Imperfect Collective at Signal Arts Centre

I greatly enjoyed Imperfect Collective’s recent show Picking Up the Pieces at Signal Arts Centre in Bray. It was probably one of the best and most interesting exhibitions I have seen at Signal! There’s a lot here to unpack – memory, damage & repair, violence, frustration, desperation, perhaps even reconciliation.

The noise of crashing plates from the video was the first thing I noticed, but since the video was already in progress I decided to have a look around the gallery first, before returning to watch it in full. It was a twenty minute long video on a loop. Most of the exhibition was sculptural, with the exception of three self-portraits of the three women who make up the collective: Cathy O'Reilly Hayes, Darina Meagher and Ann Marie Webb.

I looked around at the various works of various awkward shapes on various plinths. All the dishes are of that type that one associates with propriety. I am familiar with the Japanese concept of kintsugi, yet the crockery is glued together carelessly and the glue painted over with gold to represent the idea of kintsugi while not actually being kintsugi (which is far more precise and elegant).

When I get back around to watching the video, I realise that it provides the key to the work. The video is shot in a pool without water so the sound kind of echoes. Three pairs of hands conscientiously place dishes on a table. At first it seems they are setting a table, but no, they continue stacking the dishes precariously. A large, covered, silver but tarnished, roasting dish is placed in the centre of the table and the hands begin polishing. They are not careful at all with the task and the dishes find their way to the pool floor. The noise begins. Eventually high-heeled shoes are thrown at the table of dishes and everything is broken. The shoes remain on the table. Restrictive high heeled shoes have never been part of my wardrobe so throwing them at the table does not represent a rebellion of any sort for me. But I can sort of understand the point (and yes, the high heels are also pointed!).

The press release for the exhibition talks about the societal pressure to avoid failure but I somehow seemed to have missed this concept in the viewing and instead see it entirely as a feminist act of rebellion against upbringing and propriety. There is carelessness in putting back together of the dishes - perhaps there may be some regret in breaking them but the restoration is cursory: they are no longer useful as dishes. The smaller pieces too, the plaster encased shoes kind of holding repaired dishes, no longer serve any shoe-like function. They are white. They are ghosts. 

The Tower at Rua Red

I was so excited a few months ago when a friend told me the Jesse Jones exhibition, “The Tower”, at Rua Red gallery in Tallaght was a continuation of her exhibition “Tremble Tremble”, which had been Ireland’s entry to the Venice Biennale in 2017. While I did not get to see that exhibition in Venice, I did see it a few times when it was shown again in Ireland the following year. I wrote about it here and I also wrote about the "in conversation" evening between Jesse Jones and Olwen Fouéré here. 

As in 2018, I was stunned and amazed by Jones’s monumental multi-disciplinary work involving collaborations in film, dance, sculpture and performance. Wow! As I stayed for the duration of several performances I ended up with two “milagros” (hope/healing/spiritual charms), which I cherish.  

I was thrilled to learn that there will be a third installation in this amazing series of artworks from Jones. I lifted the last two photos from the Rua Red website and publicity (with apologies as I could not find the photo credits) because I wanted to give a sense of the magnitude of “The Tower”, which is a totally indescribable work, and I most certainly did not want to take photographs during this incredible performance event.

Cora Cummins and Saoirse Higgins at The LexIcon Gallery

 A couple of weeks ago I realised that I was running out of time to see an exhibition that had been on my radar for a few months! With the way these past two years have gone, at least I can forgive myself for losing track of time. But at least I got to see the exhibition at The LexIcon Gallery prior to its close. On Steady Ground/Unsteady Ground was a 2-person exhibition by Cora Cummins and Saoirse Higgins. While there was some collaboration in process discovery and prior to exhibiting work (as indicated in an artist talk by Cummins) the exhibition itself is not of collaborative work, rather work by two very individual artists.

Entering the gallery from the adjacent library, the viewer is brought face to face with a number of prints by Cora Cummins and the variation in scale - from tiny mezzotints to the multi-panel etching - is immediately apparent.

The common denominator between the works by the two artists seemed to be landscape and a concern for the environment. However, this is only a surface reading of the works as both artists are really addressing issues of isolation and responses to the pandemic seem to seep out of the works.

As I knew something of Cora Cummins prior to listening to her artist talk (via Zoom the week before I saw the exhibition) I was not surprised to find out that Cummins was also finding creativity from insurmountable grief (her husband died, far too young, several years ago). 

Even had I not known this, I would have looked at the fractured image in the multi-panelled print Monument as something more meaningful than simply the image of a mountain. Because of the artist talk I was aware that this labour-intensive piece subverted the whole point of printmaking itself - it was a unique piece and would always remain so:

Cummins, after printing those unique panels, used the copper plates to form the sculpture Fallen. Together the two works complement each other in a heartbreaking expression of sorrow and survival.

The space around each work allowed that necessary room to hold the emotionsal impact.

I thought, at first, that this wall hanging was another of Cummins's works, but the creator was Saoirse Higgins. It was a good bridging piece between her and Cummins's pieces. The central image had that feeling of landscape but its actuality could not be placed. Perhaps it was a detail? Within the larger cloth it took on several aspects of appearance and connotation: a shroud, a blanket and a screen. So any emotional reading was confused by a multiplicity of meaning.

And then one is drawn to the flickering video in the small room at the back of the gallery where the changing shoreline and racing clouds of timelapse are mesmerising. I was unable to attend Higgins's artist talk but from hints Cummins gave in her talk, I surmised that the landscape filme was of a remote island in the Orkneys where Higgins spent much time in isolation during the worst days of the pandemic.

At some point the video/film becomes multi-split-screen and, aside from the saturated blues of sea and sky, one is aware of the propellor movement from a small aircraft. Both Higgins's and Cummins's work deal with the passage of time and leave the viewer with a melancholic hope. I was glad I had the chance to view the work in this incarnation, at this venue.