‘If you don’t know you’re being brave, you just do what you have to do...’
Artist Janet Mullarney, daughter of Green Party founding member Marie Mullarney, has had a much-lived life throughout Europe — before turning to sculpture, writes Emily Hourican
‘IWOULDN’T have known I was brave,” says artist Janet Mullarney. “When I see back, I realise ‘Jesus Christ…!’ I was very gormless, to be wandering round on my own. But the gormlessness was quite helpful,” she laughs. “If you don’t know you’re being brave, or daring, you’re just doing what you have to do.”
We’re in IMMA, surrounded by the emerging shape of Janet’s exhibition Then And Now, which ranges from the early 1990s to 2018, including sculpture, painting, drawing, video and installation.
Her sculptures are remarkable, demonstrating wit, power, curiosity and a certain sly challenge. They have been most perfectly described by RHA director Patrick T Murphy as “a little like Angela Carter’s novels, where the everyday and the ordinary can suddenly plummet into the surreal and the mythic”.
Now in her mid-60s, Janet is talking about the time she, then aged about 18, moved from Ireland to Florence, alone, to study art. This was 1970, and she spoke “very little Italian. I’d done a little bit in school. But you just learn, you have to.”
Art paid for her air ticket — she won the Glen Abbey art competition “the money, £75, that’s what I went to Italy with.”
However, what sent her away was more complicated. “I’d done a year’s nursing here, psychiatric nursing. I was fascinated by it, also because I’d had some psychological problems of my own, so it ended up mixed up. I was a more of a patient, than a nurse. I think that’s quite common.”
How did she find the nursing? “I loved it, absolutely loved it. I was only 17 and I was interested in how the brain works. They brought me out to Clontarf hospital — and there were these whole new ideas then that I tapped into. That madness wasn’t madness, that people should not be kept in mad houses, that you should have back-up for people to avoid them going into hospital.
“There was a new philosophy going on and it was very interesting. Then they brought me to a different hospital, and I quit.” Why? “At the age of 17, they put me into this geriatric ward. There were women tied up to chairs.
“A place full of beds, with old women lying in them, with bed sores, being fed bread and milk. One girl escaped I remember, and I was in the crowd of nurses and we had to go after her — I was horrified.
“She was running, in her nightgown, and they got her, and got her arm back behind her” — she mimes the twisting of an arm behind her back — “it was so completely wrong for me. That was quite a good reason to leave. But Ireland in 1969 wasn’t a particularly interesting time. I remember it as being grim.”
Even at that age, she says, “You know what you don’t need!”
And so, Italy. Her plan was to study painting, but things didn’t work out that way; “I had always drawn, at home. I always had a sketch book. I gave it up when I went to art school,” she laughs. “No, I never gave it up, but when I went to art school, there was chaos, strikes, models lying around asleep that you were supposed to be drawing…”
“I couldn’t understand what was going on,” she says. “It was so political” — Italy at the time was fiercely, even violently, divided between left and right — “and I was too young to understand that.”
Instead, she “went round the corner to an etching school, which was very good for me. I got on fine. I made groups of friends, all Iraqis and Kurds and from other far-off places, all in the same boat, all penniless, all needing our permits… Some Italians as well. Italy,” she says, “has been really rich for me.”
When she could, Janet hitch-hiked across Europe. “Basically to save money. I could give up my room, and leave a few boxes, and travel with nothing. The travelling was wonderful, so much would still be in my work. I went where the trucks were going; I went to France, Bruges, up and down Italy, Greece for months and months. Greece was very poor then, with very few cars.
“They’d give you a lift for 5km, then they’d give you half a watermelon. God... the amount of watermelon, I can’t bear watermelon!” she laughs.
“I drew people all the time. They’d want their portrait. I was there, I’d be drawing, I’d give it to them, then I’d find, by my sleeping bag, little bags of cheese and figs and grapes, not knowing who it was from. It was lovely. A lovely life. No one can do it now, the world is such a different place.”
