Memory Is My Homeland at Rathfarnham Castle room 3: The Dining Room

 The third room of my exhibition at Rathfarnham Castle is accessed by walking across the back of The Saloon from The Pistol Loop Room and entering through the curved door. To see works related to this exhibition and in-progress, simply do a search for Memory Is My Homeland on this blog.

While it is furthest from the door that one has just entered, Kingswood is the largest piece in this room and being so colourful one tends to walk over to it first. 

This is my representation of the house in Toronto that I grew up in, the three figures representing moments of my life: a young child stands on the front lawn by the hedge on her Communion Day, wearing the purple cape that her mother made for this occasion, a young teen reading and tanning on the steps (every summer for several years) and the young woman in her early 20s leaving home to start her life as an artist and writer. The house had much flora in the front yard, back yard and side garden. One of the lilac trees in the back yard was hit by lightning when I was a child so there was a stump that didn't flower, but the other side of the tree remained healthy. I didn't put everything in the picture but as much as I could... 

Moving away from the big picture, on a false wall of its own is Home. Although this piece is much earlier than the others (it was created in 2009) and began as part of another series of works, I thought it belonged with these works. The little icon is based on a drawing my child did, of my current home in Bray, when my child was about 6 years old.

Turning away from Kingswood and Home, one is attracted by the bay windows and the plasterwork on the ceiling. There are two false walls in niches to either side of the bay windows and these contain the last pieces in the exhibition.

The House with the Red Door and The House with the Green Door are representations of the earliest homes of my life, in Cabbagetown, in Toronto's inner city. I actually remember a few things related to each house but mostly I differentiate them by the colour of their door. We moved from the former to the latter when I was 2 years old and my family moved from the latter when I was 4. The print Swing Chain, in the Pistol Loop Room, specifically relates to the low chain fencing separating the front lawn of The House with the Red Door from the footpath. I had remembered swinging on a chain fence as a toddler and thought this was a false and impossible memory until one day, as an adult, I passed this terrace of city housing while on the streetcar in Toronto and saw the low chain fences as they appeared in my memory! Cabbagetown got its name because in the late 1950s and early 1960s there was a huge wave of Irish immigrants who ended up living in this area (my parents and siblings among them).

The final piece in the show, Kingston Road: Waiting, is a representation of me in my twenties at my bachelor apartment in the upper beaches area of Toronto (West Scarborough), where I lived for several years. The curtains behind me are actual sheers that I had painted for an installation about HOME that I worked on while completing on my BFA at York University. I was, of course, waiting for my career and life to really begin. A few years after finishing uni, I moved to Ireland, where I had my first solo exhibition in Dublin at Temple Bar Gallery & Studios in the spring of 1989.

Anonymous Archive part 2 of 2

I blogged last week about anonymously and unexpectedly receiving some of my old work and you can read about that here, because I am now continuing from where I left off.

This print I was very happy to have back, as I do not have any other copies myself, but had never forgotten my work on it. Based on a sketch I did of one of my young nieces asleep, I wanted to recreate that variance in pencil linework and spent many hours of class time in the print room with my zinc plate in an acid bath to create this variance. I remember, in 1981 (my final year at CTS in Toronto) being so pleased that the test print showed the lines as I imagined.

My printmaking teacher convinced me to fill in my minamilist approach with aquatint, which I had never tried before. Although I took a similar attitude with the aquatint - giving it many "baths" in order to have a variance in shadow, I remember being hugely disappointed in the resulting test print. I thought the aquatint overwhelmed the linework.

I am not so disappointed now, though, as I think there is a good contrast between the lines and the shadows. I know I only made a very small edition, but since I have no idea of the provenance of the others, I am quite delighted to have one of the final prints in the edition.

After I finished at the Special Art Programme at CTS, I carried on with my own work as a developing artist. That summer I was very interested in specific flowers as representative of my self. I also made many monoprints, using the backs of zinc etching plates. At this point I do not recall whether these represented red tulips or rosebuds...

