comprising paintings and sculptures, local and foreign rarities, and “antlers, horns, claws, feathers and other things belonging to strange and curious animals.”² 

Two full-length pier mirrors are adorned with hand-painted scenes of grotesque creatures and protruding sculptural busts of cherubs. A sphere of snail shells cluster into an impenetrable, self-contained mass. Cabinets of sinuously carved hardwood open up to reveal bronze bowls, spilling over with angular shards of coloured glass. The exhibition display, which demarcates the gallery’s central space into a series of compartments and corridors, stages a number of such distinct tableaux, some more fantastical than others. 

A particular novelty is The Prize Fight (c.1900) by William Hart & Sons, a whimsical construction that features stuffed squirrels engaged in a boxing match. The scenario, which begins with the rodents shaking hands and ends with one pugilist collapsed across the canvas, takes place over six sequential dioramas, resembling a comic strip. Like the best parts of a kunstkammer, it defies description or categorisation, with its very indefinability indicating only the idiosyncrasies of its makers and the unorthodox taste of its owner. 

The pairing of a sculpture of the Cavendish Serpent – a recurring motif in the Devonshire family heraldry – with a standing lamp incorporating a taxidermied snake, makes for a tense encounter, as the two reptiles lock gazes, perpetually frozen in anticipation. Of the contemporary artworks, John Kindness’s pieces feel especially at home. His acrylic drawings of scenes from Greek mythology, delicately rendered on antique cotton breeches, feel suitably otherworldly: Circe (2012) portrays twinned, conjoined hybrids of a sailor in naval rig and his monstrous, tattooed, porcine alter-ego (the title alludes to the enchantress who turned Odysseus’s crew into pigs). The image is doubled, reversed, like a playing card, and, like the undergarments themselves, evinces a peculiarly old-fashioned salaciousness. Kindness repeats the trick with Scylla and Charybdis (2012) a pair of cast resin toilet seats rendered with stylised beasts, schematic figures and decorative flourishes. Odysseus had to chart a narrow passage between the two sea monsters, an adventure that idiomatically refers to choosing between two evils. There is a juxtaposition of the profound and the profane here that would likely have amused Quiccheberg’s patron – and his guests.  

In spite of these exceptions, the presentation of other contemporary artworks is less considered. Pieces such as Alice Maher’s aforementioned agglomeration of snail shells, The Four Directions (2005), or Dorothy Cross’ eerily discomfiting Red Rest and Red Baby (both 2021) with their immaculately carved ears embedded in ‘pillows’ of red-veined marble, aren’t just strange; they have an inherent strangeness on their own terms. Both artists have a conceptual intent, referentiality, sensitivity to materials, and history of delving into notions of the body, metamorphosis, nature, memory and mythology that belies the inclusion of their works as mere ‘curiosities’. 

Monster Chetwynd’s handmade, oversized moths, constructed from cardboard, paint and latex, have been an abiding presence in her sprawling installations and ecstatic performances, but, here, clinging onto the gallery walls and devoid of any curatorial context, they appear as facsimiles of outsider art. Similarly, it’s hard to know what Sarah Lucas’ suspended assemblages of stuffed tights, plastic buckets and lounge chairs are supposed to contribute, other than a general atmosphere of abject deflation. 

Given that ‘Kunstkammer’ largely eschews an overall contextualisation of the collective works as well as written descriptions of the individual objects, the inference is that their selection is largely determined by taste, an intuitive affinity for the bizarre or unexpected. That’s not necessarily a complaint: historical wunderkammers have themselves revolved around the often-unarticulated preferences of their owners. Yet, as a ‘re-invention of the genre’, the exhibition feels tentative, even restrained. It is caught between its own Scylla and Charybdis, neither willing to commit to a more taxonomical display of its contents – a ‘making sense’ of the otherwise incommensurable – or to diving headlong into its eccentricities through an immersive, overwhelming, pell-mell profusion of artefacts. The straight path isn’t generally the most interesting one. 

Chris Clarke is a critic and curator based between Cork and Vienna.

¹ Mark A. Meadow and Bruce Robertson (Eds. and trans.), The First Treatise on Museums: Samuel Quiccheberg’s Inscriptiones 1565 (Los Angeles: Getty Publications, 2013).

² Gabriel Kaltemarckt, ‘How a Kunstkammer should be formed’ (1587) reproduced in Journal of the History of Collections, Volume 2, Issue 1, 1990, pp. 1–6.

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Golden Thread Gallery

15 February – 29 March 2025

Maria Fusco and Margaret Salmon’s internationally acclaimed opera-film, History of the Present (2023), was shown in exhibition format at Golden Thread Gallery (GTG), Belfast, earlier this year. Mary Stevens, GTG Exhibition Officer, with Fusco and Salmon created a site-specific installation to accompany the film, which included artworks, research material from the GTG archive, personal artefacts, and ephemera. In a related coincidence, the gallery is currently located in the building that was once Craftworld, a shop Fusco remembers visiting as a child. This adds another layer of connection and intimacy to an exhibition that has deep resonance within the Belfast context.

