Cork Midsummer review: I Fall Down, at Crawford Art Gallery
Gina Moxley at the cast of I Fall Down, at the Crawford Art Gallery, for Cork Midsummer Festival. Picture: Miki Barlok
★★★☆☆
In 2020, the great Mary Beard brought the Crawford in Cork to international attention when she did a ‘fig reveal’ on her BBC show by removing the leaf that had been strategically-placed over the penis of one of the Canova Casts in the gallery’s collection. Now it’s the turn of Gina Moxley to highlight the place of another set of genitalia in the gallery and the wider art world.
I Fall Down: A Restoration Comedy had the Cork native interweaving autobiography and her own attempts to promote shamefully-neglected female artists, with a sort of farewell to a building that will soon undergo a massive overhaul.
The co-production with the Everyman begins in the Crawford’s downstairs lecture theatre, a room well familiar to the playwright from her days studying here in the 1970s when the building still housed the ‘school of art’ before that educational institution’s move to Sharman Crawford Street.
Moxley introduced her four fellow-cast members as she regaled the audience with memories of her student days, and the experience of studying in a male-dominated sphere, exemplified by the use of EH Gombrich’s book, The Story of Art. That widely-used ‘comprehensive’ tome didn’t feature the work of any female artists.
Thankfully, at least the Irish visual art world has been transformed in the intervening decades, with women in key positions throughout, and female artists very much front and centre. In fact, one of those artists, Maud Cotter, was literally front and slightly left of centre for a performance during Cork Midsummer Festival. It must have been nice for the Cork-based artist to hear her name being sung alongside those of other women in a restorative chorus by soprano Amy Ní Fhearraigh.
From there, the audience was ushered upstairs to the newer gallery space for tales of Florence, and Moxley’s plan to stick chewing-gum to the blank spaces between the legs of female statues in the Italian city’s galleries. The supporting cast’s gradual morphing into Pussy Riot was apt indeed.
Onwards to the third floor of the gallery, where a photograph of a young Moxley was cleverly brought to life for a conversation with her older self. Then it was the audience’s turn. Everyone was presented with a ball of pink plasticine, and instructed by cast member Emily Terndrup on how to work it into a series of shapes that gradually came together as vulva. Cue a squaring of the genital circle and a search for a collective noun when these models were placed together in the gallery where Beard had done her fig reveal.
Lighthearted and diverting, I Fall Down also managed to put a personal spin on some of the strands of the Crawford’s history before the venerable Cork institution begins its next chapter.