 

In the fall of 1981 I started working as a temp in an office in downtown Toronto. Because the employer had a policy that encouraged "staggered hours", I ended up starting work by 7.30 am so that I could go home in the afternoon before rush hour. As winter wore on I found myself at my desk watching the sun rise through the office blinds. I found this broken cityscape view quite inspiring and later did quite a number of sketches of it. I only finally did a large painting in 2015, Fractured City, which was inspred by this time and the sketches I did back then.

I was surprised to see this slightly later work in the Anonymous Archive. Still from the 80s, I did this mixed media piece as part of a series that ended up being exhibited in Winters Gallery at York University (while I was in my final year there in 1986) and then at Charyk Gallery in Downsview. At the time I was very interested in metonymy, visually as well as verbally, where part of the whole represented the whole. In the case of this series, the hand represented the body.

Inspiration from dreams, part 2

This is a very tiny gift sculpture I made for my boyfriend (now my husband) when we were separated by an ocean in 1988. It is based on a sculpture I made in a dream I had around that time. The chairs are moveable. I also think the dream itself was inspired by my mentor at university, sculptor Hugh LeRoy, who I had taken drawing classes with and also asked him to mentor me in independent studies in painting for my final two years in university. Before I had ever met him, I read a review in ArtsCanada about a sculpture he had made featuring an "order" chair and a "chaos" chair. Hugh was also profoundly interested in dream-induced creativity and introduced me to left-handed drawing as a useful method to encourage freedom in drawing.

In 1995 I was living in Kerry and amazed by all the calla lily plants on rural home lawns. But when I dreamed about them they were brightly coloured instead of white. I made a Father's Day card for my Dad that June, with an image of the dream calla lilies. My Dad died a few months later, and I created the piece "Dreaming for Dad" on 2 large net curtains and the companion small icon diptych. When I exhibited them the following year with other works, "Pastures Green", at The Basement Gallery in Dundalk (now called An Táin Arts Centre) I installed them in a separate room so that a life-death passage was clearly represented. I loved the way the lighting reflected muted images of lilies on the walls.

While at a studio residency in the spring of 1989, I enjoyed playing with my dream imagery to create a temporary installation in my studio space at The Tyrone Guthre Centre at Annaghmakerrig. Another painter friend referred to my studio of cut-outs as "The Playroom".

I had been granted the residency to finish work for my first solo show in Dublin, but I only had to complete one large drawing for the exhibition and then I was free to let myself go. I enjoyed drawing images with pastel, cutting them out and affixing them to every wall in the studio.

I know I created this piece sometime after the mid-1980s, based on a dream where I was surrounded by water (but remained dry, kind of like the parting of the red sea in CB DeMille's "Ten Commandments" film) and saw a red-sailed boat in the distance. This is a large (about a metre squared I think) painting/collage on Strathmore watercolour paper - a roll of which was given to me by Hugh LeRoy because he was fed up seeing me disrespect my own work by using newsprint for all my best drawings...I know this work still exists, and is beautifully framed, because it was bought in the '80s by a colleague who is now a very dear friend.

This is another piece, also painted on Strathmore paper (from a huge roll) around the same time as the one above, a variation on the same dream theme. However, I am pretty sure this work no longer exists, other than in my mind.

In my last year of university, 1986, I participated in a group show at the Winters college gallery (at York University in Toronto) and with some other work, presented these large paintings (each panel of the triptych and diptych is 4 ft x 3 ft) based on the red-sailed boat dream theme. Both of these paintings no longer exist, having fallen prey to one of my "Great Purges", a necessity when moving back and forth across continents.

These dream sketches managed to survive, having been recently discovered in my "Grey Box" archive. I know the drawing on the left is created on blotting paper (a nice blurry water effect) and the sketch on the right was created while on holiday in Ireland in 1984, presumably depicting a dream I had during that holiday.

Archive drawings

Within that box I recently found, were a couple of works on paper that I didn't expect to see again! These are from a series I had been working on from 1983-1986. Some of the series were exhibited at York University, Toronto, towards the end of the 1985-86 school year along with my large dream paintings (a diptych & a triptych where each individual panel was 3' x 4'). The exhibition was a 3 person show in the large gallery of Winters College. The hand pieces from that show were exhibited that summer in Charyk Gallery, Downsview (a suburb of Toronto).

