Cristín Leach considers Catherine Barron’s mid-career retrospective, which draws on the artist’s life experience
Catherine Barron’s exhibition at the Waterford Gallery of Art features a potent display of paintings from five major bodies of work: ‘Lone Play’, ‘The Colour of Things’, ‘Family’, ‘Principles of Light’ and ‘Windows’, together with recent small works on book covers, displayed flat under glass. Produced during the last fifteen years, each series operates as ‘a metaphorical device’, as she puts it, ‘to involve’ herself with where she was in her life at that time. Born in Carlow, Barron studied Visual Communication at what is now the Institute of Art, Design and Technology Dún Laoghaire in the early 1980s and has been based in Waterford since 2017.
Barron’s family-photo paintings were first shown together in the exhibition ‘We Were Here’, dedicated to her mother Nora, at the Molesworth Gallery in 2011. Her 2013 show ‘It’s Hard to Tell’ included a catalogue publication, which opens with the quote: ‘My mother always said, “If there’s a fire, save the photographs”. She keeps them by her chair.’ Her mother was the photo-taker and is the photo-keeper. Barron’s acrylic ink paintings on salvaged metal plates draw on images dating back to the 1950s.
To read this article in full, subscribe or buy this edition of the Irish Arts Review
From 1960, when a chance meeting with Cecil King led to his work being included in a show at the Ritchie Hendriks Gallery, Dublin, Michael Kane was a formidable, indomitable presence in Irish cultural life.
Emer McGarry considers the work of Marianne Keating, which brings to light overlooked stories of Irish migration, labour and resistance
The exhibition treats the archive as a tool for building new futures, writes Seán Kissane