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This Book Has Two Authors: Creating Conservation Documentation for Dennis McNulty’s
‘I reached inside myself through time’

Caroline Carlsmith participated in Dr. Brian Castriota’s 2021 seminar on the conservation documentation of time-based media (TBM) art at the Conservation Center of the Institute of Fine Arts at New York University. Facilitated by Castriota’s work with IMMA as TBM Conservator, students created documentation for a TBM artwork held in IMMA’s collection.

TBM is a capacious category that encompasses any artform which unfolds to the viewer over time, including growing collections in contemporary art museums such as moving images, interactive art, kinetic sculpture, performance, and installation. This text describes Carlsmith’s personal experience of documenting Dennis McNulty’s installation artwork ‘I reached inside myself through time’ (2015) in the context of her practices as both a conservator and an artist. Her engagement with the work relates to ideas of authorship and authenticity within contemporary art conservation.

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More than one maker

This book has two authors –  Olaf Stapledon, Last and First Men: A Story of the Near and Far Future

Olaf Stapledon’s 1930 science fiction novel Last and First Men: A Story of the Near and Far Future details a history of the future of humankind over tens of millions of years. Part of its conceit is that the book was apparently written by two authors, each occupying a different historical time. One author is “contemporary with [the book’s] readers” who are themselves contemporaries of Einstein. [1] The other is “an inhabitant of an age they would call the distant future.” [2]

To write a text, as to make an artwork, is always to reach across time and space. Stapledon’s novel and its sprawling timeline are referenced within Dennis McNulty’s installation artwork, I reached inside myself through time (2015), part of the collection of the Irish Museum of Modern Art. Entering a room filled with reddened daylight and reflective, tilting structures, viewers of McNulty’s work encounter a suite of sounds and moving images that seem to come from both the past and the future. On a modified LCD screen suspended on ratchet straps from the ceiling, events and eras from Stapledon’s two-billion-year timeline scroll bilaterally from the horizon of the near-present. Simultaneously, an edited acapella recording of Norwegian pop band A-ha’s 1985 hit The Sun Always Shines on T.V. emanates from rigid architectural elements transformed through vibration into speakers. “I reached inside myself through time,” the voice sings. “Give all your drifting distant mirrors, all your love, inside my mind. / Believe me, / the mirror’s sending me through time.”[3]

Detail of the Stapledon timeline animation on pendent LCD monitor. The Narrow Gate of the Here-and-Now: The Anthropocene, exhibition, IMMA, Dublin, 2021-2022, showing Dennis McNulty, I reached inside myself through time, 2015, photo: Ros Kavanagh

Like the last men of Stapledon’s novel reaching to the first, the figure of A-ha lead singer Morten Harket is also reaching from one world to another. On a small screen attached to the reverse of the larger one, a flickering drawing of Harket glows through the metallic film of an anti-static bag, giving the animation a subtle mirrored quality. The shifting image, run by a microcontroller called an Arduino Uno, resembles the famous 1985 Take On Me music video (another A-ha hit) animated by tracing individual frames of a film or video using a technique called rotoscoping. In the music video, Harket moves between photographic reality and an animated, monochrome world, reaching through the drawn windows of a comic strip to travel between it and the three dimensions that his beloved inhabits.[4]

Morten Harket drawing animation seen through anti-static bag. The Narrow Gate of the Here-and-Now: The Anthropocene, exhibition, IMMA, Dublin, 2021-2022, showing Dennis McNulty, I reached inside myself through time, 2015, photo: Ros
Kavanagh

I have not experienced the installation in person, so I reached through my own windows towards this work. As a graduate student focused on the conservation of contemporary art and time-based media (TBM) art, I studied and documented McNulty’s piece as part of a partnership between my university and the Irish Museum of Modern Art (IMMA) facilitated by TBM Conservator Dr. Brian Castriota. I know the work remotely and asynchronously: as the initial installation in Lofoten, Norway in 2015; as it was installed on two different occasions at IMMA, in 2016 and 2021; and as an installation in the future, to be potentially created even after McNulty is gone. Without knowing the work experientially, I know it intimately: I know the source material, the file formats, the parameters which the artist considers important and the ones that might shift, which aspects of the experience are intrinsic to the work and which are incidental. Or, I think I do.

In addition to my conservation studies, I am also a practicing artist. I make artworks of the type that I am most drawn to conserving – complex installations with interactive, performative, sculptural elements, often including electronic media. One thing I am drawn to in these types of artworks is the way in which they are “dormant” when not on view. Such “dormant” works may only take a physical form when they are on view, and this makes them uniquely vulnerable among artworks. To understand what makes these works special, consider an oil painting or bronze sculpture in a museum storeroom. These artworks remain physically intact both on and off display, whereas an installation artwork is disassembled when the exhibition is over, and only parts of it might be retained. Thus, documenting the work thoroughly is imperative for its conservation, for its existence in the future.

To the extent that I have experience conceiving of and producing such artworks, I hope I am well equipped to conserve them. Yet, as I documented McNulty’s artwork, I also wondered how my own habits of making might become hazardous to the works I conserve through the blurring of my own aesthetic preferences with those of the artist whose work I am caring for.

Conserving TBM artworks

The practice of art restoration is probably as old as artmaking, but the relationship – and growing distinction – between artists and conservators has shifted over time. While historically artists often restored their own works or the works of others, current conventions in the field distinguish between the “creative” work of artmaking and the “scientific” work of conservation. This distinction attempts to reassure the public (not to mention the artist and the conservator) that the artist will remain the sole author of the work, and that the conservator will protect it without making changes that would produce a meaningfully different artwork. Ideally, contemporary conservators are “objective” in their interventions, faithfully reproducing the artist’s intended effect through no “artistic” work of their own.

Yet as forms of what is publicly understood as art shift, so too do the responsibilities of the conservator, and this shift is particularly evident in the conservation of TBM art. TBM artworks are works that include duration as a dimension, revealing themselves to the viewer over time. This seemingly simple definition applies to a diverse range of forms, including film and video, performance, installation, internet-based art, software-based art, sound art, bio art, interactive art, and artworks that incorporate material change into their conceptual structure. These new artforms require new conservation frameworks, particularly because they often necessitate partial or full re-creation to be seen. I will refer to such (re)creation events as “instantiations.”

Increasingly, conservators like myself understand our work, not as scientifically objective, but from a situated perspective that attempts to account for our own identities and biases. Laying aside supposed universality or neutrality, many now see conservation as what conservator Hélia Marçal has called a “knowledge-making, situated, practice.”[5] Understanding our positions as specific to place, time, race, class, gender, education, belief system, and other intersectional identities requires a conservator to relinquish any claim we might have made to objectivity. But if we are not objective, how do we avoid being creative? How do we avoid acting as an artist?

Documentation, authorship, and authenticity

Documentation of an artwork can take a wide variety of forms. It might be textual, photographic, audiovisual, three-dimensional, anecdotal, embodied, crowd-sourced, schematic, thick or thin. It is, at best, ongoing, polyvocal, and self-reflexive. The aim of documentation is to gather instructions and other key information for installing artworks in the future and ensuring their preservation across time. Often times these may be manuals, sketches, reports, questionnaires, photographs or videos stored in museum archives and offices. Regardless of form, careful documentation is crucial for institutions like IMMA that are collecting artworks that do not carry their own material record. For Castriota, “an object or entity is safe-guarded not by discovering and protecting its ‘true’ essence, but rather by investigating and documenting how significances are negotiated and vary among diverse audiences, in different settings, and through time.”[6]

Many arguments about whether an artwork has been authentically instantiated hinge on the idea of artistic intent: a slippery concept predicated upon the assumption that an artist’s intentions are static, knowable, and paramount. Yet as has been widely documented, many artists change their described intentions for their works over time, with a particular trend towards greater openness to conservation interventions later in an artist’s career. With TBM artworks, the artist sometimes makes changes when a work is re-installed, as has been the case with I reached inside myself through time. Such changes can highlight the properties of the work which are unalterable, and which are variable, making the essential qualities of the artwork clearer.

The first instantiation, showing red window paint and Easygrow Eco Silver White Lightite film. ‘LIAF 2015: Disappearing Acts’ exhibition, Lofoten, showing Dennis McNulty, I reached inside myself through time, 2015. Documentation courtesy LIAF

McNulty has made a variety of changes to I reached inside myself through time from instantiation to instantiation. Some of the most noticeable of these include the installation architecture, which was covered with Easygrow Eco Silver White Lightite film in the first instantiation (Lofoten, 2015) but made of metallic plasterboard in subsequent instantiations (IMMA, Dublin, 2016 and 2021-22). Similarly, the windows were painted with red oil paint in Lofoten but later covered with red plastic film at IMMA. These differences reflect both site-specificity and a certain mutability in the work, which is not uncommon for installation art.

Questions about artistic intention and authority are complicated further when more than one author is concerned. For example, a work may have been produced collaboratively by an artistic pair or collective, and the artists might have different ideas about what the work is and how it should move forward into the future. Even when artworks are produced within the studio of a single artist, studio managers, studio assistants, and contracted fabricators might all have a substantial hand in the production of the work and may well have made aesthetic decisions that strongly influenced the work’s direction. When the work has left the studio and entered an institution like IMMA, conservators, who are often tasked with direct interventions into artworks as a part of their caretaking, must remain wary of how their interpretations and actions impact the way it will be experienced and understood.

The authenticity of an artwork can be called into question when there is a loss of material components and it is recreated with new materials (as with many TBM artworks), particularly when this is done without the direct involvement of the artist. In some instances, changes imposed by a curator or conservator might cause a work to be poorly instantiated or even fail to instantiate it completely, but at other times aesthetic interventions into artworks by other agents might even cause the instantiation to be an artwork of its own with new or dual authorship, rather than an instantiation of the original artist’s work alone. It was this trap I was hoping to sidestep as I worked to document I reached inside myself through time.

Installation view showing monitor position, black carpet, rachet straps, and window treatment. ‘The Narrow Gate of the Here-and-Now: The Anthropocene, exhibition, IMMA, Dublin, 2021-2022, showing Dennis McNulty, I reached inside myself through time, 2015, photo: Ros Kavanagh

Documenting I reached inside myself through time

When I began documenting I reached inside myself through time, I noticed that, rather than beginning by exploring what information I could initially access about the work itself, I chose to start with the text which had been sampled in the work: Last and First Men: A Story of the Near and Far Future. This move felt natural to me, but I was also suspicious of how natural it felt. When I make installations in my own practice, there is always a text, if not several, buried in the project. It seemed to me that McNulty, through his quotation of Last and First Men and The Sun Always Shines on T.V., had, at least in this work, made a similar move. Another conservator might not have decided that the best way to approach this documentation was to begin by spending weeks reading a dense and potentially irrelevant science fiction novel written nearly a century prior. Particularly since it is only the Stapledon’s timelines that are actually quoted in McNulty’s work. There was no obvious reason to begin with that text – one might have begun with a survey of A-ha’s discography, or with a video walk-through, or a 3D rendering, or a wiring diagram, all of which would have resulted in very different documentation, potentially influencing future instantiations of the piece.

After I had made my initial attempts to document the installation, I had the opportunity to interview McNulty about aspects of his work I did not yet understand. Artist interviews are an important tool for conservators of contemporary art, and the interview helped me mitigate the influence of my personal biases in my documentation. I told McNulty I had read Stapledon’s novel, and he laughed and said I had gone “beyond the call of duty.”[7] In my own artistic practice, many of my works have dealt with literary figures – for years I made artwork about the nineteenth-century American poet Walt Whitman, who also reaches through time in his poetry. In this way, it was natural for me to document the installation as a text. McNulty, however, comes from an audio engineering background. He was making moves with sound I did not initially understand, nor would I necessarily have done so if he had not explained them to me when I interviewed him. McNulty was using impulse response recordings, which he described as “like a sonic fingerprint of a particular space.”[8] To do so, one makes a loud bang like a popping balloon and records the sound. This activates the resonances in the space, and the resulting impulse recording can then be processed by a piece of software called a convolution reverb plugin. Play another sound through the plugin, and it will apply the reverb of that particular space. As a part of I reached inside myself through time, McNulty had made impulse recordings in different spaces around Lofoten, including a concrete bunker formerly occupied by Nazis, traffic tunnels through mountains, an underground sports hall, a dry dock, and a community space.

In the audio component of the installation, Harket’s voice is processed to sound as though he is passing through these spaces. As McNulty readily acknowledged, for most people these audio qualities are subtle enough to work on a subliminal level, but the differences in reverberations would be evident to the trained ears of anyone who recorded music, which I do not. Knowing that this information was present in the work prompted me to wonder how a sound engineer might have approached documentation – no doubt quite differently than I had.

The installation architecture serves as speakers projecting sound into the space with Feonic audio-actuators. ‘The Narrow Gate of the Here-and-Now: The Anthropocene’, exhibition, IMMA, Dublin, 2021-2022, showing Dennis McNulty, I reached inside myself through time, 2015, photo: Ros Kavanagh

When I interviewed McNulty about I reached inside myself through time, we were joined on the Zoom call by Castriota, along with Claire Walsh, an Assistant Curator in IMMA’s Collections department. After McNulty finished patiently answering my questions about obsolete operating systems and configurations of ratchet straps, he took a moment to thank Castriota for a talk he had recently given, which McNulty had accessed as a recording. McNulty was excited about Castriota’s thoughts on the conservation of TBM artworks, which had prompted McNulty to recast his own work as a performance rather than an object. Listening, I was reminded that there were many ways an artist and a conservator might influence one another, and the works in both of their pasts and futures.

View into the installation. ‘The Narrow Gate of the Here-and-Now: The Anthropocene’; exhibition, IMMA, Dublin, 2021-2022, showing Dennis McNulty, I reached inside myself through time, 2015, photo: Ros Kavanagh

Conservation without objectivity

Regardless of how much we might deny it in deference to the fantasy of scientific objectivity, conservation documentation is a creative act. While artists and conservators may have been separated by academic systems and the current understanding in European and European-dominated cultures of what is appropriate conservation intervention, we are not as separate as we might appear, just as I am not separate from myself.

Categorical titles such as ‘author’ or ‘artist’ disguise a distributed network of actors with a variety of goals who, through their various forms of labor or influence, together give rise to an instantiation of an artwork. Given that an artist might be separated from a conservator blurrily if at all, and that artistic authorship is commonly more decentralized than is broadly acknowledged, any of us – wearing any hat – who hope to care for an artwork should try to remain cognizant of how our actions might shape the futurity of that artwork. But, as objectivity and perfect knowledge are idealizations unavailable to us, we also cannot allow ourselves to be paralyzed by the imperfections of our attempts to reach through time. All we can do at this time is give ourselves permission to try, and to certainly fall short, and to try again, to assist in the continuous co-creating that is care.

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References

[1] Olaf Stapledon, Last and First Men: A Story of the Near and Far Future & Star Maker, (New York: Dover Publications, Inc., 1968), 13.

[2] Stapledon, Olaf. Last and First Men: A Story of the Near and Far Future. New York: Dover Publications, Inc., 1968.

[3] Dennis McNulty, I reached inside myself through time, 2015, Texts from Olaf Stapledon’s timeline for Last and First Men: A Story of the Near and Far Future, an acapella recording of Morten Harket’s vocals for The sun always shines on TV sourced on-line, True Type (digital) rendering of the Futura font by Paul Renner, high resolution impulse response recordings made in various spaces in the Lofoten islands, Reaper DAW with convolution reverb plug-in, Feonic audio-actuators, stereo amplifier, 2 Raspberry-Pi computers running Raspbian, openFrameworks open source toolkit, programming, modified LCD screen, Arduino Uno with 2.8″ TFT display, anti-static bag, aluminium profiles, cables, cable glands, nuts, bolts, screws, wood, webbing, ratchet-straps, plasterboard, plastic window film, black carpet and adhesive, Dublin, Irish Museum of Modern Art.

[4] A-ha, “a-ha – Take On Me (Official Video) [Remastered in 4K],” YouTube, January 6, 2010, Video, 4:04. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=djV11Xbc914.