These works are mixed media on paper, 55 cm x 37  cm. While at York University, I took a few creative writing courses and remember that I was inspired by discussions of metonymy and thought it would be great to create visual metonyms: I started using the hand and its gestures to signify aspects of humanity and emotions.

In the above collage I used some of the silver paper sheets I found (dumpsters in the factory areas of Toronto were always great for unexpected art supplies -- I actually still have some of this paper 30 some years later!). After gluing pink tissue to some areas of the drawing I had a hey day with my graphite, watercolour pencils and a brush loaded with water.

I think the above piece was one of the earlier ones from the series (the fragility of paraffin on paper being a telltale sign) and I am positive it was not exhibited. I know I painted on the paper first, before applying the hands and then covering the two sides with wax hiding the lustre of the silver paper. I think the black lines are China marker. I did some more work with encaustic painting in the 1980s, but properly using beeswax, turpentine, oil paint and canvas or board NOT paraffin and NOT paper!

The above piece was not in the box but is from the hand series of the 1980s. It was included in the York and Charyk Gallery shows and had been again exhibited in 2005 during my "Coming of Age" exhibition in Wicklow. A few years ago there was a competition call for providing artwork to Europol's new building in The Hague. The criteria for the competition had very specific criteria that the artists had to meet (as well as not being involved in criminal activity!). While I thought this work met their criteria, the size did not fit into any of their specified categories. Happily, on enquiry, they gave me the go ahead to apply in a larger size category, purchased the piece and it now hangs somewhere in The Hague.

Kingswood drawings!

The box I found last week contained drawings related to the house I grew up in, 293 Kingswood Rd. in Toronto. My family moved there in 1964 and my parents sold the house in 1983, when they both took early retirement and returned to Ireland. I pre-empted a trauma by getting "settled" in my own apartment in the spring of 1982. (For the record, I was hardly settled as I moved house very frequently in the 1980s!)

One of my homework assignments in my first year of art school (Central Technical School's Post-Secondary Art Programme) was to produce 4 pencil drawings with an architectural theme. The family home provided the subject; these drawings are in a folder dated April/May 1979. Judging by the angle on this drawing, I was sitting on the roof of the shed looking at the back of my house and the back porch (built by my Dad). 

This is the view from my bedroom window of the house and lane directly opposite ours.

This is the view of our wobbly fence leading to the lane, from the back porch.

Still a view from the back porch, this is looking at the shed in our yard, our neighbour's garage and the backs of the houses on the next street (Bingham Ave).

Another assignment from that class was to use pen & ink and ink washes to draw an architectural interior. This is the view from my bedroom down the hall to the bathroom.

The assignment here was to do a watercolour architectural drawing and once again the family home was my model. I remember sitting on the curb across the road from the house in order to do this watercolour, probably in May/June 1979.

In my second year Design class I was learning about architectural drawings from a more technical point of view but again I used my own house to get dimensions, etc., when producing isometric drawings. This is the bottom floor of the house.

This is the house cut in half!

After art school finished in 1981, I took a year off to do studio work and make some money in a job before going to York University for my Fine Arts Degree. One of the classes I took, I think in my third year (1984-85) was Experimental Directions. The professor for that course was the inspiring performance artist, Toby MacLennan. During her class there was a lot of story-telling as a basis for making work and as students we discovered how to tease out our stories. By this time my parents were in Ireland but my memories of the house where I grew up were becoming epic. I am sure this undated drawing done in crayon and soft pencil on the back of a piece of matte board was from that class and was illustrating a point in one of my stories. Looking at this memory drawing now and comparing it to the curbside watercolour of the house which was in front of me, I am impressed by my visual recall! Although I don't remember saving them, I obviously rescued all these drawings from purging oblivion simply because they were depictions of the house where I grew up.

