Cecily Brennan: Crossing the pain threshold for exhibition at the Glucksman, UCC
Cecily Brennan at the Glucksman Gallery at UCC.
Over the several decades of her career, Cecily Brennan has returned again and again to the subject of pain – both physical and psychological – that human beings endure. She has used whatever media best suit her ideas; painting, photography, sculpture and video all feature in Pressure, a major survey of her oeuvre that runs until March at the Glucksman Gallery at University College Cork.
“Some of the work is completely current,” says Brennan, “and more is older work that I’ve wanted to show again. The new work includes a big photographic portrait of a fictional character called Sad Man.
"Sad Man is a man we see everywhere, walking around the streets. He's very lonely, and everyone ignores him. He’s based on a man I see in my area, here in Dublin.
"You see him, and then he disappears. So he obviously goes into hospital for a while, and then he's back on the street again. That’s the way Sad Man is; he's just constantly rocking between these two.”
Sad Man is part of a larger project that Brennan has been working on for the past two or three years. “I started thinking about illness, and how men can fall off the edge so easily. The six men in this project range in age from 17 to 75. It covers all the age groups. They are all either suffering from, or have suffered from, psychotic breakdown.”
The Glucksman exhibition includes photographs of all six. “They’re totally fictional,” says Brennan, “but I've lived with the idea of them for a long time. I've got funding from the Arts Council to make a film about them, so they will walk and talk and say their lines. And I’ve made lots of drawings and paintings of them as well. So it’s a pretty wide-ranging project.”
Brennan originally trained as a painter, and her new exhibition also features some of her Heat series of paintings, of hospital patients suffering from eczema and psoriasis.
“I attended the National College of Art & Design in the late 1970s, and painting was basically what was on offer,” she says. “But it was a time of confrontation between the academicians and the new students, of which I was one. I didn't want to be taught by academicians. I wanted to find my own route. I just wasn't interested in what they were doing.”
Brennan and her fellow students began hearing of developments in new media, like video and film. “And then we got these new tutors from the UK. People like Nigel Rolfe and Rob Smith and Campbell Bruce. They had a huge influence, you know. Suddenly it was like a different world.”
It was a time of sweeping social changes. “There were all these clashes beginning to happen,” she says. “People were pushing back against the oppression of the Church.
And I think we were just on the brink of really benefiting from the women's movement. A previous generation of women artists, who’d gone to NCAD, didn’t always keep working. But we did. We saw ourselves as professional artists. We felt like we were doing something important. Whether we were or not, we felt we were.”
On leaving college, Brennan and the painter Eithne Jordan set up a studio co-op in Dublin city centre. Brennan got involved in initiatives such as the Project Arts Centre, where she served as director for three years in the mid-1980s.
She exhibited regularly, at venues such as the Douglas Hyde and the Taylor Galleries, and was elected to Aosdána in 1991, heading its visual arts committee from 1993–97.
There followed 12 years in London. “London was great,” she says. “I was very fortunate in that my partner had a good job, and was earning good money. I took every advantage of it, going everywhere and looking at everything. Soaking it up.”
In the 1990s, she took an interest in stainless steel, making sculptures – such as her Bandaged Heart series - that began as objects fashioned in wax. “I was making work about surgery and skin grafts,” she says, “and I worked with wax because it’s the closest thing to human skin that you can imagine. It was used in the 19th century to make all these models of skin diseases.
“After I’d made the pieces, I had them cast at a foundry, which was actually a car parts factory in Roscommon, which has since closed down. They'd never done anything like this before, and they found it fascinating. The casting is so perfect because they were used to doing such specialised work in making parts for cars.”
The Glucksman exhibition also features several of Brennan’s works in video, such as The Devil’s Pool, in which the actor Marty Rea plays a character trapped in a tank who is overwhelmed by wave after wave of an oppressive black liquid. “I think with video, it’s more the performance I’m interested in than the medium,” she says. “The videos are like paintings, but I wanted there to be movement in them, and I wanted people to come back and look at them again.”
Brennan expects to include The Devil’s Pool in her next exhibition, at the Taylor Gallery in Dublin in February 2025. “But most of the work will be paintings and drawings,” she says. “I’ve done individual portraits of each of the six men in that series, and I’m doing one large painting – 10 foot by four - of all six of them together. It’s the largest painting I’ve made in 40 years, and I just hope, with everything else I’ve had going on, that I can finish it in time.”
- Cecily Brennan, Pressures runs at the Glucksman Gallery, UCC, until March 9 2025. For further information, click here.
