Ursula Burke, Emma Donaldson and Deirdre McKenna explore the mutable topic of time at the F E McWilliam Gallery, Banbridge. Claire Dalton looks at their responses
‘The past’ is a loaded phrase. It is never free from emotion, made acute by the fact that it can’t be changed and yet our interpretation of it is always changing.
With this reinterpretation comes the process of utilizing thoughts, memories, and events from the past as a crucial starting point from which to create a new reality. This concerns all three artists in ‘The Past is Unpredictable’ at the FE McWilliam Gallery, Banbridge. Ursula Burke, Emma Donaldson and Deirdre McKenna have exhibited in solo and group shows in Ireland and internationally, showing sculpture, painting, photography, video and installation. The trio represent the next generation of Irish female sculptors under fifty pushing the boundaries of their craft, and playing with assumptions about what their materials can say and do. In this way they are natural successors to Dorothy Cross, Alice Maher and Kathy Prendergast. The exhibition explores themes of temporality, identity and authenticity, and all three artists have taken different approaches in response to the statement ‘The Past is Unpredictable’.
What is it about the work of the Irish sculptor Eilís O’Connell that has led to her having created, in this most difficult and masculine medium, over thirty permanent site-specific installations in Britain and Europe, including the sensual, orchid-like Unfurl (Fig 1), a bronze commissioned by Kensington Borough Council and the residents of Kensington Gate, to celebrate the Millennium?
O’Connell subtly combines a number of different elements that give her work both a sense of physical vitality and poetic metaphor. It is monumental yet intimate, atavistic yet contemporary. From discarded agricultural tools to birds’ nests and whale bones she appropriates the quotidian and the natural to create dynamic forms in stone, steel, resin, plaster and bronze. Like her poetic compatriot, Seamus Heaney, O’Connell looks to the archaeology and topography of her Irish homeland for inspiration but the ideas she finds there are filtered through a considered relationship to architecture and geometry. The work is never soft: emotion is always tempered by intellect and painstaking technique to combine something of the muscularity of Richard Serra with the female sensibility of Barbara Hepworth. Science and mathematics meet the natural world within her organic and biomorphic forms. Inside and outside coalesce. In the layered and slippery space of contemporary culture she has created objects that generate a unifying narrative and suggest a philosophy of interdependence rather than of confrontation, an openness and desire for contact and inclusivity, rather than a brittle postmodern autonomy, which unapologetically recalls the timeless resonances of Brancusi.
Anne Hodge and Peter Harbison examine the visual evidence of Daniel O’Connell’s unusual conditions of imprisonment in the Richmond Bridewell, Dublin