[5] Hélia Marçal, “Situated Knowledges and Materiality in the Conservation of Performance Art,” ArtMatters International Journal for Technical Art History, Special Issue 1 (2021): 56.

[6] Brian Castriota, “Variants of Concern: Authenticity, Conservation, and the Type-Token Distinction.” Studies in Conservation (2021). https://doi.org/10.1080/00393630.2021.1974237. pe-Token Distinction.” Studies in Conservation (2021): 9, https://doi.org/10.1080/00393630.2021.1974237.

[7] Dennis McNulty, Artist Interview, December 1, 2021.

[8] Dennis McNulty, Artist Interview, December 1, 2021.

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IMMAxDAS Artist Spotlight with Salvatore of Lucan

This IMMA Magazine is a transcribed interview between IMMAxDAS artist-in-residence, Salvatore of Lucan and his sister, writer Gabrielle Fullam, discussing about family, identity and painting the personal.

Salavatore of Lucan is an invited IMMA artist working in one of the four studios generously gifted to IMMA by the Dean Art Studios on Chatham Row in Dublin’s City Centre. Joining this dynamic creative community is an exciting opportunity for both the artists and for IMMA.

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Me [Gabrielle Fullam] and Sal [Salvatore of Lucan] meet in his studio in town. I am one hour late and I have picked up a Diet Coke for us both as an apology. We spend quite a while setting up the microphone because I speak much louder than him, and we don’t want the audio quality to sound poor. Despite this, the audio is quite poor. Below is a transcript of the interview.

GABRIELLE [G]: So I’m here with my brother, Salvatore of Lucan, I’m Gabrielle.

SALVATORE [S] : Of Lucan

G: Also of Lucan

S: Yeah

G: And we’re going to talk about some of your paintings of our family. A little bit about race and being ‘the other’. And about…yeah, that stuff, basically, right?

S: There was some large pauses in- when I was talking, actually, about race. We’re gonna leave that in anyway?

G: Yeah? Would you like me to?

S: Well, if this is the introduction, I would like to tell the listener that there is large pauses. I felt like there was large pauses when I was thinking of what to say.

G: [laughing] Yeah

S: [laughing] I’m just trying to make all my apologies now.

G: Yeah, you don’t need to apologise.

S: For not being particularly clear.

G: I think it’s good.

S: OK.

G: Yeah, your paintings aren’t particularly clear, either.

S: I think they’re very clear.

G: Really?

S: Yeah.

G: That’s kind of an interesting question.

S: They’re a lot clearer than I am in real life.

G: Yeah? Do you think that?

S: Yeah.

G: In what way?

S: I’m a much better painter than I am a communicator in real life. Right?

G: Yeah, that’s true.

S: Okay yeah.

G: But I wouldn’t say that those are… I wouldn’t say being a good painter doesn’t necessarily mean making a very clear painting.

S: Oh. Yeah. Well…

G: [laughing] I suppose that makes sense to you.

S: [laughing] Yeah. To me they make perfect sense. Anyway

G: Here is the interview!

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G: How are you feeling Sal?

S: Grand yeah.

G: You say that you take a little while to warm up in an interview?

S: Yeah.

G: What are you doing?

S: Getting something to fidget with, is that not allowed?

G: That is allowed.

S: Okay good, I’ll do better if I’m fidgeting.

G: Yeah, that’s good, that’s good, I just thought the mic might pick it up, so I thought it might be good to say it.

S: Oh.

G: How do you feel you normally come across in interviews?

S: Oh, good question. I usually get asked the same questions. Oh, I don’t really know how I come across though because I don’t really watch them back.

G: How do you feel about them, usually?

S: Hmm, I don’t mind them, like, I just try not to say anything that I don’t think is true. Yeah. Yeah, that’s- that’s the goal.

G: That’s the goal. Yeah. How do you feel about me interviewing you?

S: Well it was my idea.

G: Yeah, we don’t normally talk much about your work in detail and I think maybe that’s because I know, the ones I’m most interested in, I would often know the subjects in. So maybe that might make it harder, but I’m kind of most interested in the ones of our family. So we might talk about those.

S: Yeah, I’m ready.

Salvatore of Lucan, Me Ma Healing Me, 2022, Oil on canvas.

G: You’re ready. So the first one I’m interested in is Me Ma Healing Me. Why did you make that painting?

S: Em, I don’t know. I think, eh, [pause] maybe – so maybe I feel more comfortable saying this because you’re my sister, but like, I feel like the question is too hard to answer.

G: Yeah?

S: It’s too hard to answer why I paint anything really.

G: It’s a hard question. When I bring people in to see that painting, or whenever I’ve shown it to any of my friends, they are always really drawn to the kind of set in the background of it.

S: Yeah.

G: Which is kind of interesting, because most of those objects are just actual things in Mary’s room.

S: Yeah.

G: Which I think is an interesting dynamic. What do you think of that room and that set?

S: Oh, okay, yeah you’re dead right. Yeah. Like probably one of the main reasons I made that painting is because Mary’s room is quite a vista. You know, like, it’s pretty intense. [It’s] just like 16 gongs and she sleeps in a little tiny corner of it, in- on a couch. I remember when I won the Portrait Prize for that, I think Sean Kissane was like, giving a talk, or talking about why the painting won. And the whole way through the talk Mary – our mom, I call her Mary – [laughing] she was just saying “Oh, that’s mine”. Like he listed everything in the painting and she was like “That’s mine as well” [laughing], yeah we know, like it’s all of your stuff.

G: [laughing] Yeah, she is really proud of all those things.

S: Yeah she loves all those things yeah.

G: You painted it during lockdown. And you actually weren’t at home for that part of lockdown. Or maybe you had started painting it. And I remember I went in to take pictures of the carpet in her room.

S: Oh yeah true, I got you to take the photos for it.

G: Yeah, so I tell everyone that too. I go in and I say “I took the source photos” [laughing]. So, yeah, it’s a really kind of magic space, I think, that part of the house is. But you haven’t painted anything of that space before. You’re not in there that much, are you? How do you feel about it more generally? Other than, like, as the museum?

S: Em, Mary’s room?

G: Yeah.

S: How do I feel about it?

G: Yeah.

S: I think it’s kind of cool, like.

G: Yeah.

S: I think it’s definitely odd. But I like that. You know, it’s her own unique expression or own space. Or like, I suppose people say that, like, the spaces that people occupy resemble their brain.

G: Yeah. Do you feel like that about your spaces?

S: Yeah. Or like, I want it to look like my brain or something. Or like to make myself feel more comfortable or something. I don’t like- I like messy.

G: Yeah. It’s cool.

S: It’s organised a little bit as well though.

G: Yeah. You’re your cleaner that I am.

S: Definitely. You’re filthy.

G: Yeah. I’m really drawn to it because I obviously used to sleep in that room.

S: Yeah, of course, yeah.

G: Like even the corner you’re using – it’s the corner where my bed used to be. And it always had all the stuff in it. So I think, I don’t know. That’s why I’m, I’m really fascinated by the background. I don’t know, it’s obviously very religious, or something. That whole area has the sacredness to it, which I think is really nice. And she is kind of like a genie in it. Like kind of like a wisp, as well.

S: Yeah she doesn’t have legs.

G: I only realised that today, actually, when I was really looking at it.

S: Oh really

G: I was like “She doesn’t have any legs!”. So when you make those sorts of choices, obviously, one of the things you’re really interested in is the composition.

S: Yeah.

G: So how did those choices come into being? Or what kind of process do you take to do that, you know?

S: I think probably like, technically, like, when I’m composing. I start, I try and … I think composing is, like, trying to heighten all of the most important parts, or the parts that you consider the most important. So then I tried- I composed it to put the most important details in prime locations and in unison with each other. And then there was like no need for me to do her feet. It just wasn’t important. So like, like, I kind of worked out that it was going to be hard for people to even notice that there was no feet. So I just didn’t put them in. You know?

G: Yeah. That makes sense.

S: And I don’t like the idea of like, just doing them like real sketchy. I’d rather just – I’d rather do everything detailed rather than just painting something that’s not important just because it should be there.

Salvatore of Lucan, Munich 1998, 2022

G: I think my favourite painting that you’ve done is Munich 1998.

S: Oh? Okay, no one’s really seen that. It’s never been exhibited.

G: Yeah, do you still want to talk about it?

S: Oh yeah of course, we can talk about it.

G: Well, I think Mary looks really different in that painting, than in ‘My Ma Healing Me’. She’s a lot younger. Do you have many memories from Munich?

S: I don’t really have that many memories from Munich. I have a memory of moving apartment, and being got sugary cereal, or like a sweet cereal, as a treat. But then when we got to the new apartment, there was no, eh, bowls. So I had to eat cereal out of a plate with like Mary topping up the milk and I remember being quite upset about that.

G: That’s a very funny image.

S: It’s kind of all I remember though. Like sometimes I get like a weird… I don’t know like what you’d describe it [with]. But with certain types of architecture, it makes me feel a certain way. But I don’t really know, it must be something to do with the flats we in Munich [mumbling] I’m not sure.

G: What age were you, three?

S: I think four and a half? I’m not sure, actually.

G: Yeah. That makes sense.

S: I know I spoke German when I started school here, did I?

G: Yeah. I’ve given you a hard time before about forgetting German. But that’s an interesting thing to happen. But why am I in it [Munich 1998]?

S: Well, I actually made the painting because of a request from Mary like she said, she said, like… if you were to make painting, I’d really like if you made one of when you were about seven, and Gabrielle was like two or three, or something, she said that would be, that would be a painting of like a happy memory. She would prefer that more than a painting of her now, is what she said to me. So I decided to make a painting that was kind of about, like, my vague memory from Munich, and then I added you in.

G: Thanks.

[We laugh].

G: And kind of related to that, I don’t remember what it’s called, I couldn’t find it, the family portrait in ‘Dead Present’. Family time, I think?

S: It’s called Family Time/Nanny’s Shriek

G: Yeah, and it’s also sort of related to the one [you made] before of nanny and the three uncles,

S: Yeah, the pastel drawing.

G: Yeah, so that, and I’m also thinking of the one with Nanny and Mary watching the TV and falling asleep.

S: Yep.

G: There’s quite a sense of kind of like matriarchy or motherly influence, or at least what I look at them. How do you think that relates to your work?

S: So in those two paintings… well, like, I suppose, you know, we grew up with a sort of matriarch, our grandmother and our mother. It’s not intentional, it’s not like I’m intentionally trying to make work about matriarchy, but I just make work about my own life and I grew up

G: In a matriarchal household.

S: In a matriarchal household.

G: Which I think is kind of nice… I suppose when I kind of look at them, I get, like, a very strong feeling of power in the family. I mean that a positive sense. Where I get this feeling of where a family can draw its power from. [Whether] from key figures or influences or whatever it is. Do you think that there is some level of that being a bind to the family or how do you think that that manifests visually, or otherwise?

S: I don’t think like, sorry, yeah again, like I just don’t think about it. Like I say, basically, I’m just trying to make things about how I feel, you know, and vaguely what happens in life. Yeah, so yeah, I don’t think about it. Like that’s definitely for you or a viewer to see. Especially you as well like. Yeah, yeah. A lot of paintings of the family like the main target audience probably is you, as a member of the family…. Like it’s probably made mainly for you than it is…Like, if I make it for the family and communicate something strongly to the family, then my communication is clear. And then hopefully someone else, outside the family, will understand that as well.

Salvatore of Lucan, Family Time/ Nanny’s Shriek, 2022

G: When you paint about very personal things, or things close to your life, or kind of from your perspective of the world… What’s it sort of like having those kinds of things exhibited or put up, and having people interact with them?

S: I suppose it’s embarrassing.

G: It’s embarrassing?

S: Probably the most, or, the main overall feeling I have when I exhibit.

G: Is embarrassed?

S: Probably yeah

G: Just because it’s- like, why?

S: Because it’s just kind of a personal isn’t it?

G: Yeah.

S: It’s embarrassing being personal.

G: Yeah, very earnest.

S: Very earnest. Well, like him at the same time, like, I mean, I feel like sometimes I get an idea and I feel like it’s embarrassing. I think it might be a good idea. Obviously there’s terrible ideas that would also be embarrassing.

G: And yeh, and when you take something or think something about something or whatever. And you put it into a painting, what’s that sort of process like internally? I know, when I start to write something, verbalising it and writing it down kind of changes how I interact with that feeling or interact with that subject. Do you feel differently about something after you painted it?

S: I think, yeah, usually, yeah, I feel a little bit better about it maybe. The painting Me and My Dad in McDonald’s. After I made that painting, I had a strong feeling that the painting hadn’t helped how I felt that situation at all, or hadn’t enlightened me at all on how I felt about that situation. But I had to keep doing like interviews and talking about it [as if it were] like I did know how I felt about the painting.

G: Yeah.

S: Because like, when you’re being interviewed, I suppose that’s one reason why I wanted you to do the interview. When you’re being interviewed, and someone asks you a question, even if it’s quite personal or if you don’t know the answer, you kind of feel like you have to give a stab, or else you’re being rude. Even though really, you don’t know. So you mean, I kind of found myself constantly talking about that painting. And like, knowing that I was like- I didn’t actually know how I felt about the painting.

Salvatore of Lucan, Me and My Dad in McDonalds, 2018, Oil on cotton canvas

G: So, did you think other people expected that you would have something profound to say about it.

S: Yeah, I had an expectation with myself to say something, yanno what I mean? I don’t even know if like, anyone else was expecting or like putting pressure on? But yeah, in general, I don’t think I think about things too much differently after I paint them. Usually I feel more or less the same. Or sometimes… I dunno actually yeah… I’m not giving a great answer here.

G: No, no, no, you’re fine.

S: Sometimes when I’m painting- I think to paint for me anyway, to sustain the effort in the painting, I need to have quite a strong feeling about the painting. To sustain it for like, long enough to like make a painting that I’d be happy with. Or like my favourite work of my own is work that I labour on or like, worked on for a long time. So if something’s- if something- if I just have a strong feeling for something, it’s easier to work on.

G: Yeah. And would that feeling be anything? Like, could it be upsetting or could it be embarrassing, or could it be happy? Like, is it just about an intense feeling or is this about a particular kind?

S: [mumbling] Em, is it an intense feeling or a particular kind… It’s- I think, more like a repetitive feeling. Like if I feel something a lot or I think about something a lot. I generally think that that’s something I should make work on. Like something that’s already going on inside my head. Rather than trying to find something outside myself and bring it into my head, to just explore the things that are already there. When trying to broach the topic of race with my brother, I deliver some incomprehensible questions and we laugh. We decide to retake after talking for a bit and relaxing.

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G: Okay, this is take two.

S: Yeah. Gabrielle and myself have composed ourselves.

G: Yeah, we garbled it. I garbled it. Basically, what we’ve been talking about so far has kind of been about our family. But in a lot of the press and the wider context – there’s all of these other things that people- I’ve actually, garbled it. I said it [the question] just fine just before

S: Yeah, you said it fine [laughing]. It’s like you’re over explaining.

G: Yeah, I’m over explaining.

S: You just have to ask the question.

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G: Okay. This is take three. What we’ve been talking about so far is basically our family. And basically, what I’m wondering is, how wider social contexts and conversations on race might play into or interact with your work.

S: Yeah. So I suppose when we were talking off recording there, when we were trying to compose ourselves. I said, yeah, I suppose I don’t know how it affects or like, I don’t like to think about how it affects the work, but I suppose I know how it makes me feel. I suppose like, being mixed race and also not knowing that side of my family always contributed to like a feeling of otherness in me. Or like, that’s something that I’ve kind of, I kind of love about myself, or kind of am into or, like, I suppose I don’t [pause] I suppose the feeling of otherness always gave me like a licence to like, do whatever I wanted, or like to, like, just follow, or like not, I never felt like I had to try and fit in. I always felt like I could just do whatever I wanted, like my whole life, for some reason, or it might be that reason. Also, our mom’s quite unique as well. Like, even I felt like I was allowed to be an artist or like I was allowed to do things a little bit differently to everyone else. Because of that. But then, yeah, I suppose in terms of, like, in terms of race, like I don’t, I don’t know. Like I don’t feel Irish in lots of as well. I always make friends better with people who aren’t like, either fully Irish or didn’t grow up in Ireland. But like my work is quite Irish in lots of ways as well.

