O' Brien rises to occasion with latest exhibit 'With Bread'

ONE of the roles of the artist is to take the mundane and tease out surprising facets of our relationships to it.

In the past, Abigail O’Brien has done this with everything from the rituals endemic to our culture (in her ‘Seven Sacraments’ series) to the nostalgia that the toy inspires in us (in her ‘Airfix Days’ installation). Her latest exhibition, ‘With Bread’, illuminates something that occupies a banal yet central place in most of our lives. It does so in a way that poses questions concerning gender and capitalism, while celebrating bread’s ancient place in our cultural and spiritual lives.

Having debuted in Drogheda last year, the exhibition — which comprises photography, video, and sculpture — moves to The Dock in Carrick-on-Shannon from Feb 7 to Apr 5. The most immediately striking aspect of the photographs in the exhibition is the primordial quality they capture in the creation of bread. O’Brien’s video installation documents the genesis of pain au levain, the starter-dough, the origins of which stretch back 6,000 years.

“I see bread as being a very feminine material,” says O’Brien. “Certainly, the pain au levain, that’s a very female material. You feed it every day, and when it’s fed it starts to come up and bubble and be energised. The video shows it coming up and then collapsing back into itself. So there’s an alchemy to bread-making. It comes to life, it’s transformative and it has a very feminine life-force about it.”

Notably, each of the photographs is named after a female artist. The gesture invites the viewer to draw associations with these artists’ works, but O’Brien says she did it primarily as a way of honouring female artists, having been troubled by their marginalisation.

“Eighty-four per cent of the works at Tate Modern in London are by men,” she says. “That’s quite an extraordinary figure when you think about it. And of the 100 most expensive works of art sold in auction in 2012, none of them were by women artists.”

This issue of gender provides a subtle tension in the exhibition. Baking is generally deemed a feminine activity, one belonging in the home, yet the bakeries O’Brien shot in, emblematic of industrial spaces, were predominately staffed by men. O’Brien visited four bakeries: McCloskey’s Bakery in Drogheda, the Bretzel and Il Valentino Bakeries, both in Dublin, and Barron’s Bakery in Waterford.

“Most of the people I photographed were men,” she says. “McCloskey’s Bakery sponsored the exhibition in Drogheda, so we went there with a group of children one day and this little girl asked ‘Are there no women working here?’. And I thought, ‘Good on you.’ In fact, there were women working there. But they were all in the packaging and pastry end of things.”

‘With Bread’ mobilises themes other than gender. A set of sculptures — each of them named after an international currency — were created by casting ethnic breads in silver.

“I’m playing with that whole thing of use value and exchange value,” says O’Brien. “Most of the currencies that the sculptures are named after are defunct now. The bread should actually be more valuable to us as bread, but these are objects now. So the bread is gone. And yet as sculptures they are the objects that are for sale.”

Since the late 1990s, O’Brien’s work has won acclaim at home and abroad. She’s a member of the Royal Hibernian Academy and is currently its secretary. It’s notable that ‘Kitchen Pieces’, one of her earliest works — part of her Seven Sacraments series — also drew on imagery of bread and baking, and it suggests a fascination with the rituals that surround food.

“Rituals are the things that bind us to one another,” she says. “When we were children nothing was ever made out of a packet or out of a tin. My mother made everything from scratch herself, which of course meant that cooking and preparation were a huge part of the day — the ritual in the house. Food was always eaten late because it would take so long to prepare. My friends would all have their tea at 6 o’clock. We would eat at 8 o’clock at night.”

Fatefully, for O’Brien, her mother’s craft fed her own creativity.

“That’s absolutely where my love of making things stems from,” she says. “I’m saddened a little bit these days by the sight of children sitting around a table with their family and they’re all on some kind of tablet instead of chatting and learning and engaging. My mother was fantastic at encouraging all sorts of creative activities. She got rid of the television because she felt we were watching too much.”

Despite her mother’s reverence for food, however, O’Brien admits she did go astray the odd time.

“We used to get these sandwiches every day for school,” she recalls. “They were brown bread with ham and cheese and salad and tomatoes — big beautiful sandwiches. My pal in school would have white bread with sandwich spread, and we used to swap. She adored my big munchy sandwich. And I loved hers, because it was a complete treat to have something so ‘processed’.”