Filmed in Belfast in 2022, using 35mm film and video, History of the Present opens with a close-up of opera singer, Héloïse Werner, whose improvisational vocal work is transforming archival recordings of the ambient noises of The Troubles. Channelling the soundscape of war – sirens, helicopters, explosions, and so on – via the human voice, Werner’s vocalisations have an unsettling yet riveting effect. This dramatic – and yes, operatic – opening establishes an overarching inquiry of embodied human suffering that struggles to find expression. Themes of silencing and censorship, particularly of women and working-class communities, are found throughout Salmon’s inventive filming, and in Fusco’s deeply personal libretto.

A collaborative work, History of the Present is a ‘total work of art’ or Gesamtkunstwerk in the Wagnerian sense. It utilises a range of elements, including composer Annea Lockwood’s tremendous soundscapes, personal experience, abstracted images, disembodied voices, and vocal recordings to express subjective realities. The artwork title reflects philosopher Michel Foucault’s view that the ‘history of the present’ should be the starting point for an enquiry into the past. In that spirit, the cinematography concentrates on images of contemporary Belfast, while Fusco’s libretto provides a present-time reflection on her experiences growing up in Ardoyne during The Troubles.

Working-class areas and the women of those communities bore the brunt of the violence and hardship of the conflict; yet in the grand narrative, such voices are rarely heard. As the libretto states: “All across Belfast, all of us, always watching in silence.” Saying nothing became a way of life, a survival strategy. Libretto, cinematography, and soundscape each work in unison to convey that lived reality. The spoken words from the libretto are all the more powerful because they are devoid of overt polemic or rhetoric. At one point, the disembodied voice delivers a quietly spoken litany of experiences of daily life, played out against a backdrop of existential threat. Especially moving is the recounting of the journey home from school, experiencing harassment and fear, and keeping quiet so as not to upset a parent. In this, and the other deeply affecting accounts of growing up in a war zone, the personal is political.

Salmon’s cinematography is sensitive and moving. Images of Ardoyne show contemporary daily life in all its ordinariness, yet the residue of the conflict is visible on people’s faces, and in the physical landscape. Its legacy is reinforced by images of the peace lines or peace walls – physical manifestations of sectarian division and distrust. An aerial shot of rows of identical red brick terraced houses, divided by an imposing peace wall, conveys this very powerfully. Equally impactful is the recurring motif of the red brick, “with its three cast holes, sustained by water and hardened by history” (as described in the libretto), which becomes a metaphor for both entrenched positions and human resilience. 

There are several moments of visual beauty, such as a lingering image of the peace wall which has been given gradient colours by the opaque glass of a domestic backdoor. This and other images remind us of how The Troubles encroached on the most private of spaces and relationships.

History of the Present ends with an image of Belfast Port at night, as the camera tracks slowly, almost imperceptibly, across the screen. A soothing voice gives directions that are fine and precise. The effect is calming – comforting, even – ushering a de-escalation of the heightened emotions so beautifully and sensitively evoked by this compelling work.

Mary Flanagan  is a writer based in County Roscommon.

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Draíocht

19 February – 3 May 2025

Rich Gilligan’s ‘The First Draft’ at Draíocht sees the artist curate and revise his extensive body of work, both artistic and commercial, in a gallery setting for the first time. The Amharc Fhine Gall exhibition commission has allowed Gilligan to revisit his archive and his origins in and around Blanchardstown.¹ ‘The First Draft’ may not, in the main, be directly derived from the local area, but it presents the work of a photographer whose aesthetic and method were born in the surrounding streets and estates.

Outside of his commercial work, Gilligan is best known for his skateboard-related photography. His book, DIY (19/80 Éditions, 2013), for example, catalogues skater places across the world and finds in them commonalities – despite the obvious territorial and cultural differences in the myriad of places he has visited – whether a style, an attitude, or a shared take on the urban/suburban experience. Skaters are both part of their cities and exist at a slant to it. They use the urban environment in ways that critique the banality of city and suburban living and yet are dependent on and cherishes it. There is something creatively makeshift and independent about skate culture that is crucial to Gilligan’s photographs. His regard for the street, for concrete and tarmac, along with a sense that skating is pushing against constraints, is at the centre of the kind of photographic practice which Gilligan has made for himself.

One of new pieces exhibited here is Linger, a looped digital film work from 2024, which is taken up with the cycle of a carwash, as seen from inside the car. Sitting on one of the elongated sides of a triangular prism structure in the middle of the gallery, Linger becomes a series of fluid abstracts made from the water, suds and drying air of the carwash. The piece shifts between something deeply ordinary to something much more mysterious and elemental yet always manufactured. In its textures and colours, it works as if the ethos and the constituent parts of the photographs on the walls have been condensed into this sequence. 