G: I suppose it’s also like Irish and Irishness is just like this huge big. I don’t know, I think of it as this huge, big concept with all this sort of social. I don’t know, baggage, for lack of a better word.

S: [hums]

G: But I don’t know. So it can be harder to kind of relate to that in a very personal way. But you do feel like you’re from Lucan.

S: Yeah, I suppose the Lucan thing is that I do feel like I’m from Lucan, yeah, just the idea of like, Ireland. Kind of, yeah, freaks me out.

G: Freaks you out?

S: Yeah. Well, like I don’t know, like, I definitely don’t feel- I definitely wouldn’t be like- I’m definitely not very nationalistic.

G: Yeah. But I suppose a lot of your paintings are of Irish people and of very Irish contexts, and what else is there [to Irishness]. Which I suppose is interesting within that [feeling].

S: Yeah, see that one over your shoulder there [indicates to painting in progress]. See those colours in the wrap, the duvet, and the underwear. [they have green and orange colours].

G: Yeah.

S: Yeah. I’ve been doing that a lot lately, trying to put green and orange in everything.

G: Green and orange?

S: Yeah, but that’s kind of just that painting is of me still living at home. Being nearly 30. Like, that’s me at 16. And me now. Still in the same bedroom.

G: Yeah, that’s a very common Irish problem. But you’ve always said you, you kind of knew you would have to be at home for quite a while to live as an artist.

S: Yeah, yeah. Well, I don’t know if that’s just me being lazy or not. But I knew when I was- I knew when I left college and went on the dole, and decided I was going to give art like the best shot I could. I knew that I wasn’t going to make money. And if I wasn’t going to get a full time job that- it was going to be pretty much impossible for me to live outside of home. And also art costs a lot of money. Especially the way I make it.

G: Yeah. Do you ever feel pressure about that?

S: Pressure about what?

G: About not making money?

S: Yeah, I do you feel pressure about it, yeah.

G: Yeah.

S: Yeah is that enough?

G: Yeah. Okay. I think it was good.

S: Cool.

G: Yeah.

S: Nice.

G: Do you have anything you wish I had asked you about?

S: Oh, this the whole interview?

G: Well, yeah, that’s it, right?

S: Okay, yeah. No, um I feel like I could have been more clear in parts, but it’s fine. It was less casual than I thought it was gonna be [laughing]

G: Yeah [laughing]

S: Should we like listen back here or do an intro now?

G: Yeah.

[End]

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Find out more about IMMAxTheDeanArtStudios Residency at imma.ie

Follow Salvatore of Lucan on Instagram – @salvatoreoflucan 

Banner Image Credit: Salvatore of Lucan in his Studio. Photo by Sorcha Frances Ryder @sorchafrancesryder

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About Gabrielle Fullam

Gabrielle Fullam is a 23 year old Punjabi-Indian writer from Lucan. She is currently serving as the President of Trinity College Dublin Student Union. She is a previous editor of Icarus vol. 71, Ireland’s oldest literary magazine. Her work has been featured in FRUIT, The Liminal: Notes on Life, Race and Direct Provision, The Player and Icarus Vol. 69, and 70. She has received 13 nominations and 2 awards for her play ‘Do As I Tweet, Not As I Do’ at the Irish Student Drama Awards. She has also been a recipient of the Irish Writers Centre/Words of Colour ‘Uplift Fellowship’. She has also represented Ireland at European University Debating Championships, progressing to the quarter finals, and won the Irish Times Debating Competition.

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Art Nomads respond to the IMMA Collection

“It is one of the marks of humanity and the only way to peace and the only way to co-existence in a fragile planet ecologically and in human terms, if we can develop the capacity to allow other cultures find their space and within cultures, people’s experience and stories.” ~ President Michael D. Higgins, presentation to the Unspoken Truths conference, IMMA, January 1993 .

In the following text, members of the artist collective Art Nomads respond to works in the IMMA Collection as part of their 2022 Residency at IMMA, and their involvement in the SPICE Project. 

Art Nomads is a collective of visual artists from migrant and diverse cultural traditions based in Ireland. The main aim is for a collective creative engagement through exhibitions, projects, talks, and workshops. Art Nomads is a voluntary and not for profit organisation that works as a capacity builder and advocate for artists from minority ethnic backgrounds to gain visibility in the Irish art world. 

 The SPICE Project is an EU Horizon 2020 funded project dedicated to developing tools and methods of citizen curation that support underrepresented communities to share their perspectives through selecting and interpreting works of cultural heritage. 

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 Amna Walayat responds to Golden World by Stefan Kürten 

Stefan Kürten, Golden World, 1997
Stefan Kürten, Golden World, 1997, Oil on Canvas, 180 x 252, Collection Irish Museum of Modern Art, Donation, In honour of Denis, Bridget, Will and Madeline Twomey, 2008

I found Golden World interesting. At first, it looked like traditional Persian art until I checked its title and found that it was made by the German artist Stefan Kürten. 

In Islamic traditions, due to restrictions on making representations of human or living figures, floral and geometrical patterns are used to decorate religious scripts, particularly on the borders. In Royal Court art in Persia and India, birds, animals and later, human figures can be seen in secular subjects. However, in religious scripts there were still restrictions on representing living beings in the decoration of the borders. Tea washes and gold were mostly used for illumination of the borders. Thus, the painting by Kürten expresses the same feeling for me although it lacks the borders. 

Amna Walayat. Bengal Tiger Hunt, 2020. Gouache, half tone and gold on wasli.
© Courtesy the artist

Kürten’s work resonates with my painting Bengal Tiger Hunt, which can be considered in the neo-miniature style and is decorated with a traditional border of flora and fauna motifs in tea washes and brown ink.  It depicts Queen Victoria hunting a baby Bengal Tiger. ‘Bengal Tiger’ was the title of a young Nawab (Prince) of Bengal and ruler named Siraj ud-Daulah, who was the first Nawab defeated and the killed by British’s forces in 1757. His body was torn to pieces and served to dogs. It was a historical moment, since after that, the occupation was expanded, and India was colonised for another 200 years. The painting allegorically represents that moment. 

 The border of the painting expresses ‘the law of the jungle’ where the powerful hunt the weak (see the lioness killing a Bengal tiger in the upper central border) and in the birds flying away you can notice the fear of the hunt.

 Roxana Manouchehri responds to Little Miss Muffet by Paula Rego 

Paula Rego, Little Miss Muffett, 1989, Etching, aquatint, 52 x 38 cm, Edition 23/50. Purchase 1996. Collection IMMA

I have been fascinated and influenced by Paula Rego’s work since my student years. 

Rego is an icon for many women painters, especially those who engage with the body and mythology. This particular work, Little Miss Muffet, is very similar to many of my drawings that show violence against women and an ongoing battle between evil and good. An innocent creature attacked by a huge spider, but this innocent creature has lots of hidden power.  

Roxana Manouchehri.
Fear (ترس). 2022.
Acrylic and print on cardboard. © Courtesy the artist

In my work Fear, I let the ancient being (the spider, having inhabited the Earth for more than 300 million years) sit on my face. 

 By remembering and weaving fear and trauma without any resistance, I accept that life goes beyond fear that I can’t control. Embrace life for all that is, and all that sometimes isn’t. Life is a loan, and fear exists. 

Laragh Pittman responds to Stack by Kathy Prendergast 

Kathy Prendergast, Stack, 1989, Cloth, string, paint and wood, 270 x 260 x 70 cm, Collection Irish Museum of Modern Art, Purchase, 1991 © the artist
Kathy Prendergast, Stack, 1989, Cloth, string, paint and wood, 270 x 260 x 70 cm, Collection Irish Museum of Modern Art, Purchase, 1991
© the artist

I was fortunate to have recently been in the presence of Stack, a monumental artwork in The Narrow Gate of the Here-and-Now – Chapter 3: Social Fabric. I was struck by its soft, layered, and tactile nature. I remember the smell too, that warm, fuzzy scent of wool. I learned that it references the idea of women and landscape, and an association with the off-cuts from clothing factories – this global trade sustained by women’s labour.  

Laragh Pittman. Evergreen. 2022. Textiles. © Courtesy the artist

In Evergreen, I have been using the unlikely materials of needle and thread to embroider an image of other stacks – the imposing edifices of metal containers in Dublin Port. Just as Kathy Prendergast makes layer upon layer of material to build her sculpture, I am still sewing lines of colour to form my piece. It is very small in comparison, at only 16cm by 20cm, yet it is about the cliff faces of storage in the docklands and the gargantuan ships laden with metal boxes that trade across our seas. This work is part of a larger project ‘Global Box’, my attempt to explore the fluid and transcultural nature of life in Ireland today. 

 Joe Odiboh responds to Yeoman Yemen by Claire Halpin 

Claire Halpin, Yeoman Yemen, 2019, Oil on canvas, 60 x 150 cm, Collection Irish Museum of Modern Art, Purchase, 2020.

The 2019 painting Yeoman Yemen by Claire Halpin in the IMMA Collection touched and inspired me as an artist to reflect on the unprovoked attack by Russia on Ukraine. All the arms deals and military support, the refugee crisis, and battles for territorial gains. The destruction of lives and properties. The nuclear threat and danger of a ‘Third World War’. 

Joe Odiboh. Ravages of War. 2022. Acrylic on canvas. 50×40cm, © Courtesy the artist

My painting, Ravages of War is a direct response to Claire Halpin’s work, showing the Ukrainian map, attacks, occupation, and annexation of territories with the blood of the innocents. All these are expressed in my use of hot and warm colours to express the war of occupation.  

Tomasz Madajczak responds to I reached inside myself through time by Dennis McNulty 

Installation view Narrow Gate of the Here-and-Now: The Anthropocene, IMMA, Dublin. Photo Ros Kavanagh.

 
The natural solitude of the senses leads towards particular way of belonging. 

I wrap up moments in time, in their meaning shared through recognition of familiarity. 

I don’t own anything.
 
The death travelling with the speed of light, allows us to reach through multidimensional histories understanding the past and the future.
 
A shelter built on a rock is anticipating another high tide, to lift up the body into motion. 

The inner compass is oscillating between the high and the low attitude.
 
The next is becoming the now, the past is integrated into our presence.

Sounds liberate through the flow of air.

A name becomes a prison for the named.

Tomasz Madajczak. Statement. 2022. © Courtesy the artist

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Find out more about the SPICE Project here

Find out more about Art Nomads through their website or at imma.ie

Art Nomads – @artnomads_ireland

Banner image credit: Art Nomads, Karvansarai, 2022, Video still

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Radiating Shadows – James Merrigan interviews Brian Teeling

Brian Teeling, Self-Portrait, Karim's, November 2022, Photograph

In this magazine article, James Merrigan interviews Brian Teeling about what inspires and fuels his multidisciplinary practice.  

Brian Teeling is an invited IMMA artist working in one of the four studios generously gifted to IMMA by the Dean Art Studios on Chatham Row in Dublin’s City Centre. Joining this dynamic creative community is an exciting opportunity for both the artists and for IMMA.

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JAMES MERRIGAN: I scrolled through close to 1500 posts on your Instagram account. Over that 7 years of photographic documentation of a life lived, loved, and experienced, I discovered the mirrored self-portrait as a perennial haunting presence as early as your fourth Instagram post-dated 13 December 2015. Can you elaborate on the photographic self in your work, specifically as a photographer, which manifests in a panoply of mirrored objects, from the car mirror, elevator mirror, bedroom/bathroom mirror, and TV screen?  

BRIAN TEELING: I’d love to be able to say something delectable about them, like “I’m cruising my reflection”, but the reality is that the self-portraits began as primarily thoughtless photos, used to fill frames at the end of a roll of film. 

When I look back at them now, I can register that I’m recognizing myself at that moment in time, in the event. It makes me think of what Slavoj Žižek has to say about the ‘event’: “…event is not something that occurs within the world but is a change of the very frame through which we perceive the world and engage in it. Such a frame can sometimes be directly presented as a fiction which nonetheless enables us to tell the truth in an indirect way.” These self-portraits can be situational, being present to the power of a kind of political energy of the body in space and time. I can see flesh and blood, I can determine how I was feeling. There’s also a weird balance between slight narcissism and an emotional register for a life previously lived. I wish I could reach into these photos and reassure myself sometimes, but other times I think “Oh my god, my arm looks great there.” 

Recently, I’ve been thinking of them as diffractions, and maybe these are diffracted versions of myself. Radiating shadows that have their reality in the past, somehow stuck in some unremitting universe. Generally, I like to think of photos as pathways to other realities. 

Brian Teeling, Manchester, October 2019, Archival Print

JM: You said in casual conversation before, that you felt that knowing you personally led to knowing your work. Can you talk about the photograph Shower-Time (Southend) October 2018 in relation to this knowing you, knowing your work thesis? 

BT: There’s this interview with Félix González-Torres from Flash Art by the critic and curator Bob Nickas. In the interview, Bob asks Félix about his audience and posits a lovely idea that has stuck with me. “I believe art is made for no more than five or six people you know, and anyone else who gets something out of it, it’s just extra.” I love this idea from Bob. For me, it reaffirms this idea of “to know me is to know the work”. If you didn’t know me and you saw the Shower-Time photo, you could read it in a certain way in terms of a contemporary domestic scene, but if you knew me better you would understand what my relationship with my ex-boyfriend Scottee was like, who really crystallised ideas around the working-class experience for me in art. Scottee is an incredible artist, performer, activist and he helped enshrine the belief in vocality, but also presence and embodiment just through the process of making work. It’s really important to me.

Brian Teeling, Shower Time, October 2018, Archival Print

This photo comes from us waking up in the morning — I think we just had sex — and getting ready to head out into Southend where Scottee was living at the time. It was an uncanny situation for me, primarily because it’s something that I’ve never had in any of my previous relationships. I’ve never had this domestic scene, just doing unexciting things, like brushing our teeth and having a shower. This was included as part of A Vague Anxiety (2019) at IMMA and is one of my favourite works I’ve made. Much like Scottee, it means a lot to me. 

Brian Teeling, The Drift Parallax, September 2022, Book. (Photo by Louis Haugh, Book Design Keith Nally)

 JM: Your most recent print publication The Drift /// Parallax, what you describe as a “triptych of publications based on the stars Arcturus, Rigel and Vega”, is an experience of chromatic and lyrical elegance. Why has text become more than an element within your photography, but a supplementary excess outside your photography?  

BT: At the beginning of the lockdown in 2020, I was feeling ‘uncentered’. I believed I had this enormous burden that I should be taking advantage of all that free time, but I was just burned out. I was working two jobs, full-time in retail and full-time with my practice. After a period of not doing much other than going for long walks and re-watching The X-Files in its entirety, I started looking through my archives, to see if I could find patterns, resonances, or anything that would lead me somewhere. I collated all the images that had a sonorous quality and began to print with them. There’s an easy connection between memory and photography, and I wanted to address the fallibility of our memories by purposefully and inadvertently degrading the photos through printing, scanning, and reprinting. Three bodies of work emerged from this process of retrospection, and what is called “anamnesis”, when you confront the fallibility of memory and recall. The Disintegration works, which I exhibited as part of Speech Sounds (2022) at Visual, Carlow, were large-scale text works, comprising multiple sheets of paper, intended to disintegrate over time. Lastly was my book The Drift /// Parallax, which is a combination of text and image. 

Brian Teeling, Landscape (Anamnesis), April 2020, Archival Print
Brian Teeling, silver scar, crashed car, June 2022, Archival Print

Text work has been present since I started captioning photos. It feels right that it’s more visual in my work now, less of a shadow aspect, and more pronounced. The combination of the image and text is where I feel there is a power, where there’s an explosion of meaning. I could feel that when I was assembling ‘The Drift /// Parallax’. There was so much more I could infer, or obfuscate behind the ‘lyrics’ combined with the photos. 

JM: The experience of sexuality and class are continually repeated in the literature that accompanies your exhibitions and printed projects. When I think of these two experiences, I think of the working-class philosopher Pierre Bourdieu, and what he defined as “Habitus”. Can you elaborate on the experiences of masculinity and queer working-class identity within your work? Not just as embedded content, but how it manifests as colour (such as red)?  