Dream Paintings

My huband has been teaching me how to use GIMP, an free software programme alternative to Photoshop. Since I regularly need to adjust colour, crop and resize images, I have been getting in some practice with old polaroids of artworks that I don't have properly documented. I am only doing the simple things to the image, so there is still a lot of "noise".

This painting is one of many paintings I did at the time based on dreams. Specifically, in the dream I was surrounded by water looking up at the sky and could see a red sailed boat on the horizon. I sold this painting sometime in the 1980s to a friend in Toronto who was an art conservator at the time but then got into alternative therapies. Recently she let me know that this painting is hanging in the new offices of her practice. I was delighted that it still has pride of place! I saw it after she had it framed over 25 years ago and it looked fantastic (if I do say so myself!). The painting is primarily acrylic on heavy watercolour paper; two of the hands are silver paper affixed to the ground before painting was complete. Though not visible in this picture, there are many white lines radiating from the stars in the pink sky which I created painstakingly with a ruling pen (do people still use this tool?). The piece is quite large, either 3 or 4 feet square. 

This painting is also about 3 or 4 feet square, acrylic on heavy watercolour paper and based on the same dream. I don't know if this piece is rolled up somewhere or was a casualty of one of my purges!

Also taken from a tiny polaroid, this image is an installation view of some paintings that were shown in Winters College gallery while I was at York University. It may have been spring 1986 or may have been earlier. This triptych and diptych are acrylic on canvas, each panel being 4' x 3'. They are again based on the same watery dream with the starry sky and red-sailed boat. I know most definitely that these paintings no longer exist, as they were destroyed in a purge before I moved countries and the stretchers were sold to Central Technical School for use by students in the post-secondary art programme.

 

Dream Drawings Part 2 c 1985/86

The following images are more transfers from slide to digital. They were a further development on my left hand dream drawings, done while I was at York University in Toronto under the tutelage of sculptor Hugh Leroy. I can only generally date them from the setting in the dreams so I figured around 1985 and/or 1986 (my last year of uni). I had a big batch of standard 26" x  40"  cartridge paper that I used for my drawings; the following drawings are done in chalk pastel. The dream below clearly takes place in my batchelor apartment on Kingston Rd. in Scarborough, with a depiction of one of my large diptych paintings in the background, surrounded by my beloved stereo & Boston Acoustic speakers (100 watt per side!), records and a dead baby. This was a very sad dream, despite the fair going on outside the window, and I later associated it with the death of my soul. This is the first instance that I recall of me using the figure in the red top and green skirt to represent myself. I later used elements of this dream in my poem "Portrait", published in The Sunday Times New Irish Writing in 1989.

"The Blood Bears Fruit"  - some very obvious but intense imagery in this dream!

"The Second Coming: Evil"  - I remember this nightmare began as a calm moment and then all hell broke loose.

"The Second Coming: Good"  - and this one began with a lot of chaos and running through corridors until I came upon The Virgin of the Rocks -- safety and calm.

"The Water Meets the Bluff"  - although I remember this was a confusing dream, it had very specific imagery and colour (like the more saturated colour between the shadow of two branches on the sand and the change of colour in the water where the figure is about to dive).

Dream Drawings - Part 1 c 1984/85

I was working on transferring my old slides to newer media and am still interested in these dream drawings. At the time I remember I was very frustrated with my drawing skills which seemed to be deteriorating in the environment of York University, Toronto, where I was doing my Degree in Fine Art (at least that is where the blame fell!). My mentor & drawing professor, sculptor Hugh LeRoy, suggested that I draw with my left hand and channel my subconscious. I enjoyed taking his advice as I was developing my interest in dreams and the psyche. I did these charcoal drawings on standard white 26" x 40" drawing paper.

I remember this as an alarming dream, as the dog bit my hand off when I went to pet it!

Song.

Greed.

Offering.

Refusal.

The Gift. (I later did a painting based on this drawing.)

 I don't actually know if these drawings still exist or not! They may have ended up in a portfolio that escaped the second Great Purge of 1993 and simply be up in my attic, or they may have met their doom back then...