The story behind six of the pieces in Bodywork, at Crawford in Cork
Clockwise from left: artists Maia Nunes, Rita Duffy, Rachel Ballagh
Jennifer Trouton’s watercolours of flowers and herbs are so beautifully executed they could easily illustrate a book on plants.
Look closer, however, and one can see that the paintings also feature maps of Ireland and images of the female pelvis and uterus.
All the plants, pretty as they might be, are traditionally known to induce abortion during pregnancy.
The fact that there are 32, the same number of counties in Ireland, reflects on how abortion, and women’s reproductive issues, continue to be an issue on this island, where even the decriminalisation of abortion in the south in 2018 has failed to bring parity with northern Ireland, as part of Great Britain.
At first glance, Duffy’s painting might strike the viewer as a typically accomplished depiction of the jumpsuit she wears when working in her studio in Ballyconnell, Co Cavan.
But Duffy is nothing if not a political artist, one who has engaged fearlessly with the realities of her native Northern Ireland, and it comes as no great surprise to learn that bright orange jumpsuits are typically assigned to ‘non-compliant’ detainees by their US captors at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.
The title plays on the Latin conjugation of the verb ‘to love’: ‘amas’ translates as ‘you love’ and ‘amat’ as ‘he or she loves’.
This is far from the unforgiving spirit of the detention camps of Guantanamo founded as part of the War on Terror initiated by the US after the attacks on New York on 11th September 2001.
Most will remember how Hurricane Ophelia rampaged through Ireland in 2017, attaining the highest wind speeds ever recorded in this country.
Lives were lost, and damage to property ran to many millions of euros. Away from the national headlines, there were small domestic casualties, such as the apple tree felled in Rachel Ballagh’s back garden.
Ballagh asked her friend Corban Walker, also an artist, to pose naked on the trunk, creating an unforgettable image of humankind engaging with nature.
Walker’s white skin and artfully arranged limbs contrast with those of the fallen tree, succumbing to decay amidst the unruly foliage proliferating where the garden backs onto a wilderness barely kept at bay by the mowed lawn in the foreground.
The image was short-listed for the Zurich Portrait Prize in 2022.
Writing to his lover Merce Cunningham in 1943, the composer John Cage said of a recent fall of rain, “it was marvellous because it started suddenly and it was alternately terrific and gentle.”
The Irish-Trinidadian artist Maia Nunes takes that as the starting point of ARIMA, a work that encompasses two poems and an eight-minute video.
The poems are displayed, appropriately enough, on a music stand, and both reference rain, with one describing it as the “release of ecstasy and heartache.”
Nunes’ video, meanwhile, features the artist performing what look like yoga exercises in and around a slow-moving river, overhung by lush foliage.
Over the percussive electronic soundtrack features, Nunes intones the same poems, with the refrain: “Rain is the moment a gathering breaks.”
Yvonne Condon is an artist from Midleton, East Cork who participates in Crawford Supported Studios, a partnership between Crawford Art Gallery and MTU Crawford College of Art & Design.
Condon’s painting, in acrylics on cardboard, is probably the most striking image in the exhibition, a vivid study of a human head with startling blue eyes, a crooked mouth and a profusion of black hair with six additional eyes embedded in it.
The subject’s gaze seems fearless and defiant, as if challenging the viewer to a staring contest.
Condon’s style is nothing if not expressive. The paint is laid on thickly and seemingly in haste, as if she were anxious to preserve this vision before it disappeared into the ether.
The subject’s flesh is rendered in an agitation of reds, pinks, and even a dollop of yellow; the grey background has wonderful tinges of purple and blue; while the thick black outlines recall Picasso’s in his portrait, Child with a Dove.
The Malaysian artist Rajinder Singh completed a PhD in Engineering in 1993 and a Master’s in Fine Art in 2010. He is now based in Dublin.
Singh’s Untitled (Magical Being) consists of a found object, a statue of a cherub around whose head and shoulders the artist has constructed a scaffold of brass rods topped with a twist of the bright orange fabric worn by monks, priests, shamans and witch doctors, and used by many Sikhs in fashioning turbans.
It’s a work that might cause the viewer to smile, but Singh’s intentions are often more sombre.
His second piece, My Sister’s Coven, consists of more than forty metres of the same orange fabric, hanging above a tall ceramic plinth in a twisted mass the artist compares to a carcass in an abattoir.
The work commemorates the artist’s older sister, who died of cervical cancer 1,000 miles from family and home in 2004.
- Bodywork runs at the Crawford Art Gallery until August 20. Further information: crawfordartgallery.ie