BT: Sometimes, I want to disregard those labels, as I feel discomfort in being pigeonholed. But in art, you have to be able to demonstrate who you are, and the best way to do that is to be truthful to your lived experience because it’s what you embody when you make work. My work is inherently masculine, queer, and working-class because that’s who I am.  

I feel that identity is too often elevated over lived experience. Ornamentation is in a higher regard, simply because people believe in the truth of aesthetics, rather than the reality of ‘habitus’. What I mean by this is that identity is something that can be commandeered, purchased, and presented as reality, rather than something gained through a lived experience. This is an implosion of meaning. We see this all the time in fragile men dressing like CEOs or ‘tender-queers’ policing others online (while working for arms manufacturers).  

Everyone has a personal relationship with colour. Red for me, is personal. I can trace it throughout my life. The colour of Eric Cantona’s Manchester United jersey, the brake-lights of every car that went through my Dad’s garage, the colour of the light emanating from my bedside lamp, the supposed enemy of every photographer.  

JM: Your ongoing “c-space” installation in the toilets of The Dean Art Studios Dublin is (to my mind) one of the most visceral and sympathetic off-site artworks I have experienced in recent times. It’s site-specific, intimating a cruising space for casual sex, with the formal suggestions of glory holes and voyeuristic car mirrors under heavy red lights. It invokes the words of the artist Luis Camnitzer, in his text work This is a Mirror, You are a Written Sentence… 

Brian Teeling, c-space, August 2022, Installation, Mixed Media, Dimensions Variable

BT: I’ve had this idea around cruising for quite a while, where I’m overlooking the transactional part, and trying to think more romantically about it. Maybe this is a result of being single for so long, but I think the idea of connecting with someone on a greater intimate level, even for a moment, is appealing. And that connection doesn’t inherently have to be just sexual, maybe there’s something deeper, emotionally, spiritually. This was the entry point for that work, which allowed me to collide with other aspects into one space. The car, the text, the colour red, the mirrors, the cosmos, the glory holes. 

The works present in that space all address looking, observing, location & distance. Car mirrors, vinyl, light-fixtures, and song lyrics, they all have a familiarity. I like the idea of taking these standard objects and shifting them slightly, into a new realm of thought. You’re forced to address your relationship with these items, establish a new meaning, and reinforce an old one. It kind of mirrors what I want to do with cruising. Shift the meaning.  

There’s one work I wanted to include in that space but didn’t have time to realise it. It was a hidden speaker within a cistern, which would have a playlist of 100 ambient songs and film soundtracks, all without lyrics (except ‘Outside’ by George Michael as a kind of Easter Egg). The idea being that every time you enter the space to cruise, it’s likely you’ll hear a different song, and you’ll have a different experience. I like the idea of this being shared by people who visit the space, unaware of its intent, or inherent possibilities. This unrealized work would have been called ‘River Fragments’ after Heraclitus. “No man steps into the same river twice, because the river has changed, and so has the man.” 

JM: Recently you brought up Roland Barthes’ A Lover’s Discourse. I searched for my copy at home and came across a segment I underlined twenty years ago, at a time when I was trying to find images to suit my desire: 

 “It has taken many accidents, many surprising coincidences (and perhaps many efforts), for me to find the Image which, out of a thousand, suits my desire. Herein a great enigma, to which I shall never possess the key: Why is it that I desire So-and-so? Why is it that I desire So-and-so lastingly, longingly? Is it the whole of So-and-so I desire (a silhouette, a shape, a mood? And, in that case, what is it in this loved body which has the vocation of a fetish for me?” 

What do you think about when you read this? 

BT: The ‘Image’ for me is a person who you are in love with. Deep, romantic love. Swimming in their lake.  

Brian Teeling, Swim In My Lake, May 2020, Archival Print

That passage really speaks to me. I think about an ex I was once in love with, and the amount of self-reflection I had done over that period of my life. Why did I desire him? Was I in love with the idea of him, rather than the actual person? I love that this passage invokes ideas around photography, snapshots, visuals, and framing. I think that’s why I’m drawn to Barthes’ work so much.  

JM: When I think about your work in relation to love, and then Félix González-Torres’ work in relation to his lover Ross, I wonder if Félix’s work was doing two things at once: one, it was made out of the love he felt for Ross, and two, it was motivated by the anxiety of losing that love while Ross was dying of AIDS? So perhaps the haunting love references and sensations in your work are about the absence and yearning for love, which makes it all the more present? 

Brian Teeling, Declan Flynn in Dublin (Aspect #1), June 2021, Archival Print

BT: Félix’s work Untitled (Portrait of Ross in LA) is incredibly powerful and my favourite example of love in his work. You can feel it, it’s real. The power of it, how he memorialises him, the personal aspects of Ross’ sweetness, and the tragedy of AIDS. He puts so much meaning into it, it’s transformative and heavy with emotion.  

In my work, I feel the absence. I yearn for that love, for someone to memorialise, to be vulnerable with. Those ideas can be channelled into other works, without necessarily being about love. Like absence. I focussed on that for Declan Flynn in Dublin where I made ten different aspects of Declan and his life. Each aspect was a distillation of a part of his life. His absence is present, his presence is absent. This in portraiture I find interesting because you can still tell a story about someone, and visualise part of who they are, without photographing them directly.  

JM: You used the word “hauntology“ in reference to your own work recently. But when I look at your work I don’t see the ghosts of the past, but the ghosts of the present reality. Can you name anything you are haunted by in choosing, taking, and curating your work? 

BT: When I talk about hauntology, I’m considering it in the same way that Mark Fisher did, in terms of being haunted by a future that will never come to pass. That future was having my father present in my life. He is the haunting presence. He’s a mechanic. You can see that reflected in the cars that keep appearing in my work. When I was younger, I felt I would become a mechanic or involved in cars in some way. I spent a lot of time in my Dad’s garage. The memories from that space are tinged with the scent of new car smell fresheners and exhaust fumes, his blue oil-stained overalls, and the endless supply of broken cars in need of repair that came into that garage. We don’t speak anymore, which is tragic, but it’s something I’ve come to accept. I idolised him growing up, and would look forward to being collected by him after school. Every day he would arrive in a different car. I remember one time he picked me up in a huge Volvo estate that was painted white with big leopard spots on it. It was so bizarre, but I remember him being totally unfazed by it. He’s his own person, and unconcerned with the opinion of others. We’re quite similar, so that’s probably why we clash.  

Brian Teeling, Headlight (Billy), October 2015, Photography
Brian Teeling, Father, June 2022, Mercedes Car Door, Red Window Tint, Screen-printed Photograph

JM: Before we get to my final question about love in your work, could you describe the body of work you are currently developing entitled “Black Mesa”. My initial response to the images you shared of self-portraits, car crashes and Audi rings graphics is that they register as spectres for something much darker, something much emptier?  

BT: Black Mesa is a collision of photographic work that addresses ideas around depression, poles of inaccessibility (Point Nemo), the International Space Station, and car crashes. These collisions are made from instant film photos, found images, and graphics. This work exists as digitally printed flags, large-scale vinyl, clothing, aluminium and framed c-type prints, and some text work.  

There’s a truth at the core of this work. It uses a mix of the personal with the fictional in order to express a desire to be rid of depression. To crash and relocate a depressive state of being into an inaccessible point, and submerge it with the broken decommissioned satellites beneath the Pacific Ocean, to both extend and subvert its weight and claustrophobia.   

JM: The question of love was something I had planned as a final question (for now), but somehow love is the thing that seems to keep coming to the surface, especially in your references to the love behind Félix González-Torres’ work, and the absence but search for love in your own work. Any last words on love in your work?  

BT: Love for me in my work is represented by meaning. Love is the meaning, the meaning is love. I don’t think I can make work without it, or can make meaningful work (to me) without it.  

Brian Teeling, regarde-moi (Black Mesa), December 2022, Instant Film Photo

Find out more about Brian’s work through his website or at imma.ie

Find out more about James’ work here  

Brian Teeling – @brianteeling 

James Merrigan – @james__merrigan 

Banner Image Credit: Brian Teeling, Self-Portrait, Karim’s, November 2022, Photograph  

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About James Merrigan 

James Merrigan began writing critically on art in 2008 on the advent of the global financial crisis. The title of his first online writing moniker Billion Journal was a statement of his belief that money is the opposite of culture. For over a decade he has continued to make critical statements via different online and self-print entities, the most recent being Small Night, which works with artists on antagonistic and subversive image and text publications and exhibitions, screen-printed in his independent studio based in Waterford City.  

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Witnessing ‘Yellow’ by Paola Catizone

In this magazine article visual artist Paola Catizone discusses ‘Yellow’ by Amanda Coogan, performed in 2021 as part of the IMMA exhibition The Narrow Gate of the Here-and-Now; Queer Embodiment. 

Catizone is an arts educator (at IMMA) and a yoga and movement facilitator. Originally from Italy, Paola has lived and worked in Ireland for many years. She holds a BA and MFA from the National College of Art & Design, Dublin. Paola combines the immediacy of drawing and the directness of Performance Art in her work. She engages in interdisciplinary collaborations, working with choreographers, musicians and video artists. 

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In September 2021, Seán Kissane, Curator of Exhibitions at IMMA, asked me to assist artist Amanda Coogan in two performances of her seminal work, Yellow, recently acquired by the IMMA Collection. Yellow was on display as part of Queer Embodiment, the first chapter of the museum-wide exhibition, The Narrow Gate of the Here and Now.

Coogan is a durational performance artist who studied under Marina Abramović, a Serbian conceptual and performance artist whose work explores the relationship between performer and audience, the limits of the body, and the possibilities of the mind. Abramović, who is often referred to as the grandmother of Performance Art, developed the Abramović method for performance art training, which prepares participants to both perform and observe long durational work.

As an internationally acclaimed Irish artist, Coogan’s work often refers to challenging periods in Irish history, which she addresses from a contemporary feminist perspective. Growing up in a family with two deaf parents, the artist learned sign language early in life. Amanda’s father spent some of his own childhood years in one of the homes for deaf boys, at a time when a disproportionate number of Irish people were interned within institutions, whether Industrial Homes, Magdalene Laundries, prisons, or psychiatric hospitals. Coogan’s endurance test is a tribute to all of these innocent prisoners, in particular to the children in the Deaf Schools and the women in the Magdalene Laundries, the last of which closed its doors as recently as 1996.

We meet on Zoom. Coogan talks about Beckett’s Not I (1972), and of the mysterious figure of the ‘The Auditor’. She imagines my role in Yellow as a sort of ‘auditor’, and our interaction during the performance as a ‘duet’. My role, in fact, will be practical. As Yellow involves soapy water, I will use a mop to dry out any spillage. I will be ‘in role’ wearing a white medical overcoat. I will play Shubert’s 4th Sonata in A flat on an MP3 player at regular intervals throughout the performance, which will take place over seven uninterrupted hours.

Amanda Coogan performs ‘Yellow’, as part of Chapter One, Queer Embodiment, of the Narrow Gate of the Here-and-Now, at the Irish Museum of Modern Art. Photo: Conor McCabe Photography.

3 October 2021, 10 am – 5:30 pm:

In the gallery, props and materials are in place. A large white bin has been filled with water and several containers of Matey Bubble Bath stand beside it. A platform acts as temporary stage between two long mauve curtains, framed by two artworks. Behind us is Vivienne Dick’s video, Liberty’s Booty (1980), featuring candid shots taken in a New York brothel, interspersed with imagery of the pope’s visit to Ireland. There is a connection between this work and Yellow, with reference to female sexuality and to the infamous Magdalene Laundries, where single mothers and ‘fallen women’ were interned. In the alcove facing Yellow, is Alice Maher’s Familiar 1 (1994). A large red colour field canvas with an image of a little girl is presented alongside a skein of unbleached flax, resembling human hair, which hangs from wall to floor, reminding me of Mary Magdalene. The three works seem to be engaged in conversation, supporting each other.

It’s 11 am and the artist is sitting on the bin, her enormous skirt pouring down from her waist, forming a large, yellow rectangle on the floor. Her legs are open wide, and a stream of liquid soap runs downwards from her lap. Her posture echoes depictions of Renaissance Madonna and Irish Sheela Na Gigs, unapologetically, unashamedly exposed.

Covid-19 lockdowns are recent, and the museum is quiet. In the lonely, cold gallery, sitting on her tall bucket, the performer begins her rhythmic task. It doesn’t take long for her knuckles to become red, and for the washing gestures to begin to look like labour. She plunges both arms deep into the cold water between her legs, searching, then pausing, as if about to pull a newly birthed infant from the depths. She shapes the soaked fabric into a vertical, phallic form rising from her lap, then suddenly stands, throwing the length of the huge skirt onto the floor, over and over, evoking the repetitive nature of female domestic labour.

The relentless circular scrubbing of cloth between two hands, the wiping away of froth, the seven hours stretching ahead, already make the task appear impossible. Fabric, water, foam, body, space, and time are the sculptural and performative materials of this epic work. In her writings, Coogan tells us that durational performance art relies on four pillars:

  1. Body (of the performer)
  2. Place (in this instance, the East Wing Gallery at IMMA)
  3. Time (still stretching ahead of us and offering unknown possibilities)
  4. Audience (scarce on this occasion)

At various times during the day, I am alone in the gallery with the artist. As her concentration deepens through repetition, she enters a state of ‘flow’. The attention and presence of an audience support the artist in sustaining concentration. In return, observers partake of some of the artist’s experience of endurance. People gradually enter the space in pairs and in small groups. An older woman stands, leaning on the wall near the performer, and remains for about two hours.

I play Schubert when Coogan seems tired. The melancholy piano notes elevate her energy. The frantic labouring stops, and she rises from the depths into a trance-like, radiant state, her arms raised gracefully, her body light, eyes gazing into the distance. Stillness pervades the space; viewers seem to hold their breath. The folds of the dress are also still now, like the drapery of classical sculpture, the white bucket resembling a plinth. Motion resumes, always returning to the task of washing.

Coogan draws large soapsuds from her dress and feeds them into her open mouth, later spitting them out to form a white beard from mouth to chin. In her book, Sexual Personae (Yale University Press, 1990), Camille Paglia analyses western art through the lens of classical mythology. She assesses artistic representations of the eyes as reflecting the Apollonian values of logic, order, and mental clarity. The mouth carries chthonic qualities of unconsciousness, depth, and the messiness of the body. What would Paglia make of Coogan’s foaming mouth – of the biting, dribbling, and spitting? The image is grotesque and unsettling. Is this a beautiful, strange, bearded lady, or a large white tongue, the inside coming out in a frothy release?  “She’s a bitch, that one”, Coogan says later.

Amanda Coogan performs ‘Yellow’, as part of Chapter One, Queer Embodiment, of the Narrow Gate of the Here-and-Now, at the Irish Museum of Modern Art. Photo: Conor McCabe Photography.

At times, the performer bites the fabric, lifts it, and moves it around while scrubbing, using mouth and teeth as a third hand. She stands and the triangle of yellow fabric hangs from her mouth to the floor. Coogan’s 2015 work, I’ll sing you a song from around the town, featured monumental soft sculptures made of fabric. Textile art has traditionally been the province of women. In I’ll sing you a song…, the heroic, permanent gesture of classical statues was re-imagined through a material that is both impermanent and pliable, impinging less on a world afflicted by too many manmade objects. Watching Yellow is also a sculptural experience, during which forms last only seconds, before being transformed.

When she immerses her arms in water again up to her shoulders, a rhythmic, fast, eager movement that we cannot see begins. She looks over her shoulder like a crouching animal slaying its prey; she also reminds me of a witch figure from Goya’s print series, The Disasters of War (1810-20). Now she raises both legs and balances her body weight on the rim of the bucket. I remember Coogan being asked during a lecture how she prepares for her performances: “I do my Yoga, I rest” was the answer.

