In The Frame: Brigid McLeer reaches for the Cosmus at new exhibition in Limerick
Brigid McLeer currently has an exhibition at Limerick City Gallery of Art. Picture: Liam Burke/Press 22
Brigid McLeer is nothing if not eclectic in her interests. Cosmus, her new exhibition at Limerick City Gallery of Art, features work inspired by subjects as diverse as the failings of the international textiles industry and the assassination of Robert Kennedy.
“It’s a kind of survey exhibition,” she says, “looking back at work I've made over the past 15 years. It ranges from video pieces to installations, with drawings, collage, and textiles.”
McLeer grew up in the country outside Drogheda, Co Louth, but left for London in 1991 to study for a Higher Diploma in Fine Art at the Slade School of Art.
She has lived there ever since, exhibiting widely and completing a PhD at the Royal College in 2021. Alongside her artistic practice, she is a Senior Lecturer at Manchester School of Art.
Cosmus – the deliberately misspelled title plays on the idea of merging the universal with the personal - is the largest exhibition she has undertaken in Ireland since a solo show at the Highlanes Gallery in Drogheda in 2012.
One of the major pieces featured in the new show is Collateral, a four-and-a-half metre length of embroidery she made in collaboration with a group of retired women in Lancaster and 120 more from across Britain for the Textile Biennal in Lancaster in 2021.
“The work is a memorial to people who have died in factory fires around the world,” she says. “When I was talking with the organisation Super Slow Way, who run the Biennial, they brought me up to Burnley to visit a stately home called Gawthorpe Hall, which has a textile collection of its own.
"In that collection, there was a piece from the 1940s, a machine-made lacework produced to commemorate the Battle of Britain. A huge piece.
"I looked it up afterwards and I was struck by the material - this beautifully fine, gorgeous lace that you’d associate with the floral borders on people’s clothing - and its juxtaposition with images of bombers in the air, ruined buildings and St Paul's Cathedral on fire.
“I was struck by how this language of violence was coupled with the fineness of the material, and I thought we could do something similar. So Collateral is based exactly on that lacework. It's the same size, and it borrows quite a bit of the design.
"But instead of the ruined buildings in London, or St Paul's on fire, you have the Rana Plaza factory collapse in Bangladesh, and these different factories that burned down around the world. Our piece is predominantly handmade, rather than being machine produced, and it's embroidery, not lace work as such, so that's where it was getting its language from.”
The collapse of the Rana Plaza building in 2013 left 1,134 dead, and thousands more injured, and is remembered as the worst garment factory disaster the world has ever seen, though sadly – as McLeer reminds us - there have been many more.
“I hope to make a new work soon,” she says, “one that will look again at the phenomenon of the textile industry and its connection to this bigger global capitalist system, which is full of horrors.”
Robert Kennedy’s killing, as he campaigned to be elected President of the United States of America in 1968, was a different kind of tragedy, but one that also had wide repercussions; his death is seen by many as bringing to an end the idealism of that decade.
McLeer’s interest was sparked by her discovery of a suite of photographs by Paul Fusco, who’d been commissioned by Look magazine to photograph Kennedy’s funeral.
“Fusco rode the train bringing Kennedy’s remains from New York to Arlington Cemetery. As they were traveling south, thousands and thousands of people came out to the edges of the tracks to pay their respects, and Fusco stuck his camera out the window and photographed them.
"These were not the white elite or the middle class. They were a cross-section of society, people who thought Kennedy represented their best hope, and it was almost like they were saying goodbye to that.
“The photographs are amazing. The people are looking out at you, and it’s like they're calling for someone to be held to account for Kennedy’s death.”
McLeer was so taken with Fusco’s images that she decided to replicate his methodology. She got permission to shoot on Regent St, one of the busiest shopping streets in London’s West End, when it was shut down for roadworks.
She laid down five metres of track in the middle of the street and ran her camera back and forth along it.
“It was on a tripod where I could swivel the top of it and photograph people walking by. And if they looked at me, I would hold the camera on them a little longer. So I was mimicking Fosca’s actions, and my photographs are then collaged with his in my video.”
McLeer’s video - The Regent’s Street, set to music by Arvo Part - suggests that these contemporary shoppers in London may be a world away from those mourning Kennedy’s passing in rural America in the 1960s, but they are essentially the same; still clinging to hope, still vulnerable to disappointment.
However grim her subject matter can be, McLeer insists there is as much light in her work as there is darkness, and she has yet to despair of humanity.
“Just yesterday I went to see this amazing new documentary about Julian Assange, called The Trust Fall,” she says. “And in it, they're all talking about how we're at this real crucial turning point where our democracies seem to be disappearing.
"It brought home how we need to be really careful. We need to watch what the powers-that-be are doing and try to ensure that we hold them to account.
“It’s hard, but if we stay active in our relationships, in our relationship to the world and to each other, then there is always hope.”
- Brigid McLeer, Cosmus, runs at Limerick City Gallery of Art until April 7. Further information: Gallery.limerick.ie; brigidmcleer.com
