Patricia Hurl: 'I got letters from women saying they were praying for me'
Patricia Hurl's exhibition is currently on at IMMA.
Patricia Hurl is surprisingly easy company for an artist whose work has so often provoked controversy. Her first major retrospective, Irish Gothic, has just launched at the Irish Museum of Modern Art in Dublin and features eighty works from throughout her career.
The earliest are drawn from Hurl’s very first solo exhibition, Living Room Myths and Legends, which, when it opened at the Temple Bar Gallery in October 1988, was notorious for its satirical take on suburban life.
“I got really bad reviews,” Hurl laughs, “and nasty letters saying I was casting aspersions on people’s lives and so on. I even got letters from women saying they were going to pray for me. But I also got a major Guinness Peat Aviation Award for that show, and there were some wonderful women journalists who encouraged me. Without them I might have sunk.”
Hurl is now in her 80th year, and it is fair to observe that her retrospective is long overdue. Had she made a career of painting landscapes or portraits, success might well have come sooner. Still, she is glad to have stuck to her guns. The miracle, she says, is that the work is still intact.
“I had kept all these paintings in a container for so long that when we opened it up, most of them had been water damaged,” she says. “The people at IMMA had to take them away and restore them.”
Hurl has always painted. She married young, settling with her husband - a Guinness cooper named Joe Doherty - in the new suburb of Blanchardstown, where they reared their three children. For a long time, the art was a side-line; she sold watercolours on the railings at Stephen’s Green to bring in extra cash. But then, in her thirties, she applied to study at the Institute of Art, Design and Technology in Dublin.
Mature students were a rarity at that time, and she was understandably nervous when she was accepted. But college was a revelation. “I found my tribe,” she says. “I just loved it from the start.” Her tutors included Brian Maguire and Patrick Graham, but the one she remembers most fondly is Charles Brady. “Charlie would work away on his own painting while we were working on ours in the studio. But then he’d walk past and give you a wink if he liked what you were doing. And that wink was worth so much more than all the waffle the rest of them came out with.”
On finishing college, Hurl got a studio at Temple Bar, and began making the paintings she would exhibit as Living Room. “There was a lot of desperation in those paintings, but I was talking about myself,” she says. “I told the truth of what the government did to us, sticking us into little boxes on the hillside, as the song goes. We were all so different from each other, from completely different backgrounds, thrown in to live together in the suburbs with no proper facilities or services. But we supported each other. We helped with each other’s children. When people had troubles, we listened.”
Hurl’s art has often dealt with issues such as abortion and women’s rights, and that first show at Temple Bar featured several paintings inspired by the case of the Kerry Babies and the persecution of Joanne Hayes. It may seem a lifetime ago, but Hurl is adamant that things are not much better now. “I still cut out newspaper articles,” she says, “and I put the clippings up where I can see them. We have so many murders here. We seem to take violence much more easily than we used to. Suddenly a row becomes a murder. The inequality is so stark now; the more money people have, the worse the violence gets.
“It’s terrible to think that’s where I get my inspiration, but all these things are fodder to me as an artist. I love trees. I love mountains. But I don’t want to go out and paint them. I don’t paint to make money. I paint what I want, and I’ve always been political.” Hurl lectured in the Fine Art Department at Dublin Institute of Technology from 1984 to 2009, somehow finding time to complete an MA in Interactive Multi-media in 2000. In her later years teaching, she commuted from Roscrea, Co Tipperary, where she now lives with the artist Therry Rudin. From 2013, the two ran the Damer House Gallery in the OPW-operated 13th century Norman castle in the town.
“The OPW used to charge a fee to get into the building,” she remembers. “But we said we would only run the gallery if it was free, and they agreed to that in the end.” The gallery was a great success, but Hurl is relieved to have stepped back from it in 2021. “I wasn’t getting my own work done at all,” she says.
During the Covid lockdowns, Hurl and Rudin became involved in a group of artists called Na Cailleacha, along with Barbara Freeman, Catherine Marshall, Rachel Parry, Carole Nelson, Gerda Teljeur and Helen Comerford. “We are all over 75, and Barbara - the eldest, above in Belfast - is 85. We meet up on Zoom every week, to keep the ball in the air.”
Na Cailleacha have exhibited as a group in Wexford, Waterford, South Tipperary, Co Clare and Dublin. “The Dublin show, at the Hugh Lane, was a real feather in our caps,” she says. “We were invited to be part of a feminist exhibition, Bones in the Attic, along with the likes of Dorothy Cross, Alice Maher and Alanna O’Kelly. To our surprise and delight, the Hugh Lane bought a work of ours, a piece we called Childsplay, for their collection.” Hurl makes no secret of how much she misses Dublin.
“I’m heartbroken here,” she says. “I’m longing for home. But I can’t afford to move back to Dublin, it’s just not possible.” There are advantages to rural life, however. Her studio is large and airy, and she accepts that the seclusion helps her focus. “I’m very social. If I was in Dublin I’d probably be going out all the time, to the cinema and so on. But here in Roscrea, I stay in the studio and work, and I always work hard.”
- Patricia Hurl: Irish Gothic runs at IMMA, Kilmainham, Dublin until 21st May
- Further information: imma.ie; hurlrudin.com