After the first three hours, everything changes. Vulnerability is exposed and pathos becomes visible. The performance becomes a sacrificial act. It becomes clear why this is not a ‘duet’; I am sitting in relative comfort, while she’s endlessly labouring. Later on she comments: “At some point it’s not even performance anymore”. Actions emerge as ways of managing strain. Durational performance art truly is “Making, not faking”, in the words of cultural anthropologist, Victor Turner. This distinction between the performing arts and performance art is that during the latter, events are really happening in unrehearsed ways in front of our eyes, and the exhaustion is real.

Suddenly standing up and throwing the heavy wet fabric forward, the performer loses her balance and falls. She lands on her hands and knees and immediately bounces backwards, like in the rewinding of a movie scene. I recognise pandiculation, an animal movement that allows four-legged mammals to pounce and retreat effectively.

Towards evening, the gallery becomes busier, and the performer’s body is driven by something other than physical strength. Now, as she continues to scrub, she raises her eyes, and her face is transfigured; in my tiredness I see the face of one of the Magdalene girls. Later, she tells me, “It couldn’t happen without the time factor”. The sustained concentration and physical exhaustion engender visions. The tenderness and strength of the female body has been revealed in its universality.

Physical empathy is central to the notion of ‘Direct Body to Body Transmission’. In the Abramović Method, viewers are in direct connection with the performer, by virtue of inhabiting the same space and physical field of experience.

Towards evening, a circle of people surrounds us. A group of older women appear moved by the work, and give me a nod of acknowledgement, and an empathetic look through tearful eyes. Some ask how many hours Yellow had been going on today and are awed by the reply. The last one to leave holds her hand on her heart while saying, “This is one of the best things I’ve ever seen”.

Amanda Coogan performs ‘Yellow’, as part of Chapter One, Queer Embodiment, of the Narrow Gate of the Here-and-Now, at the Irish Museum of Modern Art. Photo: Conor McCabe Photography.

 7 May 2022, 12 noon – 5:30 pm:

Covid restrictions have been lifted. As soon as the performance begins, visitors come in. Coogan appears to make eye contact with the audience, smiling sometimes. “I only see shadows” she says later.

An atmosphere of empathy is palpable, revealing people’s natural tendency to want to support someone engaged in a massive effort. Upholding her. Sharing the weight. Some viewers stay for several hours, perhaps wanting to share in the experience of ‘durationality’. Others are possibly engaging in a collective act of exorcism, healing memories of institutional abuse through this cathartic work.

Slow movement and sculptural moments of stillness unfold, reminiscent of Coogan’s performative photographic prints. A distinguishing feature are the artist’s clothes in primary colours. I ask her about the significance of colour and she shrugs; she just likes it, she says. However, Coogan’s early training in painting may account for the prominence of colour in her work.

Now she twists the fabric into a long, snake-like shape, which she wraps over her shoulder, mirroring the gesture seen in a large oil painting on canvas hanging on the opposite side of the corridor wall, in room 3: Hughie O’Donoghue’s Laocoon (2003). The original inspiration for the painting, the ancient marble sculpture The Laocoon Group, is the prototypical icon of human agony in Western art. This is a suffering that offers no redemption. The notion of effort in pursuit of gain is disturbed in Yellow; the artist’s herculean task doesn’t have a practical outcome.  Later, I ask: “Do you ever feel you can’t continue?” The succinct, definite answer: “Yes!”.

She mentions flow: “Falling off … having to climb back up”. Flow is a state of continuous absorption in a task, as described by psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi in his book Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience (Harper & Row, 1990) and often quoted in Coogan’s talks. A movement emerges with a lateral flinging of the long skirt, creating a rhythm. The heavy, wet fabric slaps the walls and splashes viewers with water and bubbles. Eventually the garment tears under the force of the action. Coogan later tells me that the movement helps her warmup when she’s cold.

At intervals we hear the voiceover of Dick’s Liberty’s Booty: “So, I’m a whore, he swindles the banks, who gives a fuck?! I mean, he doesn’t go to jail for what he does…” The gallery’s video and sound installations are now being switched off. The scrubbing, panting, and grunting becomes audible. Someone asks: “Does the lady speak?”, “Not during the performance” I reply, and I am reminded of Coogan’s childhood in a relatively silent household. I play Schubert again; it was recorded during a live performance, and it includes watery sounds and concludes with a recorded applause. It’s 5:25 pm. The audience stand up and we applaud.

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Interested in learning more about Performance Art? Visit our What Is_? series which provides an overview of the term and how this practice has evolved over time.

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‘Dance of Life’ – West Tallaght Women’s Textile Collective

Artist Wendy Cowan’s work and teaching practices are firmly rooted in the processes of making and collaboration where care, labour, power, women’s and young people’s relationship to the state are made tangible through a variety of texts (film, textiles, works on paper, installations, and street happenings). Cowan now lives and works in Mparntwe-Alice Springs, central Australia on Arrernte Country and is the co-founder and co-director of Stick Mob Studio. 

In this article, educator and artist Wendy Cowan diffractively reads the story and impact of ‘The Dance of Life, Shamiana Panel’ textile work made almost thirty years ago, that was brought together with women of both Irish and South Asian descent at the West Tallaght Women’s Textile Group, to explore cross-cultural understanding. ‘The Dance of Life, Shamiana Panel’ (1993) was selected by Curator Georgie Thompson for Chapter Three- Social Fabric, of the current/recent museum wide exhibition drawing from IMMA’s Collection -The Narrow Gate of the Here and Now-IMMA 30 Years of the Global Contemporary.

In her curatorial introduction Thompson says, ‘With a rich history, global reach and fundamental relationship with human existence, textiles and their production are a powerful lens through which to view some of the concerns of the last thirty years, and to read the museum’s collection and history.’ (page 136) Museum catalogue

Helen O’Donoghue, previously IMMA Senior Curator, Head of Engagement & Learning Programmes, describes the impact of bringing the panel into the IMMA exhibition space for the Narrow Gate of the Here-and-Now: Social Fabric;

“I witnessed their reappraisal of their work which has been in storage and out of sight. This revisiting of the work reawakened the sense of personal and collective agency and empowerment that being involved in the process had for them. The last thirty years has seen unprecedented changes in Irish society, with changes in the demographic makeup of its population, and the role that Museums and galleries play in people’s lives. This work is one of many artworks in IMMA’s Collection that has been an outcome of our outreach policy which has been to create meaningful access to the cultural assets of this museum and is a demonstration of how art can be experienced as transformative, and museums can become significant in people’s lives. Through our programming, we have worked to build local and global connections that engage with social, political, and cultural concerns of our time.”

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Entangled exhibitions: Returning, remembering more just pasts

What I am about to talk about has gone before – here-and-now, there-and-then – which is to get a felt sense of entangled states through creative threads that trace past-present-future, intra-actions [1],  across hemispheres, times, and matter/s [2]. These threads include: the textile Dance of Life created in 1993-1994 by the West Tallaght Women’s Textile Collective which was featured in the exhibition The Narrow Gate of the Here-and-Now, Social Fabric (2021-2022) [3]; the launch of Stick Mob Studio’s graphic novels (2021), which threads Indigenous cultural stories and speculative fiction through every day, not-so-ordinary, desert life in central Australia; and finally the hastily written notes taken during an online talk from Karan Barad entitled ‘Re-memberings Times/s, for the Time-Being’ hosted by IMMA in 2022.

The exhibition title Narrow Gate of the Here-and-Now was taken from the text Comrades of Time by Boris Groys (2009). This exhibition worked as an apparatus or weaving loom through which this paper is threaded across hemispheres, times, and matter/s. The art projects and notes work not as a succession of events, as in one follows the other, rather as the experience of pasts-presents-futures existing simultaneously. For Arrernte [4], Indigenist scholarship from central Australia and Barad’s take on quantum field theory – agential realism – time, space and matter/s are inseparable (Stuart & Georgiadis, 2015; Turner & McDonald, 2010). In my work as artist-teacher-researcher, I respect the distinctive and entangled nature of these scholarships.

The artworks and photographs in this paper are not static representations of times past, they radically remember and rethread entangled relationships. In this way they do not provide clarity to the words, nor do they represent static moments stored on film, paper, or cloth as antiquated matter/s.

Installation view The Narrow Gate of the Here-and-Now: Social Fabric, 2021, IMMA, Dublin. Photo Ros Kavanagh.

Art – weaving/drawing acts of resistance

The Social Fabric exhibition guide notes, ‘This chapter considers themes of globalisation, technology, labour, community and agency through artworks that engage with textile as commodity, material and craft. These ideas form pathways across the exhibition, from feminist work to heirlooms, woven acts of resistance’. The Dance of Life textile work was created in 1993 by women living and/or working in Jobstown [4], West Tallaght, Dublin.  I retell their tale with permission from the women who create far-reaching, intra-connected ‘act[s] of resistance’.

Priest with a missive [5]

In 1992, I worked one morning a week as a teacher in a women’s centre in Jobstown that was affiliated to the Catholic church. During the recruitment process the centre’s manager outlined the importance of ‘getting women out of their suburban homes so that they can participate in social learning activities that build confidence along with their personal and families well-being.  Considering this, the plan was to start with watercolours and then to see what happens next. As we painted landscapes from postcards, we shared stories of what was going on in our lives. Several months later these stories materialised into an art installation, shown at the centre’s end of year community open day. The installation consisted of life-size figurative models that told stories of how it felt to live in this ‘new town’ on the edges of Dublin. During this event, I sensed that the installation took up too much space, was too controversial, and that too much interest was given to it by family and community visitors. Nothing was said until a few days later when the manager went to great lengths to pick me up to attend the staff Christmas party. In the car we talked about the open day while avoiding any mention of the installation. She told me that the women were becoming demanding, wanting a say in the type of knitting wool purchased, the choice of recipes for the cooking class. She told me, as she pulled into the venue, that I was to ‘treat the women as children’. Shocked, I fumbled a response along the lines that several women were grandmothers, all were mothers, all of whom I treated with respect.

West Tallaght Women’s Textile Collective Reunion at IMMA's Narrow Gate of the Here and Now: Social Fabric exhibition. Photo by Louis Haugh.
West Tallaght Women’s Textile Collective Reunion at IMMA’s Narrow Gate of the Here and Now: Social Fabric exhibition, 2022. Photo by Louis Haugh.

In the New Year we were invited by the Victoria & Albert Museum’s (V&A) Head of Adult and Community Education to create a textile as part of the Shamiana: Moghul Tent Project [6]. The brief was to draw from our experiences of home and displacement. Between 1994-2001, the Dance of Life textile, which made up one of over sixty Shamiana panels, was exhibited as part of a ceremonial tent in galleries across Europe, South Asia, America, and the Middle East. In the exhibition catalogue the V&A’s exhibition curator, Shireen Akbar states ‘the panels depict narrative scenes relating to home, refuge and dispossession’ .

As suburbs across Tallaght were being built, medical professionals from South Asia were beginning to arrive to provide essential services. During our weekly sessions, as we talked about our personal everyday lives within wider political and social issues, we put out an invitation through the local health centre for South Asian women to join for a visit to Chester Beatty Library and the National Museum of Ireland to meet curators and to sketch the Moghul Collection of miniature paintings and early Irish artefacts. A week later, the manager arrived unexpectedly to inform me that my role was no longer required. The conversation ended when there was a knock on the door – I was called back to the art room. The manager drove off, leaving us in deep conversation. I heard stories about how the manager was becoming agitated when the women requested to be involved in the running of the centre. As I rode my bike back across Dublin, I thought about the initial conversation when I was told that the centre was established to ‘get women out of their suburban homes so that they could participate in social learning activities that build confidence as well as their personal and families well-being’.

What to do? I was shaken and vulnerable. Working as an artist I needed the money; it was winter in an economically depressed country and the project could fold under the weight of the manager’s anxiety. I called a meeting to ask for an explanation and hopefully to negotiate a way forward. At the end of the following art session a Jobstown parish priest arrived handing me a white envelope. He could barely make eye contact. I read the letter out loud. My contract had ended. Unanimously and automatically, we packed up and moved to Bernie’s kitchen three doors down. To cover basic materials, we applied for funding from the Tallaght County Council. Our existence – a collective of creative women separate from church and state institutions – was treated with suspicion as we were going ‘against the grain’ of social life.

Art studio in Bernie McCarville’s Jobstown kitchen. Photos by Bernie McCarville
Art studio in Bernie McCarville’s Jobstown kitchen, 1994. Photos by Bernie McCarville

Bernie’s kitchen became our home and refuge: where we drank cups of tea, kept an eye on the children, talked about our fears and strengths – usually with raucous humour. In a crowded domestic space we threaded, stitched, and patterned our thoughts, stories, and relationships into the fabric.

We captured our personal stories of strength and vulnerability in miniature paintings that surrounded the central panel where an Irish and Indian woman are dancing, inspired by Moghul paintings and Celtic manuscript illustrations. The textile was manifesting a fledging shift in Irish identity from monocultural to pluralistic – through telling and materialising stories that didn’t fit to the repetitive norms of what it means to be Irish.

Image 1: Bernie McCarville – sketching Celtic patterns post visit to the National Museum of Ireland to view fine gold filigree on Celtic artefacts. Image 2: June O’Connor, Wendy Cowan, Lilian Dalton, Catherine Walker, Christine Mason, Promilla Shaw, Jilloo Rajan, Marion Kilbey, Bernie McCarville.
Image 1: Bernie McCarville – sketching Celtic patterns post visit to the National Museum of Ireland to view fine gold filigree on Celtic artefacts, 1994.
Image 2: June O’Connor, Wendy Cowan, Lilian Dalton, Catherine Walker, Christine Mason, Promilla Shaw, Jilloo Rajan, Marion Kilbey, Bernie McCarville.

This is significant because while we were stitching and embroidering a textile that tell stories of women’s prophetic intelligences, a mother, an academic, a barrister and member of the Seanad Éireann, Mary Robinson was elected as President of Ireland. In her Inaugural Speech in Dublin Castle, she pledged:

“As President I will seek to the best of my abilities to promote this growing sense of local participatory democracy, this emerging movement of self–development and self-expression which is surfacing more and more at a grassroots level. This is the face of modern Ireland” (Robinson, 1990).

I met President Mary Robinson at several exhibitions where she mapped points of political and social connections through artwork that would otherwise remain dormant, unrealised, and avoided. I cried often when Mary Robinson spoke, her words resonated with ‘stepping out’ of the women’s centre where our voices and actions, in their fragility, were dangerous.  The words of the Irish poet Eavan Boland continues to ring in my ears and my heart, ‘[o]nly when the danger was plain in the music could you know their true measure of rejoicing in finding a voice where they found a vision’ (1994, p. 3).

As we stitched, we talked about our messy feelings around the loss of project funding, lack of wool for knitting projects (it was winter) our growing disbelief in ideologies wrapped up in phrases such as ‘for your own good’ and ‘in your best interests’. Refuting these ideologies meant that the textile work and the women’s collective became the problem to be expelled, not the set of behaviours and structures within the church that upheld the ideology.

Walking out of the women’s centre into Bernie’s kitchen on a cold skull grey February morning, sharp winds off the Dublin mountains dislodged calcified, risk-averse ideologies, it felt safer to be vandalized by art and wind, to be rendered in/determinate and dangerous. The icy wind hitting our backs as we sought refuge was surely haunted. Hauntings that trouble the divide between absence/presence, not merely in the sense of holding memories of the dead nor the lingering of violent passing events (Barad, 2022). These hauntings – us, a group of women seeking refuge, the textile in it’s making – ‘are the eliminable materials of existing conditions’ (Barad, 2022).

In Bernie’s kitchen, we in/directly asked ourselves if the cost was too high, did we have the resolve, the courage, the skill to resist the threat of annihilation through our blatant audacity to challenge acts of cruel retribution (priest with a letter, a missive ushered to ensure compliance).

The Narrow Gate of the Here-and-Now, Social Fabric

Image 1: West Tallaght Women’s Textile Collective reunion 2022, at IMMA
Image 2: Narrow Gate of Here and Now: Social Fabric, 2022, ‘Dance of Life’ exhibition label

The Dance of Life was acquired by IMMA in 1993 and first exhibited in 2000 as part of the Shamiana Mughal Tent, after an international tour organised by the V&A. It was exhibited again from 2021-2022 in the exhibition The Narrow Gate of the Here-and-Now. In returning, reconnecting, remembering through the present as ‘existing conditions’, these matters/moments in their entanglement bring an embodied material sense of the here-now: not as a succession of moments but as materially co-existing, a superposition of times in this thick now (Barad, 2017, 2022).