On other side of the prism is another film piece, Untitled (2017), which follows a skateboarder down a street in Williamsburg, New York. The black and white of the film is echoed and accentuated by the monochrome clothing of the Orthodox Jews and other pedestrians whom the skater passes by. The film poses questions about the relationship between the skater and those walking on and off the pavement – whether they are all equally street inhabitants or flâneurs, or whether the skater lives apart form, and in critique of, the pavement walkers. 

Taking these two works together, as they look out across the gallery towards the photographs on the walls, gives a strong guide to Gilligan’s work here. He is interested in the shapes, patterns, colours and visual sensations of city life, and he is drawn to the actual and implicit stories of those who live and find a way to play in urban environments.

The walls of the Draíocht gallery include sequences of work from Gilligan’s back catalogue, arranged so as to create an atmosphere, or series of atmospheres, of urban life. The first skateboarding images from Birmingham and Dublin flank a bonfire at Mountview (very much signalling the importance of the locale) from 2004, and between these is a puddle on tarmac in London from 2011, reflecting the sun in a cloudy sky and echoing the light and water imagery of Linger across the way. The other works in the gallery follow this pattern, with light – and therefore a kind of tender hopefulness – being a common motif in the petting of a horse, lit from behind by the sun, kids watching a bonfire, or sunlight on a bush in New York. 

Gilligan’s work, consistently through the two decades covered in ‘The First Draft’, takes the energy, independence and creativity of the skateboarder as its foundation, seeing an urban world, full of contained possibility and dignity.

Colin Graham is a writer, farmer, and Professor of English at Maynooth University. 

¹ Rich Gilligan ‘The First Draft’ is the 13th edition of Amharc Fhine Gall (The Fingal Gaze) – an exhibition programme initiated in 2004 by Fingal County Council Arts Office, in collaboration with Draíocht, to celebrate the work of Fingal artists at all career stages. 

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Graphic Studio Gallery, Dublin

1 February – 8 March 2025

In printmaking, the thing seen – the most visible layer – is not what the artist has made. Painting has a version of this dichotomy – the application of paint reveals and conceals at the same time – but in printmaking, the viewer is denied a direct encounter with the made object, the matrix itself, and presented with a version of it, a reflection or afterimage, a material ghost. If I’m labouring the point, it’s because in this two-person exhibition, what’s seen directly and what’s available as clue or implication seem at play between the different artworks themselves. That, and the fact that Tony O’Malley’s work is finished (he died in 2003), while Maria Atanacković’s work continues as a going concern. 

O’Malley’s abstraction is rooted in landscape, in the school of St. Ives, for example, but also in numerous Irish peers and predecessors. His home patch was Kilkenny, but his carborundum prints have exotic titles like Haria and Isla de Graciosa – Canary Island locations with sunny, relatively unencumbered visions of the natural world. His multi-plate, printed surfaces are compressed, with varying degrees of texture and translucence, enabling overlapping marks to retain a semblance of autonomy within their complex, visual fields. 

Atanacković’s screenprints are flat. Without modulation of hue or application, they rely on juxtaposition for their visual excitement. A title like Intervals of Quiet prompts thoughts of meditation or graphic scores, but parallel arrangements of variously coloured stripes equally suggest quilt-making. Atanacković applies colour dispassionately. She’s not interested in bodily gestures, but in the relationship of parts. With a background in textiles, and a penchant for clothing and other artistic applications, her complex shapeshifting also suggests a kind of aesthetic utility, functioning best in relation to other things. 

In relation to O’Malley, her work seems more analytical and less felt, but that’s close to a tautology when so much of her work happens through mechanical processes. Two large works on stretched linen are described as ‘reactive prints’. New to me, this is seemingly the result of digital files being transferred to the fabric and fixed by heat. In Fragments of a Gesture, differently shaped and coloured elements crowd within their right-angled format. The result is compositionally balanced, but there seems little else at stake. 

It’s unfair to wish for something unavailable, but I’d love to see how this handsome patternmaking might respond to being fashioned in three dimensions. Closer to this idea, if not quite sculptural either, wall-based, plywood assemblages of individually cut and coloured segments coalesce into locked formations or bloom outwards into counterbalanced arrangements. Construct 1 is reminiscent of Jean Arp (though the versatile Sophie Taeuber-Arp seems more relevant to the overall practice), while Barbara Hepworth came to mind in a series of related screenprints with curved elements, balancing circles and oblongs into a sculptural tension.

