Richard Malone: The Irish outsider at the Royal Academy of Arts

As the 40th anniversary of the first Dublin Pride Parade takes place today, Ruth O’Connor speaks to Richard Malone - the Irish artist and designer whose work is taking centre stage at The Royal Academy of Arts' Summer Exhibition in London.

Installation view of the Summer Exhibition 2023 at the Royal Academy of Arts in London, 13 June - 20 August 2023. Photo: David Parry/Royal Academy of Arts

While Richard Malone has been the darling of the fashion set since graduating from Central Saint Martins in 2014, the designer has embraced a multi-disciplinary practice which has seen him curate and produce work for exhibitions including, ‘Making and Momentum: In Conversation with Eileen Gray’ and ‘Knot Bind Gesture Bend’, his response to the National Gallery of Ireland’s ‘Giacometti: From Life’ exhibition.

His successful stint as Artist in Residence at the National Gallery may have helped prepare him for his latest project at the Royal Academy of Arts, however it is nonetheless pretty extraordinary that a 33-year-old member of the LGBTQ+ community, an Irish artist from a rural Wexford seaside town, is taking over the Wohl Central Hall, which has previously hosted such established names as Ai WeiWei, Anthony Gormley and Joana Vasconcelos.

Malone’s installation of suspended blue fabric is entitled ‘poem in the dark about sadness, filíocht faoi bhrón, as an dorchadas’ (2023). It’s an immersive hanging mobile sculpture, 7m by 5m, made from hand-bent metal, wire and hand-sewn recycled fabric. The theme of the piece centres on personal action as well as on LGBTQ+, working class, Irish and immigrant identities.

Malone says, having produced a fashion graduate collection at the esteemed Central Saint Martins college, the prizes he won enabled him to stay working and living between London and Wexford. However he’s never been entirely comfortable with the churn of the fashion cycle and has simultaenously explored disciplines including drawing, sculpture, writing and performance. Renowned for his attitude to sustainability, he has always produced small collections in sustainable fabrics. “The cycle of fashion has always been a bit grating to me in terms of the amount of production,” he says. “I was very lucky in that I had people commissioning and buying pieces from me from as early as my graduate collection but I’ve always kept a lot of other things going on on the side.”

A studio visit in 2016 from the Museum of Modern Art in New York prompted him to examine his practice beyond clothing: “I found it exciting that they were asking questions about the body and talking about textiles. To me, textiles are overlooked as an art form and there are gender connotations to that,” he says. “I’m interested in ideas around how labour is not really valued — the idea of me learning to weld from my dad or learning more about colour from him as a builder, painter and decorator than at art school … learning stitch and embroidery from my grandmother. The idea of allowing processes like that to be celebrated and have meaning.”

Speaking of the piece for the Royal Academy he says: “I like the idea of fabric having a human quality — it is something that we all engage with every day whether realising it or not. The metal moves at a different speed so that it looks like the piece is moving in and out of shapes and silhouettes. It has a kind of presence that is moving all the time. I notice that people are spending a lot of time with the piece, underneath it.. moving around it — that’s really rewarding.” The Summer Exhibition, an open submission show, has taken place annually since 1769 and is considered pretty democratic and accessible as far as these things go. Nonetheless Malone says he is very aware of being young, working class, Irish and LGBTQ+ and taking up such a huge space in the illustrious British institution. “You carry those things with you, being working class, queer, Irish. You’re really aware you’re taking up this huge space in the Academy ... kind of a strange place to put your work in any case. It’s a very human thing ... it feels like a very human work.”

Overall winner Richard Malone is pictured at the Royal Hibernian Academy in Rajinder Singh's 'Pale in Saffron' after the announcement of the 2023 Golden Fleece Award, the largest arts prize open to both artists and makers in Ireland. Photo: Mark Stedman

Does he feel pressure to ‘represent’ as a kind of outsider on the inside of the elite art world?

“I definitely feel the pressure to represent but the work is truthful to who I am and where I’m from. I have never tried to fetishise who I am and where I am from. You see it in fashion a lot ... pony boys, photos of the Travelling community or working class communities [as themes]. I would never do that. It’s an identity, it’s not something to be copied. My identity I carry with me and I’m using what I have learned, and the education that I was lucky enough to get, to hopefully create a new language. You have a deal of responsibility but you don’t want to self-fetishise for the sake of it.” As illustrated by the title, ‘poem in the dark about sadness , filíocht faoi bhrón, as an dorchadas’, the Irish language is important to Malone as he believes it can express more fully concepts of nature, other worlds, magic and the human experience than the English language. He has chosen an Irish language title for its “anti-capitalist and anti-colonial basis that allows for a more human understanding of experience”.

“It was important to have Irish in the title in that space because it’s never happened before,” he says. “It asserts the fact that this is an Irish artist and Irish work in this space and it doesn’t look like what people in Britain expect Irish work to look like.”

Malone seems to have identified a disconnect between what many people in the UK think Ireland is like and what it is actually like, as well as what they perceive Irish contemporary art to be. “Having lived between London and Wexford for the past ten years, while there might be bad things happening in Ireland [such as the housing crisis] it is a very modern country. The country has really shifted. Voting through same sex marriage and Repeal changed the whole public consciousness — it’s democracy,” he says.”I believe that Ireland, before colonisation, had a very forward-thinking way of existing.” He cites ‘Making and Momentum’ 2021’s travelling exhibition of contemporary visual art which opened at Eileen Gray’s iconic Villa E1027 in France before travelling to Ireland. The exhibition and auction, which he curated and also exhibited in, raised over €170,000 for the restoration of Gray’s work and home as well as the establishment of a prize for emerging artists. “At the final show, artist Niamh O’Malley noted that the works we’d selected were by people with really modern contemporary practices that you couldn’t really define as sculpture,” says Malone who grew up with two consecutive female Irish presidents and jokes that, as a child, he didn’t know men could be presidents. “That’s what you aspire to as an artist I think, to have your own strong visual language. When we looked at it, all these artists were people from working class backgrounds, were queer or were women. It wasn’t something that we were specifically aware of but I don’t think you could have had a show like that 20 years ago.”

This week has seen him at London’s Hayward Gallery with a show entitled, ‘Dear Earth: Art + Hope in a Time of Crisis’. As someone who sets a limit of 15 minutes a day on his phone and has become disillusioned with his 3D garments being reduced to flat images on social media, his wish was for the public to engage with the performances in real time as they have with his artwork in the Royal Academy. “For the Hayward I wanted to use dance and ritual but make something modern and contemporary,” he says. “I was thinking about the interconnectivity between people, and of people being present and engaged for the duration of the piece. I think things like that are quite radical now because everyone is permanently on their phones.”