The Dance of Life isn’t about going back to past times, but rather the material re(con)figuring of space time mattering so as to hold account the subjection wrought by the church and state over women’s bodies while manifesting and exhibiting different possible, more ‘just’ histories for ‘stepping out’.

Stick Mob Studio storytellers, central Australia and Northern Territory

Stick Mob Studio graphic novels.
Published in partnership with the Indigenous Literacy Foundation, Gestalt Publishing and Pan Macmillan. 1, Mixed Feelings – written, illustrated and coloured by Declan Miller. 2, Exo-Dimensions – written and illustrated by Seraphina Newberry and coloured by Justin Randall. 3, Storm Warning – written by Lauren Boyle, illustrated by Alyssa Mason.

In Australia – while the Dance of Life was exhibited at IMMA in 2021, Stick Mob Studio, a collective of Arrernte storytellers launch their graphic novels to a packed venue in Mparntwe – Alice Springs.  In a different time-zone, surrounded by desert matters, Stick Mob authors and illustrators disrupt the sedimenting logics of colonial linear time as they jump time. In their speculative stories, Arrernte Country, remorphs and reimagines past-futures where Indigenous young people are not required to catch-up on colonial progressive time, serve time, or do time, which resets the colonial project to roll out successive interventions (Mellor & Corrigan, 2004), such as the Northern Territory National Emergency Response [7].

When Stick Mob and I publish creative work we are troubling institutional education systems where Indigenous young people are positioned as problems to be fixed. Stick Mob’s graphic novels, along with this paper and the Dance of Life textile, testify that it is possible to move through the narrow gate of the here-and now – to pull, stitch and cut different threads in social fabrics to make spaces for radical political creative imaginaries where difference is made possible rather than its destruction (Barad, 2022).

At the end, I return to the Narrow Gate, to a thick now – to listen with cloth touched by women and children, institutions and exhibitions, to the wind blowing off the Dublin mountains, to the sound of more just histories told through touchy threaded matter/s.

 

Footnotes

[1] In Barad’s words, ‘The usual notion of interaction assumes that there are individual independently existing entities or agents that preexist their acting upon one another. By contrast, the notion of ‘intra-action’ disrupts the familiar sense of causality (where one or more causal agents precede and produce an effect), and more generally unsettles the metaphysics of individualism (the belief that there are individually constituted agents or entities, as well as times and places)’(Juelskjær & Schwennesen, 2012).

[2] The slash in matter/s indicates that matter, as a verb (matters of care and concern) is inseparable to matter as a noun (art, wind, threads). This inseparability comes from Arrernte Indigenist theories of rationality (Stuart & Georgiadis, 2015; Turner & McDonald, 2010) and Barad’s quantum theory ‘agential realism’ (2007). In this instance matter/s include – art, home, refuge, dispossession, resilience, friendship, and storytelling.

[3] Social Fabric is the third chapter of a four-chapter exhibition at IMMA, The Narrow Gate of the Here-and-Now, a museum wide exhibition serving to celebrate IMMA’s thirtieth birthday by showcasing works from their collection and to reference IMMA’s role in Irish society since 1991 (Thompson, 2022).

[4] I acknowledge Arrernte Country, central Australia where I write this paper and the country where I was born, Ireland. I pay my respects to elders who assist me in the work I do, which is embodied in relationality and justice. This paper is not easy to write, nor to reread – there are many hauntings to grapple with.

[5] Arrernte Country is in the centre of Australia. Eastern and Central Arrernte and Western Arrarnta peoples live in this region which ‘holds very important ancestral journeys that have travelled in and around the Central Australian landscape in many forms from when time began’ (Riley).

[6] In 1992, Jobstown was one of many newly built housing estates on the far edges of Dublin consisting of a web of narrow roads, lined by identical working-class two-story houses. These ‘newly built’ and ‘monotonous’ housing estates were built to accommodate families moving from their homes in the ‘older’ suburbs located closer to the inner city (MacLaran & Punch, 2004, p. 37). Code words for inner city gentrification.

[7] The missive enacted the control of the catholic church in Ireland – from Pope John Paul’s visit in 1979 to the unmarked graves of over a hundred ‘fallen women’ (unmarried mothers) instutionalised in the Magdalene Laundries (Asylums) run by the catholic church throughout the 18th, 19th, and 20th centuries (300 years of slavery of over 30,000 women). See the documentary – ‘Sex in a Cold Climate’ (Humphries, 1998) and Caelainn Hogan’s book Republic of shame: stories from Ireland’s institutions for ‘fallen women’ (2019). The Magdalene Laundries was located on Sean McDermott Street, South Dublin, which is named after Seán Mac Diarmada, an executed (by the British for high treason) Irish Republican leader of the 1916 Easter Rising. This military uprising is mentioned in the Preface. I worked on an arts project in a women’s centre on Sean McDermott Street in the 1990’s, without knowing that a few doors down women were held captive to a moral problem that the church and state created and imprinted on female bodies.

[8] The Northern Territory National Emergency Response, also known as ‘The Intervention’, was a package of measures enforced by legislation affecting Indigenous Australians in the Northern Territory of Australia, which lasted from 2007 until 2012. The measures were numerous and included restrictions on the delivery and management of education, employment, and health services in the Territory. The measures proved controversial, being criticised by the Northern Territory Labor government, the Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission and several Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander leaders. The Act was amended by successive Federal governments, finally repealed in July 2012 by the Gillard government, which later replaced it with the Stronger Futures in the Northern Territory Act 2012

References

Australian Bureau of Statistics. (2022). Corrective Services, Australia. ABS.

Akbar, S. (1999). Shamiana: The Mughal Tent. London: Victoria & Albert Museum.

Barad, K. (2022). Re-memberings Times/s, for the Time-Being. Paper presented at the IMMA Talks Online

Beard, A. (2013). Mary Robinson: Leadership. Harvard Business Review, online. Retrieved from tps://hbr.org/2013/03/mary-robinson

Boland, E. (1994). In a Time of Violence. New York: Norton.

Cowan, W. (2000). A tent of ideas, visions and actions. In Shamiana: Mughal Textiles 2000-2001. Dublin: IMMA.

Groys, B. (2009). Comrades of Time. e-flux Journal, (#11).

Hogan, C. (2019). Republic of Shame: Stories from Ireland’s Institutions for “Fallen Women”. London: Penguin.

Humphries, S. (Director). (1998). Sex in a Cold Climate. Dublin, Ireland: Testimony Films.

MacLaran, A., & Punch, M. (2004). Tallaght: The Planning and Development of an Irish New Town. Dublin.

Robinson, M. (1990). Inaugural Speech given by Her Excellency Mary Robinson, President of Ireland. Paper presented at the Stanford Presidential Lectures in the Humanities and Arts. Robinson, M. (2013). Mary Robinson: Everybody Matters – A Memoir. St Ives: Hodder & Stoughton.

Thompson, G. (2021). Curator’s Talk Series: The Narrow Gate of the Here-and-Now, Social Fabric. IMMA.

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IMMAxDean Artist Spotlight with Thaís Muniz

Thaís Muniz, Iansã - Urban Orishas Series by Antonello Veneri and Thais Muniz. Photo: Antonello Veneri

Earlier this year Thaís Muniz (TM) was invited to take up one of four studios generously gifted to IMMA by the Dean Art Studios on Chatham Row in Dublin’s City Centre. Joining this dynamic creative community is an exciting opportunity for the invited artists and for IMMA. Here Thaís Muniz invited Priscila Altivo to offer a brief overview of her artistic practice, Altivo’s introduction is followed by a series of questions posed by IMMA to Muniz about her work and inspirations.

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Sculpting textiles, connecting stories, archiving images and creating new ones to turn into inner energy. The work of Thaís Muniz chases multiple forms to integrate senses and expose stories. Ancestry, race and holistic aspects of the Afro-diaspora through shifts of space and time are translated from unwritten signs of reality and captured in her pieces. Thaís’s work makes a direct connection with its viewers, inviting them to become a part of it.

Thaís Muniz, Itan of Oxum and Oxossi, Place After Pattern After Place, 2022, Glór, Ennis, Ireland. Photo: Eamon Ward.

From Bahia, to Dublin, 4,923 miles separate the birthplace where Thaís was raised. It was her hometown in North-East Brazil which gave Muniz inspiration and guidance to build the movement Turbante-se in 2012. Translated as Turban Yourself, the platform is used to research, connect and share the Afro-Atlantic cultures, histories and beauty through turbans and headwraps, one of her main mediums.  

Dublin-based since 2014, the artist has been creating and collaborating with numerous projects combining urban interactions and performances, visual art and workshops. More than finding a home in Ireland, Muniz found a safe space as an IMMA invited artist at The Dean Art Studios to continue manifesting the narratives surrounding her imagination and presence.

Her approach is more than multicultural, it is multichannel. She addresses dimensions of perspectives to humanize the existence of people and places which the world at times chooses not to look at. She claims through art the direction to talk with spirit.

– Priscila Altivo

IMMA Q&A with Thaís Muniz, October 2022

Q: What or who inspires you? 

TM: People, existence, and the creation of possibilities are my main inspirations, as broad and complex as these topics are. I’m inspired by the possibilities of a better world, by my two grandmothers and my mom, by the historian and candomblé priestess Stella de Oxóssi, the writer Beatriz Nascimento, Afro-Brazilian culture, the Yoruba pantheon (also known as Orishas). Also by sharing good laughs, travelling, the sunlight, swimming in warm waters, popular celebrations such as Yemanjá’s day in Salvador, being surrounded by my beloved ones, good music, good food and good memes.

(1) Thaís Muniz, Darling, Don’t Turn Your Back On Me, Grandma Adalice (left image)
(2) Family (right image), 2021. Photos: Cristiane Schmidt

The re-appropriation of stories, liberation, healing and reconstruction focusing on anti-colonial perspectives and intersectional feminism are topics I often work with. They provide me with the motivation I need to better understand my own history, reimagine realities, and continue the work of countless people that preceded my own existence to create and progressively challenge the status quo.

Q: What are you working on in your studio?

TM: I have been researching what I call the new Atlantic triangulations, an autobiographical reflection on the notions of territories and choices. I am a Brazilian woman with a strong African heritage – which is still uncertain exactly from where in the continent – who got Irish citizenship.

This triangulation has led me to deepen my questions and reflections on the sense of home, possibilities and mental health, elaborating on the relationships of replacement above the narratives of displacement, and the fake notions of choice that capitalism plays historically. Beyond that, reflecting on the connections that allow me to create opportunities for myself, my family and my continuity, through the healing of transgenerational traumas. 

(1) Thaís Muniz, Black Mother Crowning, 2018, Sao Paulo (left image). Photo: Antonelo Veneri
(2) Thaís Muniz, Traffic of Influence, 2016, Dublin (right image). Photo Rafael Bezerra.

Last August, I was an artist-in-residence at Cork Printmakers, and there I created a multi-layered flag to visually represent this triangular zone. For this flag, I chose to work with simple shapes combined: inverted triangles to represent a progressive and matriarchal society and circles to represent Ori (our inner strength according to Yoruba beliefs), unity and continuity. I used black layers of a see-through fabric (chiffon), that gives you alternate nuances and viewings, rethinking the idea of the solidity of a symbol that can represent a nation, a city, a club, and in this case a soul. I am working with quite a large format of screen printing (1,40m x 1m) and this work will be part of an exhibition in Edinburgh Printmakers in April 2023.

(1) Thaís Muniz, New Atlantic Triangulations flag, 2022 (left image).
(2) New Atlantic Triangulations Print detail, 2022 (middle image). Photo: Vera Ryklova.
(3) Aw, Look At You Gorgeous, Performance, 2022 (right image). Photo: Robert Montgomery.

Q: Can you tell us about a recent or current exhibition you’ve seen that has had a resonance and impact on you and your work?

TM: In the middle of September, I saw the exhibition “In The Black Fantastic” at the Hayward Gallery, Southbank, in London, curated by Ekow Eshun. He gathered 11 contemporary artists from the African diaspora, and invited us to imagine fantastical futures as a zone of creative and cultural liberation and a means of addressing racism and social injustice by drawing on science fiction, myth and Afrofuturism. 

It was a powerful and inspirational exhibition, which gave me the opportunity to see for the first time the work of the American sculptor and performer Nick Cave (not the singer!), which included his more recent work Chained Reaction, as well as some of the pieces of the Soundsuits series. I saw the short film Prince McVeigh and the Turner Blasphemies, by Kara Walker with her iconic animated silhouettes.

I also discovered other artists such as Cauleen Smith, from Los Angeles and her multichannel video installation called Epistrophy, in which she created visions and illusions between the space, objects, screens and CCTV cameras. The collages of Rashaad Newsome, of Wangechi Mutu, but also her sculptures. I got struck by the sculpture Annunciation, by Chris Ofili, and his re-imagination of the visitation of Mary by the angel Gabriel, announcing the coming of Jesus. It was the first time I saw someone giving Mary the chance of a carnal encounter, and also becoming a powerful supernatural being. As he connected it with Homer’s Odyssey, I connect it with the Yoruba pantheon where deities have both supernatural and human attributes. 

Q: If you could visit any artist in their studio who would it be? 

TM: The painter and sculptor El Anatsui. I am a big fan of his cloth-like sculptures and how he plays with the fluidity of these textiles weaved with ordinary recycling materials. I’m also fascinated by their unique volume, colours and scale. There is so much movement and strong statements about identity and colonialism through abstract imagery. Its inspiring.

El Anatsui, Triumphant Scale at Haus der Kunst, Munich. Image courtesy of the New York Times.

Q: If you could travel anywhere in the world for research where would you go and why? 

TM: Ghana, Benin, Togo and Nigeria are at the top of my list. I’d probably need two or three months to get a proper glimpse, but I’m fascinated by the aesthetic aspects created by Yoruba, Igbo and Ewe people, their cosmogony, the supernatural, the Vodun and the Ifa, which were reborn in Brazil as Candomblé. The arts, the textile making, the headwear and the connection of these West African countries with Brazilian culture are big inspirations for me. 

Q: What do you enjoy most about being an artist? 

TM: The ability to create narratives, fantasy and possibilities. I also love to share knowledge and materialize my visions, expressing them through different mediums. I enjoy the learning process through researching topics, linking ideas and allowing space for the unplanned. I feel excited about the movement between places I go and the exchanges I have with people. Also the flexibility. 

(1) Thaís Muniz, The Vision of the Ori (left image).
(2) Thaís Muniz in her studio in The Dean Art Studios (middle image). Photo: Robert Montgomery.
(3) Detail from Muniz’s studio (right image). Photo: Robert Montgomery.

Q: What do you find challenging about being an artist? 

TM: As a full-time artist, managing the time I spend around some processes on the journey can be challenging as well as the pressure that comes with making a living as a self-employed person. Taking breaks and digesting a piece of work you have just made or presented is a great part of the practice, but sometimes you only have the opportunity to do it during the process itself or months after because of the busy routines and dynamics. 

In saying that, the positives far outweigh the negatives and I wouldn’t choose another thing to do. It’s difficult to explain the satisfaction I get from continuing this work, collaborating with communities and the spread of narratives which I consider important. 

—

Find out more about Thaís’ work here
Find out more about The Dean Art Studios here

Thaís Muniz – @thaismunizthais
Turbante-se – @turbante.se
Priscila Altivo – @casimimuero_

Banner Image Credit: Thaís Muniz, Iansã – Urban Orishas Series by Antonello Veneri and Thais Muniz. Photo: Antonello Veneri

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The Art of Healing, a reflection by Dr Eimear Duff

A recent collaboration encouraged Non Consultant Hospital Doctors to immerse themselves in art and experience a world completely removed from work.