O’Malley liked working with discarded materials, making totem-like objects from lengths of wood, nails and string. Often resembling crude musical instruments, their ritualistic quality is most evident in a series of Good Friday paintings, made on the eponymous day and bearing suitable analogies. On behalf of Graphic Studio Dublin, James O’Nolan and James McCreary made regular trips to O’Malley’s Callan studio in the late 1990s, where mixtures of carborundum paste enabled him to apply his painterly methods directly onto plastic plates. The results were proofed back in Dublin, with the painter’s wishes interpreted through colour notes and conversations. On some very large plates, O’Malley worked outside in the garden, swapping his paint brushes for a sweeping brush. Firenze II, with broad swathes of pink, orange and black, its aerial perspective tethered with scratchy lines, is simply gorgeous. If O’Malley’s graphic work lacks something of the tangible materiality of his work in painting and mixed media, this is countered by a gained luminosity, the sunlight that so preoccupied him captured within the printed folds. 

While the exhibition sets up abstraction as a shared language, the tendency to abstract from the natural landscape, or towards universal forms, is the essential difference. ‘The Shape of Memory’ may refer to how artists conjure images from mental states, but also, perhaps, how material can recall its former shape after technological processes. Though made at different times, all prints here are undated, as though preserving them against chronology and its associated decay. This seems an unnecessary caution, because in the best examples of printmaking, what we see and what has been are equally present.

John Graham is a Dublin-based artist and writer.

johngraham.ie

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Ormston House 

21 February – 26 April 2025

In Samuel Beckett’s dramatic monologue, Not I (1972), the central character, Mouth, stretches the limits of language, being, and experience. In all her fragility and fragmentation, Mouth seemingly does not make much sense. Yet within her staccato speech, things are revealed, even if they are not communicated; we bear witness to a wide variety of breakdowns across body, identity, and language. There is no resolution in Not I – just an expectation that the voice will keep looping, even after the curtain comes down.

Arguably, Daniel Tuomey’s recent solo exhibition at Ormston House, ‘Stuck, a decomposition’, takes influence from Beckett’s play, not only in the inclusion of the words “Not I” within the artist’s charcoal drawings, but also in its entropic essence. That is, Tuomey’s show is largely an inquiry into disintegration: of speech, space, and senses of self. Using interdisciplinary mediums and methodologies – from architectural drawings to an invocation of balladry – Tuomey’s work deconstructs and reconstructs space and voice, breaking them down again and again.

‘Stuck, a decomposition’ follows the disembodied monologue of a narrator, trapped in the chimney of a Georgian townhouse, trying to make sense of the claustrophobic feeling of perpetuity. The narrator poses rhetorical questions to the audience: Where do we come from? Where might we begin and end? Where might we be going, if the paths keep changing towards an ever more precarious future?

Tuomey’s work, in part, reflects what Franco ‘Bifo’ Berardi refers to as the “slow cancellation of the future,” whereby time has been constricted and impacted by capitalism, so much so that imagining a future is now impossible. Instead, we find ourselves stuck, struggling to find meaning or hope that things will improve. Our narrator reminds us that “this is a crisis, by the way”, and while drawn to understanding its root cause, is also interested in the nuanced transformation of Georgian spaces, and the power structures that have historically controlled language usage in Ireland. 

Though Tuomey’s familial connections to Limerick permeate the show, the Treaty City also typifies the ‘austerity conservation’ of Georgian buildings, in which developers, landlords, and local authorities deploy glorified narratives of ‘heritage’ to stimulate external capital investment, with few material, social, or cultural benefits for the local community. One thing is said that means another; the tenses shift, history is transmogrified. 

This is further highlighted through the artist’s use of randomised voice and visual patterns. A series of wall-mounted drawings, titled Pucaí (2024-25), speaks to the shapeshifting quality of the eponymous Irish mythological figure. Tuomey’s audio-visual work, An explanation (2025), attempts to detail a genealogy of voice and culture, but also undoes itself through its self-editing software, constantly reordering the narratives that question its own authenticity and ownership. The episodes emanate from the chimney sculpture, Stack (2024-25), merging the body with the architecture, leaving only a voice that is both distinctly Irish and not Irish. This voice does not seem to know its own origins, and struggles to speak.

Tuomey appears to follow Frederic Jameson’s call to ‘always historicise’ by unsettling the presumed ‘naturalness’ of decomposition, and instead considers how ‘decay’ – cultural, economic, spatial, linguistic, and so on – is controlled and orchestrated. Tuomey references this in a multitude of ways, from creating Stack in the exact measurements of his body, to his choreographed movements on opening night, which included conducting the audience to move in unison around the gallery space. 

Overall, Tuomey’s exhibition deals conceptually with haunting, and what remains when everything is taken away. It plays upon Irish cultural memory and our enduring anxieties around property, as well as notions of authentic personhood. The work seems to respond to the notion that Romantic Ireland – envisioned in her gendered representations – is dead but not gone. Instead, she might visit us in our shrinking spaces – box rooms, converted basements, chimneys – in all her different forms, sometimes speaking in our shared tongues, and sometimes rendered mute. 

