Lace, Paint, Hair at the NGI

An edited version of this review appeared in the Sunday Times Culture magazine on 6th September 2020.

The National Gallery of Ireland is back up and running – just remember your face mask. It’s operating a one-way system so you enter at Merrion Square and exit on Clare Street. Lace, Paint, Hair features three artists, Fiona Harrington, Cian McLoughlin, and Eimear Murphy, who have made “significant contributions” to the NGI’s public programmes in recent years. The opportunity to showcase their work in our national gallery is a handsome quid pro quo for these young artists. McLoughlin already has a permanent place in the NGI with a self-portrait in the National Portrait Collection (located nearby and always worth a visit). The title of this new show refers to the medium used by each artist. All of the exhibits were created during the lockdown and according to the attendant press release represent the artists’ responses to this modern plague. McLoughlin’s two pieces, Crowd 1 and Crowd 2 (see image), are part of a series however that predated the pandemic and originally explored the theme of crowd behavior – how we abandon our individualism and cohere to the energy of the masses. Now of course this coherence acquires a new and sinister import. A crowd becomes a dark and dangerous place. The swirling colours, flesh tones, blood-red threads, and ominous blacks all contrive to warn us off. Fiona Harrington’s hand-made lace works are suggestive of our fragility in the face of this deadly virus. This vulnerability is made explicit in Fragile Economies where she has attached her delicate and exquisite lacework to a series of halved eggshells. There is also a resonance in the title of the history of lace-making where poor women laboured so that rich ones could look good. Hair was an issue for many during lockdown, especially I suspect for women. Eimear Murphy’s Hair Correspondence was created by gathering hair from 65 people she contacted via social media  – evidence perhaps of widespread amateur efforts. She wove the hair together to create a large relief drawing that will give viewers an opportunity to exercise their imaginations. It’s a kind of Rorschach test. Murphy’s other works display the mundane detritus of every day life suspended in cast tablets. An anticipation of what the future archaeologists will gather to tell about how we lived. Murphy shows her versatility with materials in the form of a large charcoal drawing showing rock and concrete suspended in a fictional moment.

 

www.ngi.ie

 

 

Reflections on Love

 

I do love a good filly - they seem to be more consistent and predictable than their flighty brothers. The first great one I remember was Sweet Solera trained by the relatively obscure Reg Day who won the Oaks and the 1,000 Guineas in 1961 and promptly retired to stud. She was followed by the peerless Noblesse who won the Oaks by a Shergar-like 10 lengths for Paddy Pendergast in 1963 with Garnie Bougoure on board. In recent years we have enjoyed Enable’s feats - she is arguably one of the all-time greats. My affection for her was initially inspired by her Oaks win 2017 - I had backed her at 8-1, the last time she was a decent price. Having swept all before her for the past few years however she suddenly has a serious challenger. Love has won both the 1,000 Guineas and the Oaks easily this year and she confirmed her class by effortlessly dismissing a decent field in the Yorkshire Oaks last week. She will clash with Enable in the Prix de L’Arc de Triomphe at Longchamp on the 4th October and that is a mouth-watering prospect. Enable will have to concede 7 pounds to the younger horse and she is pushing on a bit so I strongly suspect that Love will conquer all in Paris. (I’ve been listening too many bad puns on the ITV racing programme not to be infected.) The current odds of 3-1 seem generous.

Tampon Tampon It’s All in Vain

As a mere male I should probably avoid this issue but it’s August, the start of the silly season, so why miss out on all the fun. I used to think that Ciara Kelly on Newstalk was a sound and sensible woman - now I realize this was only when juxtaposed with saloon-bar bore George Hook. These days she’s permanently outraged about this, that and especially the other. Her current anger is directed at the ASAI who have banned an ad about tampons. She has asked her Newstalk listeners to send her in tampons as an indication that they share her feelings. The tampons she receives will then be sent on the ASAI apparently to show them how affronted the women of Ireland are. I hope she has alerted the Newstalk mail-room about this initiative (do we have mail-rooms any more?) - and I sincerely hope that she has emphasized the unused nature of the tampons she’s requesting. Even if she did, I suspect that some will respond mischievously. Regarding the offending ad, of course it shouldn’t have been banned. It’s cheesy and has an undercurrent of sexual innuendo suggestive of a Carry On film (Carry on up the Vagina maybe ) and the English accents don’t help in this regard. But I think few people these days, male or female, are offended by its frankness and its physiological directness. It’s an eminently sensible message delivered in a tacky way. It was silly of the ASAI to ban it and I fear it was done on dubious grounds. It should of course be reinstated  but hardly justifies going to war. This is a spurious battle for a dubious prize between the perpetually offended and those perpetually offended by the perpetually offended.

Save the O’Sullivan

With online media setting the trends there is an increasingly blasé attitude towards spelling and grammatical usage. Anything goes: abbreviations, emojis (put me down if I ever use one) and the severe abuse of personal pronouns. A major casualty has been the use of the apostrophe - often seen now as an optional extra. A by-product of all this mayhem is that those who happen to have a surname with an apostrophe (all us O’Briens, O’Connors, O’Neills and O’Sullivans) are increasingly encountering problems when filling out forms that require a surname -  the sine qua non of most forms. The apostrophe is seen as a “special character” and renders our input invalid. So you have to omit the apostrophe to complete the form - thereby submitting a version of your name that’s inaccurate. You might imagine that Irish Government departments would recognise this requirement and program its applications accordingly. But not a bit of it. I’ve encountered it with many different departments including bizarrely the online Passport application - despite being explicitly (see image) told to enter your name as it appears on your passport. This morning I was filling out an application for an Age Card in which we are also warned that every detail must be accurate and when I had the temerity to include my surname as it appears on my birth cert with its O’ my form was declared invalid and I had to go back and delete the offending character. I expect this shit from non-Irish web sites but it’s the giddy fucking limit when our own bloody civil service can’t be arsed to build in such a simple requirement.

Irish Times Do Robert Lowell A Favour

Lucy Sweeney Byrne’s article on Elizabeth Hardwick’s Sleepless Nights (Irish Times July 11) was good for a hollow laugh. Commenting on Hardwick’s fraught relationship with the poet Robert Lowell, Byrne described him as “clutching” “a photograph of his third wife Caroline Blackwood” when he died of a heart attack in a New York taxi. Lowell had just left Blackwood and was returning to Hardwick who was his second wife. The alleged photo was in fact a painting of Blackwood by Lucien Freud. So perhaps less a poignant reminder and more a substantial asset.