‘The Art of Healing’ event, a collaboration between IMMA, The Creative Life Hub at MISA in St James’s Hospital, and the Health and Wellbeing Committee of the Royal College of Physicians of Ireland (RCPI) took place in May 2022. Coming to the tail end (hopefully!) of the pandemic, it provided an opportunity for young doctors to meet their colleagues from across the country in-person, having had their training days and conferences shifted online in previous years. It served as an artistic retreat where they could slow down, widen their perspectives, and enjoy the thought-provoking exhibits at IMMA.

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Demanding, rewarding, exhausting, invigorating, frazzling, fascinating, pressurising, uplifting. The experience of being an NCHD (non-consultant hospital doctor) can feel alternately and simultaneously like the best and worst job in the world. Above all else, it is relentlessly busy work. Bleeps punctuate our workdays. Professional exams, research, and audit too often commandeer our free time. As an antidote to this, on Saturday 21 May the health and wellbeing committee of the RCPI delivered its first ever ‘The Art of Healing’ event. It used art as the basis to slow down and reflect on the privilege of working in this most human of sciences.

Bairbre-Ann Harkin, IMMA’s Curator of Art and Ageing, guiding doctors in slow-looking and presenting the dementia-inclusive ‘Azure’ Programme at IMMA

‘The Art of Healing’ was made possible through collaboration with the Irish Museum of Modern Art (IMMA) and The Creative Life Hub at Mercer’s Institute for Successful Ageing (MISA) in St James’s Hospital. The setting of IMMA felt apt. I was explanted from my acute medicine day job in the nearby St James’s Hospital to the iconic Royal Hospital Kilmainham. This is a historically healing space – it once served as a place of respite for army pensioners from the Battle of the Boyne. It was here that a group of NCHDs from a variety of specialties and hospitals across Ireland gathered to, as one attendee captured it, “experience a world completely removed from work for an afternoon.”

Adam Stoneman, IMMA SPICE Project Researcher engages the group with selected work from The Narrow Gate of the Here-and-Now: The Anthropocene.

When you observe something as a doctor, be it a scan or a clinical sign, you embark on a quest for the ‘right’ interpretation. Guided by two wonderful IMMA staff members, Bairbre-Ann Harkin, Curator of Art & Ageing, and Adam Stoneman, SPICE Project Researcher, we were allowed to relinquish the narrow concept of ‘rightness’. Instead, we could pause, immerse ourselves in the world of art and observe as humans. We undertook ‘slow looking’, spending minutes rather than seconds in front of artworks and delving into them not as puzzles to be solved, but as springboards into deeper understandings of ourselves, each other and the world around us.

In the words of another retreatant, the event helped us to “switch to a completely different mindset” and served as a “reminder of all the valuable things outside of medicine”. Passing through the exhibition, ‘The Narrow Gate of the Here-and-Now’ was a portal to escape medical tunnel vision. It spanned works centred on forms of protest, the conflict in Northern Ireland (including Shane Cullen’s impressive ‘Fragmens sur les Institutions Républicianes IV’), and ‘The Anthropocene’. We had the refreshing latitude to hold multiple interpretations as valid and learn from each other’s perspectives. Returning to work afterwards, I felt a heightened mental flexibility, with greater ease in understanding the viewpoints of my patients and colleagues.

Dr Stephen Duff and Dr Trisha Ang engaging with the SPICE project, dedicated to citizen curation to foster diverse participation in the cultural heritage domain.

After lunch, we had the pleasure of listening to the spectacular poet Seán Hewitt reading from his collection Tongues of Fire. It was a special experience. IMMA’s elegant gardens were originally used for medicinal purposes and seemed to confer their healing properties upon us as we sat in the shade of trees, utterly transfixed, deeply moved, and spiritually replenished.

Susan Sontag wrote that “Everyone who is born holds dual citizenship, in the kingdom of the well and in the kingdom of the sick. Although we all prefer to use the good passport, sooner or later each of us is obliged, at least for a spell, to identify ourselves as citizens of that other place.”

Poet Sean Hewitt reads his work aloud under the trees in the IMMA gardens.

For doctors, art appreciation offers the opportunity to hone better clinical diagnostic skills through careful observation, description, and interpretation of complex visual information. Yet it also helps us to pause, pay attention, and attend to our own wellbeing, making us better companions to patients journeying through the “kingdom of the sick”.

‘The Art of Healing’ at IMMA reminded me to listen with both a stethoscope and an open mind and to look beyond CT and MRI scans to make people feel truly seen.

– Dr Eimear Duff, Deputy Chair, RCPI trainees’ committee on health and wellbeing; and BST trainee in internal medicine, RCPI.

Social Media

The Royal College of Physicians of Ireland (RCPI) Twitter is @RCPI_news

The Royal College of Physicians of Ireland Trainee Twitter @RCPI_Trainees

RCPI Physician Wellbeing Page 

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Navine G.Dossos presents ‘Kind Words Can Never Die’

Kind Words Can Never Die is a visually stunning new site-specific installation created by Navine G. Dossos for IMMA’s iconic 17th century Courtyard. Commissioned as part of IMMA Outdoors, Kind Words Can Never Die transforms the colonnades of the Courtyard with a vibrant mural wall painting. In this artist blog Dossos shares the evolution of this project from exploratory workshops to the resulting striking visuals. 
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The Courtyard of IMMA is a very special place, with its own complex history as the Royal Hospital of Kilmainham. It is also a place that hosts many possibilities for the present and the future of the building, through performances and music, to the simple act of having a cup of tea with a friend in the colonnades. As the Earth Rising Eco-Festival was planned for Autumn 2022, I wanted to make a work that aligned with this important event, allowing me to explore new psychological states that have emerged in response to a greater awareness of global and local climate change. As the Courtyard is a public space, I wanted the work that I made in it to be driven by a collaborative process with members of the public who are part of IMMA’s community.

Kind Words Can Never Die RGB

One of the influences on my research was the book Earth Emotions (2019) by Glenn Albrecht, which looks at creating new terms for the complex emotions and feelings that people encounter in relation to climate change, suggesting words such as Solastalgia and Biophilia as expressions of psychological states directly linked to the environment. Whilst the book looked at many negative feelings such as depression, anger, anxiety and apathy, there was also a lot of space dedicated to the importance of being able to move through these difficult emotions, accessing feelings of agency and possibility, and even finding love and reverence for the Earth.

Kind Words Can Never Die Thought Forms

My second influence for the project was Annie Besant and C.W. Leadbeater’s Thought Forms (1901). These two members of the Theosophist Society conducted a series of experiments to generate colours and shapes to express emotions as objects in the world. This very interior work, done through the medium of clairvoyance, gave rise to a series of images but also a colour palette that has influenced many artists over the years. It became clear to me that there might be a way to use this method of the Thought Forms to encourage a way to make new colours and images about climate change that are driven by feelings rather than scientific data.

Kind Words Can Never Die CMY Posters

One of the major issues of addressing climate change is how we visually represent it. We rely heavily on photographs to evidence the drama of ecological degradation, but also on data-driven charts, informational diagrams and other schematic representations to describe something that is almost intangible in our everyday lives. During my research period I collected many data visualizations and graphs about climate change, and stripped these images of their content (numbers and words) leaving them as simple line drawings that could be repopulated in our workshops to make new visual representations of our emotional relationship to climate crisis.

Kind Words Can Never Die Workshop

I held three workshops in July 2022 to develop content for the murals. I opened each workshop with a meditation by Joanna Macy (whose work has been deeply influential on my own thinking) to ground us in the space[i] and focus our attentions. In the morning each participant chose sixteen words from a collection of feelings and emotions I had put together through my research. We looked into ourselves to see if we could find colours and textures that described these states in a visual manner. Each person generated their own palette of colours and feelings that was unique to them.

Kind Words Can Never Die Workshop

In the afternoon, we used our personal colour palettes to re-populate in the empty graph and data visualization drawings I had prepared from my research. This process was about how we could use the colours to describe an emotional journey through climate crisis. Every participant thought about how we might honour the pain we feel about ecological degradation, but also go forth with feelings of possibility and respect for the planet to implement change. During the workshops we also listened to a soundtrack I compiled with songs relating to ecology and climate, from Ursula Le Guin to Samsa, which is available for everyone to access[i].

Kind Words Can Never Die Workshop

During the workshop we worked with the same paint that I was using to make the murals in the courtyard. I used only about seven litres of paint for all the workshops and murals, being as economical as I could with my materials. As my paint had a petrochemical base (acrylic), and I was unable to find a more ecological paint for the production, I felt it was important to be mindful with our materials and as sparing as possible.

Kind Words Can Never Die Workshop

Once participants had completed their colour palettes and paintings, we put all the responses up on the walls of my studio at IMMA and took a moment to look at it together before going our separate ways. My job then began to interpret their works into a scheme for the courtyard. I included the work of every participant, through their colours as well as their designs. I individually hand-mixed every colour to match it exactly to those made during the workshops, in order to be able to give value to all the different emotions and colour responses we were able to access during the sessions.

Kind Words Can Never Die Window Paintings

The courtyard is permeated with around forty doors and windows, and I wanted these portals to be part of the artwork. I decided to draw on specific colours made by participants to create semi-circular frames around each opening, making it into a painting in its own right. Each of these portals is named after the colours and the participant who created it, for instance Emmett’s Courage, Creativity and Joy, or Barbara’s Awe and Optimism. These portals exist alongside twelve large-scale paintings taken directly from the painted diagrams made in the afternoon sessions.

Kind Words Can Never Die

The painting of the Courtyard took me about three weeks to complete, and I worked almost every day during that time, always in sight of the general public. This is an important part of the work – people can see it being created, and understand the labour involved as well as the techniques. I felt very supported by visitors who stopped to chat, members of the IMMA team who brought me cups of tea and coffee, people out walking their dogs intrigued by the process. I had a lot of interesting conversations with people from all over the world about climate change, and their concerns about the environment, and what we can do to engage in these issues. These interactions are also part of my process of thinking about and creating my site-specific installations.

But perhaps the most rewarding moment was at the official opening of Kind Words Can Never Die, when many of the workshop participants returned to IMMA to see the fruits of our labours, and I was able to photograph several people in front of their paintings. To be able to share the work with those who had collaborated with me to make it, and for them to see themselves and their emotions reflected through the many colours of the work was a poignant moment for all. Here are some of those portraits.

Kind Words Can Never Die. (1) Janice’s Awe. (2) Marina’s Oneness.
Kind Words Can Never Die. (1) Annie’s Love, Restoration and Energy. (2) Barbara’s Awe and Optimism.
Kind Words Can Never Die. (1) Rachel’s Humility and Optimism. (2) Rachel’s Optimism.
Kind Words Can Never Die. (1) James’s Care and Attention. (2) Hanora’s Reverence.
Kind Words Can Never Die. (1) Evy’s Joy and Generosity. (2) Grainne’s Generosity and Kinship.
Kind Words Can Never Die. (1) Kathy’s Love. (2) Emmett’s Courage and Creativity.
Kind Words Can Never Die. Thomas’s Caring

During the process of translating the workshop paintings into the courtyard mural, I kept a record of every colour I mixed on a single sheet of paper. Each colour is unique, and also notes the person who created it and what emotion it relates to. It is perhaps the most important part of the archive material of Kind Words Can Never Die, and I was excited to be able to make it into a limited edition print with IMMA, that is available through their shop. All the funds raised through sales of this edition will go towards supporting the museum’s ecological programming.

Kind Words Can Never Die IMMA Art Edition

[i] Spotify Playlist

[i] This simple spoken Gaia meditation composed by John Seed and Joanna Macy, guides us into precise and close identification with the elements and with the evolving life-forms of Earth.

What are you? What am I? Intersecting cycles of water, earth, air and fire – that’s what I am, that’s what you are.

WATER – blood, lymph, mucus, sweat, tears, inner oceans tugged by the moon, tides within and tides without. Streaming fluids floating our cells, washing and nourishing through endless riverways of gut and vein and capillary. Moisture pouring in through and out of you, of me, in the vast poem of the hydrological cycle. You are that. I am that.

EARTH – matter made from rock and soil. It too is pulled by the moon as the magma circulates through the planet heart and roots suck molecules into biology. Earth pours through us, replacing each cell in the body every seven years. Ashes to ashes, dust to dust, we ingest, incorporate and excrete the earth, are made from earth. I am that. You are that.

AIR – the gaseous realm, the atmosphere, the planet’s membrane. The inhale and the exhale. Breathing out carbon dioxide to the trees and breathing in their fresh exudations. Oxygen kissing each cell awake, molecules moving in constant metabolism, interpenetrating. That dance of the air cycle, breathing the universe in and out again, is what you are, is what I am.

FIRE – fire from our sun that fuels all life, drawing up plants and raising the waters to the sky to fall again replenishing. The inner furnace of your metabolism burns with the fire that first sent matter/energy flaring out through space and time. This is the same fire as the lightening that flashed into the primordial soup, catalyzing the birth of organic life.

You were there I was there, for each cell of our bodies is descended in an unbroken chain from that event through the desire of atom for molecule, of molecule for cell, of cell for organism. In that sprawling of forms, death was born, born simultaneously with sex, before we divided from the plant realm. So in our sexuality we can feel ancient stirrings that connect us with plant as well as animal life. We come from them, an unbroken chain – through fish learning to walk the land, scales turning to wings, through migrations in the ages of life.

We have been but recently in human form. If Earth’s whole history were compressed in 24 hours beginning at midnight, organic life would begin only at 5pm … mammals emerge at 11.30pm … and from amongst them at only seconds to midnight, our species.

In our long planetary journey we have taken far more ancient forms than these we now wear. Some of these forms we remember in our mother’s womb, take on vestigial tails and gills, grow fins that turn to hands. Countless times in that journey we died to old forms, let go of old ways, allowing new ones to emerge. But nothing is ever lost. Though forms pass, all returns. Each worn-out cell consumed, recycled … through mosses, leeches, birds of prey…

Think to your next death. Give your flesh and bones back to the cycle. Surrender. Love the plump worms you will become. Launder your weary being through the fountain of life.

Beholding you I behold as well all the different creatures that compose you – the mitochondria in the cells, the intestinal bacteria, the life teeming on the surface of the skin. The great symbiosis that is you. The incredible coordination and cooperation of countless beings. You are that, too, just as your body is part of a much larger symbiosis, living in wider reciprocities. Be conscious of that give-and-take when you move among trees. Breathe your carbon dioxide to a leaf and sense it breathing fresh oxygen back to you.

Remember again and again the old cycles of partnership. Draw on them in this time of trouble. By your very nature and the journey you have made, there is in you the deep knowing of belonging. Draw on it now in this time of fear. You have earth-bred wisdom of your interexistence with all that is. Take courage and power in it now, that we may help each other awaken in this time of peril.

 

 

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Helio-a-go-go: Sarah Hayden reflects on Dennis McNulty’s installation ‘I reached inside myself through time’

Sarah Hayden is a writer and academic who is currently researching voice in art. Here she reflects on Dennis McNulty’s installation I reached inside myself through time, a work from IMMA’s collection that draws on a diversity of materials, media and pop-cultural references to create a space that bends light, sound and time.

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I Reached Inside Myself Through Time

pleats/places

A lone voice sings out, bare and bright; it sings as though it has never known a mortal mouth. The song it sings is familiar, but as heard inside I Reached Inside Myself Through Time, is heard transformed. The recognisable is remade. Sketch of a long-known painting, radio tune reduced to scantest essence (ether-ealized), the audio is emptied of all that might distract from the fact of vocality itself. Phrases recur in proper pop-style, but each time a line repeats, its sound is slightly, near-indiscernibly altered—as though being received via differently constituted sensory processors, situated in differently structured environments. A voice sings out from elsewheres (plural).

Light, within reach of this voice, behaves strangely—or has been made strange. Most of what passes into the installation space by the windows picks up a redness it owes to paint (in Lofoten) or film (in Dublin).[1] Only the lower portion of each pane is uncoated. But even what enters untinted is, like the rest, set ajangle. For inside, metallic surfaces—sometimes sheer, sometimes crunchy—interact hectically with the light. Silver makes sunlight reverberate, bouncing all-round. Light is made a chaos of distorting, disorienting sunechoes.