Dr El Reid-Buckley is a researcher, writer and creative facilitator from Limerick City. 

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Waterford Gallery of Art

5 December 2024 – 5 April 2025

In the public imagination, museum collections often summon up dusty places that are cloistered and devoid of relevance. However, since the turn of the century, there has been a push to place the museum at the centre of an increasingly fluid community – a shift which has become more urgent since the pandemic, with the collection at the vital heart of this new role. 

While many cultural institutions lag behind in this regard, The Waterford Art Collection, housed in Waterford Gallery of Art, is a shining exception. One of the oldest municipal collections of art in Ireland, it comprises over 700 works by artists including Paul Henry, Jack B. Yeats RHA, Louis le Brocquy, Evie Hone, Mary Swanzy, and George Russell (using the pseudonym AE), as well as a growing number of contemporary works. It is overseen by Visual Arts Co-ordinator, Luke Currall, who has extensive experience in the UK, including a stint at The Wellcome Collection in London. Currall believes that the collection must “remain a living, developing, relevant resource, not just a time capsule of historic, innovative and ambitious ideals within Waterford’s past.”

The outfitting of the two-storey gallery in 2019 was overseen by Waterford County Council Arts Office and Rojo Studios Architects with collection consultation from Dr Éimear O’Connor. Using a system of movable walls, the space has a contemporary feel, while preserving many of the building’s nineteenth-century classical features. Currently showing until 5 April in the upstairs gallery space, ‘Bodies’ presents works from the collection alongside new commissions, inspired by the human form. The skilful use of a familiar theme to surprise and beguile is characteristic of Currall’s curatorial approach. 

For instance, while Nude Study (c.1918) by Mainie Jellett nods to Susan Connolly’s solo exhibition, ‘GROUND (two-unfold)’ – a riff on Jellett’s cubist work, which runs concurrently downstairs – it is a lively, figurative work, rather than a cubist piece. Similarly, placing James Joseph Power’s bronze of a famine-era couple, Gorta Mór (1961), beside Áine Ryan’s contemporary sculpture, Implements (2021) – a disembodied glass hand on a rusted pitchfork – brackets a space in which rural histories might be reimagined.

Many artists here were active on the wider political and cultural scene. William Orpen – whose Nude Study (n.d.) is a tutorial in drawing – was an official Great War artist. Another of his sketches depicts Irish Free State Senator, Oliver St John Gogarty. Mainie Jellett and Father Jack P Hanlon (Nude Study, n.d.) were two of the founders of The Irish Living Art Exhibition (IELA) in 1943, while Conn McCluskey, represented here by the sculpture Untitled (1960), founded the Homeless Citizens’ League in 1963 and the Northern Ireland Civil Rights Association in 1967. This exhibition launched Una Sealy’s huge new portrait, commissioned by the OPW and WCC, of Dr Mary Strangman – public health advocate, suffragette, and the first female member of Waterford City Council – which holds a central position in the gallery. Reclining Nude (n.d.) by artist and curator Mary Grehan (who, incidentally, played Strangman in a recent local production) hangs nearby. Notably, the collection has a considerable number of works by female artists, which Currall is committed to building upon.

There are international links too. Women in Conversation (1953) by Stella Steyn (an Irish-born artist of Russian extraction) recalls the monumentality of Picasso’s Two Women Running on a Beach (1922) but has a vibrance and lightness all of its own. Elsewhere, a watercolour by Niccolo d’Ardia Caracciolo, titled Nude Study (n.d.), reflects the artist’s mixed heritage. A member of the RHA, Caracciolo was born to a Waterford mother and Italian father and grew up in Waterford Castle. He died in a motorbike accident in Italy in 1989 aged 48. 

Local and contemporary artists also feature in the show. Portrait of the Young Man as an Artist (1981) is a beautifully executed parody – one that subverts the title of James Joyce’s second novel, while mirroring the composition of Rembrandt’s figurative painting, The Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Nicolaes Tulp (1632) – by Waterford artist Pat O’Brien, the subject of the dissection. The medical students, tutors from WRTC (now SETU), will be recognisable to generations of Waterford art students, now scattered across the world. Alongside, Anthony Hayes’s Gladiators (2014), groins shielded by game controllers, crowd forward, their thrust offsetting Cuán Cusack’s You in Blue (2024) – cyanotypes and poems about dysphoria, floating on organza nearby.

Eamon Grey and James Horan’s This Little Piggy Went to Market (2023), holds such ambiguity within. A pair of feet, carved from Carrera marble, from which white bones comically jut, balance on pink stilts, sunk in a heap of white gravel. Sadly, Grey did not live to see the work complete, having died in 2022, but this sculptural installation, which provides a literal and figurative frame for the show, also suggests the possibility of moving forward with verve and zest. An alternative cipher, a terracotta nude, sits opposite, curled like a cat. The artist is ‘anon’ – a reminder that beauty lives on and belongs to all.