As a result, no body can traverse this environment without registering in the surrounding surfaces, and no viewer-listener can move through it without registering this registration of their passage in turn. At IMMA, the foil-backing of vapour-resistant plasterboard panels returns blurred reflections. Ambiguous likenesses that match blurred form for form, blurred gesture for gesture; what these return to the room are impressions with all of the detail diffused. At LIAF, peaks of craggy foil send the sun every which way at once. Rays refract, splitting forth as infinitely various light-vectors.

A temporally bounded microclimate is instantiated, warming the bodies of those who enter. Precious metal(lic)s derived from no earthly seam are deployed against their given purpose. A loud and lavish wastage of solar power is performed by materials manufactured to maximise spilled sunlight. At the infrathin site of each encounter between red ray and silver stuff: a stage-show, a sweet wrapper, a star suit. Abstraction of ‘80s space-future fantasies, these chromatic interactions singe the retina, ring metallic on the tongue. Helio-a-go-go.

I Reached Inside Myself Through Time was commissioned in 2015 for LIAF: a contemporary art festival that takes place biannually on the Norwegian islands of Lofoten, above the Arctic Circle. In the island locations it sonically cites, the materials used, the sensory effects it generates, and the circadian confusion it incites, McNulty’s installation invokes the remoteness and extreme opticality of the site that prompted its construction.

To enter IRIMTT is to invite temporal disorientation. To pass inside—as to traverse lines of latitude en route to the north—is to incite diurnal derangement. No chance [here][2] of reading shadows to chrono-locate oneself. But notwithstanding all ensuing destabilization, what enclosure there is [here] is self-consciously incomplete. And beyond the part-permeable envelope of the installation, things proceed manifestly as before, as ever. Though disappropriated of their bearings, each temporary, temporally-mithered inhabitant can yet see a way out, back to a world never altogether cut off. Alternate versions of reality, two dimensions like two notes sustained in synch. To enter [here] is to slip into a pleat. It is to occupy a fold—a context within which everything looks, feels, sounds the-same-but-different.

Inside this fold in the spacetime fabric, the voice that sings sounds the surrounds of mutually irreconcilable places. It carries into this space the echo-effects of an impossible multiplicity of different (differently constituted, differently community-convening) places.[3] Its every note is sure and steady, but the words of the song slide wild of those supplied by memory. This audible evidence of impossible translocations and transformations implies capacities—whether celestial or extra-terrestrial— that exceed those known. And so it is the confidence of the listener-viewer that is made to waver—to doubt at a level below consciousness the sensory percepts they receive.

Installation view Narrow Gate of the Here-and-Now: The Anthropocene, IMMA, Dublin. Photo Ros Kavanagh.

screens/times

Meanwhile, from a strap-suspended, wrapped LCD optical interface, a curious chronology spills forth in two directions at once from a seam at its centre. Text rolls out against a background of lapis blue transitioning through the spectrum into red — rolls out in vertical counterflows.[4] What it displays is McNulty’s chronologically-sequenced listing of entries drawn from a vertiginous timeline: a huge, hand-drawn, exponentially ordered schematic prepared by the science fiction writer Olaf Stapledon as the basis for the comically vast two billion year span of his 1930 novel, First and Last Men. Up the screen flows Stapledon’s selection of significant events from the formation of this planet to 2000AD. The author’s edit of all the world’s history is idiosyncratic, ideologically constrained and inevitably culturally-myopic. Down the screen streams the pre-chronicle of what he prophesies will come next. Because of how both timestreams emerge from the same central point, distant past and still-distanter future events come into fleeting juxtaposition. Unlikely proximities result: a line that reads “FIRST MEN” is momentarily succeeded by “First Supra Temporals”, “ROME” abuts “Atomic Catastrophe” and “Cnossus, zenith” meets “FIRST MARTIAN INFLUX”.

Eschewing comment on its contents, the timeline text presents itself as authorless official record; citing no source, it draws authority from anonymity. All that can be read appears in Futura-form.[5] Issuing forth from the screen, the preternatural knowledge to which it lays claim reads as though it has not arisen from human knowledge production at all. Recalling, in its blank hyper-legibility, a text-only messaging board display,[6] it insinuates an ambivalent urgency. Its faintly milky near-translucent membrane intimates a non-specified need for protection: as though an emergency protocol has been left to loop out of time, anticipating its continued looping long into a fraught future.

A second, smaller screen shadows the timeline TV—manifesting either as dangling interface-appendage (at Lofoten) or as semi-secreted retinal after-image attached to its reverse (at IMMA). What shimmers upon this tiny monitor is the face of Morten Harket of A-ha: a portrait no more definitive than anything else in [here]. Juddering infinitesimally and constantly, it is less moving image than a reminder of mutability. And it is Harket’s voice—or a vocal track rendered down from out of Harket’s voice—that permeates IRIMTT. But just as the voice that sounds in the installation is light years from the original acapella audio-track, so the portrait of the singer is the furthest thing from a raw photo-portrait. Viewer-listeners who recognise the base of that voice are likely also familiar with Harket’s rotoscoped likeness, made famous by the once-and-forever ubiquitously played music video for A-ha’s bigger hit, Take On Me.[7] Pulled from the annals of music TV and not-quite-frozen here, Harket’s portrait summons the impossible transmutations and transpositions of its A/V source material.

In the Take On Me video, a rotoscope-drawn representation of the chiselled popstar cuts a cheeky transversal from two-to-three dimensional space. Reaching through a comic-book page. Harkett’s rotoscoped image pulls a winsome comic-reader from the live-action diner in which she mopes, into his flat, flickering, rotoscoped dimension. Like the monitor to which it is attached, this screen too is seen through a filmy membrane: viewable via the metallized PET of an anti-static bag. McNulty is an artist emphatically concerned with infrastructure, one given to giving prominence to what is crucial and structural but not ordinarily centred. If these materials summon the logistics of space-travel and other technoscientific marvels it is not because the artist makes use of any showily high-sci substances. Instead, the materials and objects McNulty puts on display are examples of inventions that have passed (as though across dimensions) from the realm of innovation to that of everyday consumer affordability—from space-bound vessels into distinctly terrestrial consumer goods. All the while, ricocheting between film-wrapped TVs, red-wrapped windows and silver surrounds, there is the song…

Installation view Narrow Gate of the Here-and-Now: The Anthropocene, IMMA, Dublin. Photo Ros Kavanagh.

lyrics/ lines

Because the lyrics are so spare, and no instrumental track strings across the silences between beads/units of vocalized sound, the gaps between separately sung phonemes are exposed. The voice is made to sound especially alone—even vulnerable. Reverb tails stretch elastically and ambitiously between separately enunciated notes, but snap before ceding to the sounds that succeed them. This sustain-and-snap sequence incites in the listener-viewer a kind of sympathetic yearning. Over and over, it seems as if the note might just reach (be held) all the way across the chasm of non-sound. And every time, it fails—just. The processed voice artificially extends, then falls short. This tantalizing sequence of distinct sounds and intermitting silences can be received/read as sonic representation of the unreliability of voice as guarantor of presence. McNulty’s impulse-response processing of the vocal track produces two contrary effects. It points up the sonorous idiosyncrasies of the unique voice laid bare over the semantic import of the words it sings. And, conversely, it centres those lyrics (unobscured by any surrounding music) on a bare stage. There [here], in the space of the installation, they stand out proud in the sound-space, making themselves amply available for aural reading. [8]

McNulty’s manipulation of the audio source he mines for IRIMTT makes new lines of the modular units that constitute Harket’s sung words. Melodic enunciations have been taken apart, moved about and snapped into new phrases. Transposed into the vicinity of the song-protagonist’s “drifting mirrored mind”, lyrics that would elsewhere seem banal (“Give all your love, all your time, all your heart”) acquire new valence. Time dilates from the days and weeks of pop convention to encompass aeons. In this context of quasi-reflective surfaces, the (now “drifting, distant”) mirrors into which a classic pop protagonist might morosely gaze, amass new powers. Harket grew up in Norway (even if rather further south of the sun-slanting pole) and knowledge of his formation at this latitude lends to the lines, “The sun always shines inside myself”, and “thinking there’s got to be some way to touch the sun” an enhanced, extended plaintiveness. At the same time, the voice’s fractally reverberant tone-tails—the effects that make it sound so much on-the-move—pull against the sentiment of its invocations to “Touch me […] Hold me”. This voice that is heard to traverse diverse terrains within a single verse, denying meanwhile its origins within any tangible (touchable) body, forecloses the satisfaction of the pleas it wails. This effect is, in part, produced by the isolation of the vocal track: its presentation without the drums and keyboards that so emphatically mark beats—and so time—in the release. Set loose from the need to synch, and set about its curious, retrospective roaming, the solo voice is made temporally as well as geographically transcendent. In the original release, the line “Believe me” is followed by the wistful, “The sun always shines on TV”. When IRIMTT’s echo-enriched, ultra-transcendent Harket-voice is heard to sing “Believe me”, what comes next is one of two equally unsettling alternatives: either “the mirror’s sending me through time”, or “I reached inside myself through time”. Neither image can be comfortably envisioned. These new lines resonate with an import infinitely more epic than any found in the raw sonic/lyric material.

There’s a permutational logic to the lyrics of most pop songs, a dependence upon a narrowly delimited corpus, from which are generated repetitions with variations. Something of a similar system—albeit on a very different scale—discloses itself in the timeline that rolls out in its double/split flow on the main TV. Here, as in the course of human history, events repeat, or near-recur. By turning the contents of Stapledon’s fractally pleated tabular timeline into a list, McNulty makes apparent a cyclicality not discernible in the original document. The neat symmetries that snap into legibility when that multiscalar topology is made linear are tidy as pop-lyric rhymes. As the text unfurls from its screen-seam, Ice Ages (from the first to the sixth) recur like unevenly placed choruses. With the inevitability of a sad song that starts with a major meet-cute and then slips into a minor key, “Cnossus, zenith” is succeeded by “Cnossus destroyed”.[9] “Decline” repeatedly precedes “Recovery” and conflict is a given: the “Sino Russian War”, seeds the “Sino American War”. Like a chord resolving, the entry “Prediction of First Solar Catastrophe”, is followed, three entries later, by the realisation of that prophesy.

As today’s AI realists are already painfully aware, the future is destined to be as grim and unjust as the prejudices of those building and built into its ideological infrastructure (dataset). Equally emblematic of its era, Stapledon’s timeline text presumes upon the persistence of humanity’s predilections for violence, imperialism and war-making. Extrapolating from a colonial mentality, it predicts interplanetary invasions (“Second Martian Influx”), oppressive settlement policies (“Migration to VENUS”) and biopolitical reproductive mandates (“Breeding for Neptune)”.[10] Extending dubious fantasies of perfectibility, it predicts mutations (“Atavist Type Emerges”) and upgrades (“Abolition of Natural Death”) of the human species.

Installation view Narrow Gate of the Here-and-Now: The Anthropocene, IMMA, Dublin. Photo Ros Kavanagh.

More surprisingly, the timeline is also deeply attentive to the catalytic valences of energy and extraction. While for Stapledon in 1930, the sun (“SECOND SOLAR CATASTROPHE”) looked the likeliest instigator of earth’s end, today, the vast scope of humanity’s ecocidal mission obviously presents the more clear and present danger. And yet, it is in this anticipation of energy crisis that the novelist’s projections most successfully escape his own time, and address ours. Three entries featured in McNulty’s list are headed “Power”. These record relative percentage distributions of energy generated (in future) via particular sources. According to these reckonings, the percentage of earth’s fuel-usage attributable to coal will first reduce from 50% to 10% of the entire energy supply. Then, in the wake of the predicted “End of Coal”, an enviable reliance on renewables will be instated, ultimately settling (according to the third “Power” entry) at a ratio comprising “10% Water/ 60% Tidal/ 30% Photo”.[11] Amid so much that is either horrifying or just hard to imagine, this particular prophesy of the future cannot dawn fast enough.

Watching notifications of past and future events being broadcast with equal conviction on the timeline TV, the reader-viewer-listener might be forgiven for feeling a momentary, destabilizing doubt.[12] Or, indeed, for stumbling out of the red zone, less sure than ever before of what time (hour, day, century, epoch) it is, carrying with them a residual un-ease.

Meanwhile, a lone, hyper-reverberant voice resonates in redness. Voice, like light, glances off ultra-echoic silver: sonorous singularity against transtemporal totalities. The words it sings tangle with those of two timelines that unspool in un-synced concert. A likeness twitches in unarrested animacy. A stage is set for something/s. Time runs both ways at once.

 

Footnotes

[1]     The original proposal for LIAF had specified the use of red windowfilm, but logistical constraints on-site (off-shore) necessitated the substitution of red oil-paint, typically used to paint Lofoten fishing boats. When IRIMTT was later installed at IMMA, McNulty reverted to his original material solution. Similarly, the anti-condensation plasterboard used at IMMA also returns the work to the material state initially anticipated. Besides amplifying the work’s capacity to manifest in various forms, these substitutions also point up McNulty’s privileging of the phenomenological experience of the installation.

[2]     Throughout what follows, the contingency of the temporary, geographically unfixed and temporally disorienting installation will be referred to, with square brackets, as ‘[here]’.

[3]     Sites in Lofoten from which reverberations have been transferred include a dry dock, a sports hall, a tunnel, and a Nazi bunker enduring from the time of German occupation.

[4]               The difference in the relative speeds of these two text litanies is (like so much else [here]) barely, subliminally perceptible—a minute variation in velocity that snags the eye, keeping the viewer-listener watching.

[5]     While the Futura font’s ubiquity might make it (for some) near-invisible, other reader-listener-viewers will apprehend in the history of that typeface a polarised complex of associations. On its serif-less strokes, Futura carries myriad, mutually irreconcilable legacy-taints of its use: in the branding of NASA missions, the leaflets of diametrically opposed political parties, Bauhaus-era Utopian design features, IKEA’s proliferant production. Futura was, too, the site of an aesthetic conflict among the Nazis — its fortunes determined by the about-face on the Fraktura/German blackletter type aesthetic cast as its opposite. Having first been deemed solidly Germanic, Fraktura was later ostracised when it came to be seen as derived from Hebrew. Nearly too neatly nominally-determinist, Futura stands for what is to come, the next thing, the new world; but the same future has been envisioned in terms antipodal as night and day in temperate parts.

[6]     Visual messaging boards were also used (in combination with song lyrics) in McNulty’s VMB (Keeping Up), installed in the park beside Limerick City Gallery of Art (2014).

[7]     The rotoscope aesthetic was reprised, to lesser degree, in the opening frames of the video for The Sun Always Shines on TV. One further curious cross-reference: in the Take On Me video, the rotoscoped motorcycle race is triggered by the firing of a starter pistol. The same device was used by McNulty in the larger of these spaces to produce the reverb tails then applied to the audio.

[8]     Featured prominently across McNulty’s back-catalogue, song lyrics are also used as material in Maybe everything that dies… (2013), VMB (Keepin’ up) (2014), Running up that building (2015).

[9]     On the meet cute trope and some of its early uses, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meet_cute

[10]  In Stapledon’s timeline, as in the less speculative chronicles of human history, it’s a man’s man’s man’s man’s world. This wholly predictable gender bias manifests not just in the use of the collective noun as standard but equally in the naming of individuals: a cast of hoary regulars: Greek philosophers, Shakespeare, Newton, Kant, Darwin, as well as Confucius, and Jesus Christ.

[11]  The Lofoten archipelago has historically been fuelled by its fishing (and more recently, tourism) industry and has to date been protected from oil and gas extraction. However, the endurance of this protected status is the subject of considerable, politically fraught debate. IRIMTT was first installed at Lofoten in 2015. In the same place, two years later, a manifesto for fossil fuel divestment and an end to hydrocarbon exploration was written and opened to signatories the world over. The Lofoten Declaration has since been signed by over 600 organisations in 76 countries. Temporal incongruities and spatial coincidences continue to thicken the atmosphere of the work.

[12]  In Stapledon’s chart, and as McNulty faithfully re-presents it on-screen, an interrogative uncertainty is ascribed to certain events of the deep past (“First Reptiles?”, “First Mammals?”), but no such typographical indicator of dubiety attaches to projections post-2000 AD.