An effective and engaging exhibition, ‘Bodies’ exemplifies the new ideal of the municipal art collection as a tool to variously reach, inspire, reflect, and support its communities. The museum collection also acts as a repository of sorts, helping to bring history to life by providing tangible connections to stories of local, national, and international significance. However, collections need careful management, resources, and expertise to reach their full potential, since there is an expectation of durational care among those who donate artefacts. Currall’s presence has therefore been a game changer for the Waterford Art Collection, and it will be of national interest to see where he guides it.

Clare Scott is an artist and writer based in Waterford who recently completed a Postgraduate Diploma in Museum Practice and Management at Ulster University.

clarescott.ie

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Hugh Lane Gallery

3 October 2024 – 18 May 2025

Brian Maguire rose to prominence in the 80s and 90s when a trinity of male painters – Patrick Graham, Patrick Hall, and Maguire himself – seemed to dominate the discourse, chiming with the lustre of international neo-expressionism. Hall’s mystical homoeroticism and Graham’s broken self that wrestled with both tradition and his own facility, shared with Maguire personal struggles within the oppressive institutional forces of a post-colonial and post-religion society that was blinking back into the light. 

Of the three, Maguire’s art was distinguished by a burning sense of social justice and activism. Analysis at the time noted the masculine nature of the Irish Neo-expressionist wave, with Patricia Hurl’s 2023 exhibition, ‘The Irish Gothic’ at IMMA, providing a welcome corrective to this narrative. Since the 90s, Maguire has steadily painted himself out of the corner of subjective individual expressionism to significantly widen the geopolitical lens. That noted, one could be forgiven for thinking that although Ireland has progressively changed overtime in socio-political terms, Maguire’s worldview remains relentlessly bleak, tracking the shape-shifting nature and impacts of war and oppression, which simply move address.¹ 

Maguire has a track record of shining a light on the vulnerable and voiceless. Depictions of an American soup kitchen or the residents of South American favelas, when housed within the rarefied hallows of blue chip galleries or revered art institutions, could raise reasonable doubts of poverty porn, since art with a social conscience has an uneasy relationship with the capital of artmaking and its ecosystem. However, as Maguire has negotiated a position of being both inside and outside the institution, the authenticity and ethics of his socially engaged practice – working directly with prisoners and acting as a native witness – have been consistent and unwavering. 

In relation to the technical and formal painting exhibited in ‘La Grande Illusion’ – which presents works from 2007 onward – Maguire excels through the bravura painterly muscularity on display. The gestural economy, masterly use of space, imposing scale, and judicious understanding of how to maximise pictorial contrast, suggest a painter who has braided the material learning throughout his career, and is now firmly in an imperial phase. Black acrylic is pushed in sweeping, brush-sized movements across the compositional plane, while a largely neutral palette is offset by acid yellows and pinks. Painted un-stretched and then re-stretched during the installation, these works have the epic quality of grand history painting, yet there is enough grit and uncertainty in evidence that they resist falling into territory that is slick or facile for a painter of Maguire’s experience. 

The fact that ‘La Grande Illusion’ sits adjacent to the Francis Bacon Studio at the Hugh Lane Gallery neatly serves to highlight some comparisons. Where Bacon’s outlook is somewhat bleak and potentially jaundiced, dealing in historical generalities around the human condition, Maguire’s work, in contrast, is rich in specificity, based upon his extensive travel research. Police Graduation 2012 (Juárez) (2014) depicts a Mexican police graduation ceremony that has preserved the ritualistic salute of the Nazi regime, a painting that could be easily misunderstood. Maguire’s painting highlights how the ritual of the salute has been revised in world culture yet could move pendulously – Elon Musk’s witless hand gesture, following Trump’s 2025 inauguration, being a case in point.

Certain filmmakers have grappled with the issue of how to speak of the unspeakable. For example, respective depictions of the holocaust in László Nemes’s Son of Saul (2015) and Jonathan Glazer’s The Zone of Interest (2023) have rigorously strategised around the implicit rather than explicit. Where Nemes provides over the shoulder, fuzzy depth-of-field glimpses of stacked corpses, Glazer’s horrors are heard and not seen in what he compares to the banal ambience of oppression in our lives. Not so in Maguire’s direct and unflinching depictions of decapitated and dismembered body horror in the Arizona desert, which is closer to a Goyaesque Yo Lo Vi / I Saw It.²  

All of this may run the risk of recycling images that we have become desensitised to, through bottomless doomscrolling of our daily news feeds. The aestheticisation of human suffering is an additional potential pitfall for a painter of Maguire’s technical virtuosity; that the artist deftly navigates these slopes is a testament to the empathy and compassion that underpins his methods of looking. As a visitor to ‘La Grande Illusion’, I found the paintings powerful and moving. I experienced a confounding shock that jolted me to consider how such images are received – something we have become numb to, in an image-saturated, digital era. It is this direct encounter with the visual record of war that raises viewer consciousness and allows a chink of light into Maguire’s otherwise bleak vision. This exhibition celebrates a leading Irish artist, working at the peak of his oeuvre.

Colin Martin is an artist and Head of School RHA. 

@colinmartin81

¹ Brian Maguire, ‘War Changes Its Address: The Aleppo Paintings’, Irish Museum of Modern Art (26 January – 7 May 2018).

² Francisco Goya, Yo Lo Vi / I Saw It, Plate 44, ‘Desastres de la Guerra / The Disasters of War’(1810-20). 

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Royal Hibernian Academy of Arts

31 January – 20 April 2025

Curated by RHA Director, Patrick T. Murphy, ‘BogSkin’ is a major group exhibition which spans 50 years of artistic engagement with the Irish boglands. The work of 20 artists is presented, with their collective output evincing both changing attitudes and lasting affinities. The bog variously represents the romantic, the unknown, and the poetic, just as much as it speaks to climate change and ecological disaster. 

In Ireland, conversations about boglands almost always touch on the bog bodies on display at the National Museum. This embodied relationship with the bog forms part of the national psyche, channelling centuries and millennia of slow peat growth, the preservation of human remains, and the labouring hands that have dug it up for fuel. The artistic positions presented in ‘BogSkin’ range from the removed observer (creating abstract responses) and the anthropologist (documenting human life surrounding the boglands) to the scientist (studying minute ecological elements) and the performer (experiencing full bodily immersion). 

A large screen shows a video of a wet and black spongy bog, surrounding a pool of red-brown bog water. Specks of white float on the water, which holds the reflection of Nigel Rolfe’s body. Looking down into the pool, but also looking through the screen at the viewer, his body appears upside down. The ripples in the water cause his apparition to flit in and out of distortion, as if dancing. Rolfe is, however, as still as a statue. He eventually tips slowly towards the water, as his feet sink into the spongy black earth, falling head-first into the bog hole. The sound of the crash fills the gallery, before the artist reemerges, sopping wet. 

Robert Ballagh’s painting, The Bogman (1997), is a self-portrait of the artist cutting turf. Some kind of ancient jewel is submerged below his feet, while flying overhead is a raven – the bird of prophecy in Celtic mythology. Camille Souter’s oil painting, The bog, early morning (1963) overlays muted tones of beige, grey, brown, and green, in scenes that show people working or moving. Bold lines scratch away the paint to reveal a blue underlay, evoking the dividing cuts of the sleán, enacting a manmade geometry over the natural landscape. Barrie Cooke’s Megaceros Hibernicus (1983) depicts the long extinct Irish Elk. The large canvas barely contains the mammoth deer’s body, which is surrounded by matt black, evoking the timeless vacuum experienced by a body cocooned underneath the bog. One imagines a narrative unfolding between these three works: a group working to cut peat; an individual striking a bone; a body, frozen in time for millennia, coming back to this world. 

Patrick Hough’s film, The Black River of Herself (2020), gives voice to bodies preserved beneath the bog. “I’m not ready to leave,” says the ghoulish corpse of a woman to the archeologist excavating her, this exposure to the air affecting her decomposition – a second death. She has wisdom, derived from centuries of observation swathed in peat, and is highly critical of contemporary man’s impact on the environment. “And now a broken bog bleeds carbon…” 

These pieces engage with the macabre concept of the ‘revenant’ – a body preserved from the moment of death and brought back to life. However, the chemical makeup of boglands provides not only the ability to sequester bodies, but the efficient absorption and storage of vast amounts of carbon from the atmosphere. Fiona McDonald’s automated sculpture, We Share the Same Air [1.1] (2024), explores the ecological and atmospheric significance of peatlands. Monitored by a CO2 sensor, three transparent chambers are periodically opened and sealed by a central robotic arm, showing how unexcavated green peatlands filter carbon from the air. Conversely, the black, shorn plains of cut bog, actually leak stored carbon back into the atmosphere, producing a stark visualisation of environmental degradation. 

Shane Hynan presents photographs from his ongoing series, ‘Beneath | Beofhód’, which observes the raised bogs of the Irish midlands and the culture surrounding them. A large black and white image, titled Recently Rehabilitated Esker Bog with Mount Lucas Wind Farm in the Distance (2023), portrays the bleak expanse of a ploughed bog, showing a barren, puddle-covered landscape with no traces of wildlife. Until fairly recently, County Offaly was associated with the commercial harvesting of peat by Bord na Móna – a process that permanently ceased in 2021 as the company mobilised its new green energy business plan. In the far distance, an urban skyline features the silhouettes of wind turbines, thus signaling a new beginning in power generation technologies. 

Perhaps one of the most well-known works concerning the Irish boglands is Brian O’Doherty’s Rick (1975) – a large-scale assemblage of hand-cut turf, originally installed at the David Hendrick’s Gallery in Dublin. With current awareness of the importance of preserving boglands, the sale of turf was banned by the state under solid fuel regulations in October 2022. It was therefore not possible to recreate O’Doherty’s sculpture for the show; however, photographic documentation of the piece is exhibited as part of ‘BogSkin’. As the boglands are now left to recover after centuries of damaging excavation, it will be interesting to see how artistic relations with this enigmatic landscape continue to evolve. 

Ella de Búrca is an artist and Assistant Lecturer at NCAD. 

elladeburca.com

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Solomon Fine Art 

6 February – 1 March 2025

A striking quality of the landscapes featured in ‘The Old Grieving Fields’, apart from the Sligo-based artist’s clear aptitude for drawing, is the role played by many of their supports. Standing in front of an artwork, it is common to absorb content without conscious regard for the material upon which it has been created. But, here, the supports invite greater attention.

Sometimes remote, sometimes immersive, the 38 depicted scenes are arranged in clusters with common features that, together, proffer diversity in perspective and scale. They emit an air of disquiet, of things in flux yet somehow timeless. This is partly due to Wann’s use of charcoal, derived from his copying of black-and-white photos from newspapers as a child.¹ Working from darks to lights through erasure and reinforcement, he achieves a wide tonal and mark-making range, disrupted by occasional colourful elements.

The largest group, 20 tray-framed works on panel from 2024, represent a recent development within his practice. Applying charcoal direct to wood requires careful handling, and the results remain both crisply detailed and sensitively atmospheric. Warmth from the wood glows through, its grain contributing to the imagery. Each is composed of three-quarters sky, one-quarter aerial view of the terrain below, and hints of danger from natural phenomena or human intervention. 

While Deep Dark Night features a pitch-black firmament, dark, lightly textured ocean, and softly lit horizon, Eclipse reserves the blackest black for the titular phenomenon, ringed by crepuscular rays. Its print-like feel derives from the wood grain, which also reads as clouds, while the patterning in Murmuration enhances the dynamism of a formation cohering in flight above a tracery of fields. Omens (Crows Arriving) obliterates other elements with an all-over, chaotic scattering of birds, their portentous blackness exuding a sense of menace.

People rarely feature in Wann’s landscapes, yet human intrusion is implied by the intriguing visualisations Balloons and Recon; the first features hot-air inflatables, the second a squadron of helicopters. Consequence from human activity is suggested by Controlled Explosion and Footprints, the latter foregrounding a passenger jet to reference carbon-dioxide excess. All seem emblematic of the impacts of needlessly induced crises, including climate change.

Opposite, are large drawings on Fabriano supports, collaged together from smaller pieces. The resulting patchworks in Aerial 1-6 (2024) create an uneven surface that traps or resists the medium, depending on the direction of travel. Wann senses they may reenact his experience of being adopted and later piecing together his family history. Some years ago, he was taken up in a small aircraft over County Carlow by a half-brother, who pointed out the farm where his birth father had lived. The photos he took combined with memory and creative processes to inform the series. 

Aerial 6, The Bloodline of the Fields, directly references that encounter, the red lines that define gaps in the assemblage emulating a family tree. Aerial 3, Night Visions takes it into a dream world where the artist experienced a vision of the fields his father worked being on fire.² Here, and in other exhibits, he overwrote in red the Fabriano watermark, inviting attention to the artifice of his creations and establishing a tension with the interior acts of drawing out that produced them. 

Possibly referencing the role certified records play in authenticating a person’s identity, other devices used to mark works as ‘documentation’ include a ‘rejected’ stamp in Aerial 3, Night Visions and official ‘seals’ in Approved Landscape #1 and #2 (both 2024). In Landscape on Fire (2023), inspired by news that the Amazon rainforest was in flames, Wann includes an ornate trompe-l’oeil frame, reflecting his desire to talk about imagery and how we look at it.³ 

Described as a “lament to a landscape in distress,” ‘The Old Grieving Fields’ reflects our constructive impulses and the impacts of our destruction – including the lost potential of unadulterated nature.⁴ Although Wann prefers that his work not be defined by biography, his drawings impress as a form of working through, and this, above all, gives them deep resonance.⁵

Susan Campbell is a visual arts writer, art historian and artist. 

susancampbellartwork.com.

¹ Michael Wann interview, The Artist’s Well, 8 February 2025 (youtube.com).

² Ibid.

³ Ibid.

⁴ Exhibition Press Release, Solomon Fine Art.

⁵ Michael Wann interview, The Artist’s Well, 8 February 2025 (youtube.com).

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