What about her parents, surely they worried? “I think I probably wrote them letters full of lies,” she says. “I’d tell them what I wanted them to know!”
In any case, Janet’s parents weren’t at all the usual run. Her mother, Marie Mullarney was a founding member of the Green Party, and a passionate and unconventional educationalist, described by John Gormley as “One of Ireland’s most original thinkers.” The original manifesto of the Ecology Party, forerunner of the Greens, was written on the kitchen table of her Rathfarnham home.
Marie followed the Montessori method, wrote several books on education, and home-schooled all of her 11 children. Janet is number four.
“I think she was way ahead, in a positive way,” Janet says now. “I loved the home-schooling, absolutely loved it. The only issue about that is that, if you’re home-schooling, you might not be mixing with [other children]… then you’re going into school quite old — we had to go to school eventually, by law.
“You feel out of place and that never suits kids, it just doesn’t. You know more than them in some areas, you know nothing in other areas, you don’t know the social things. That part can be difficult. You learn it later, but it’s more awkward.”
In one of the obituaries written when she died in 2008, Marie Mullarney was quoted as saying: “Listen sisters, I am not a one-woman support system for patriarchy. I have not made a bed or ironed a shirt for any of my sons since they were about eight.”
Janet confirms: “We were all made to wash our own clothes, wash up, but still, the house was probably mayhem. She tried to keep us neat, in the sense that she tried to make us keep ourselves neat — it didn’t quite work. I remember going to school with cowpats on my knees! She was a really intelligent woman, and it must have been exhausting — boiling nappies with Napisan.”
That, too, has influenced Janet: “I don’t have children. I know some people do it — move around, travel — and I’m amazed. I would not be able to do it. I’ve always known it’s not for me. Coming from 11, with seven younger than me, you know the burden.”
Janet went to Loreto in Rathfarnham first, then after being expelled — a hilarious but complicated story about the blowing up of Nelson’s Pillar and the sullying of school property — to Sandymount High School.
Did she feel very odd, starting in secondary? “I probably did, yeah. I didn’t enjoy it either. I enjoyed when there was a good teacher. That makes all the difference. Those people saved school for me, but I cannot say I liked school. I never really fitted in. I was off in my own space I think.”
However, she has no doubt that the early experience of Montessori and home-schooling helped with her art career. “It definitely did. It was lovely. The things we had to do were really enjoyable. My father took us to the National Galleries and the Dead Museum. It was a total pleasure; the kinds of things that kids like doing.”
Her father, “had many jobs, but his main one was chief accountant for the Dublin Port and Docks Board. Another of his jobs was buying antique books, and selling them. In theory! There were books everywhere. My parents were outsiders themselves,” she says.
“The house was very beautiful, in a non-money, unworldly way. We lived out in Rathfarnham, a big old mill. They had no money but they had a whole sense of beauty that I would have gotten from them. A sense of aesthetics that definitely influenced me. We had a Jackson Pollock bathroom door,” she goes off into peals of laughter. “Painted by my mother. We hated it!”
One of Janet’s brothers, Killian, is “a world-class ornithologist,” who has designed a series of stamps for An Post and illustrated the Collins Bird Guide — “They are beautiful drawings,” Janet says. “The real drawings have never been seen, so we’re planning a show together.”
Another sister, Barbara, “paints and used to do textile design. Others are musical. There’s creativity there,” she says of her siblings. “I think that Montessori worked!”
Back in Italy, after her etching course, Janet settled into “a big old house, people came and went and the whole thing was run on a shoestring. There was a lot of sharing, and the philosophy ‘per un mondo migliore’ — for a better world — it held together all the things. The idea that you don’t need money; improving your own house, having a vegetable patch, making things.”
At the time, Janet worked in restoration. “There was a big chunk between art college and actually making art again,” she explains, “and that was filled with restoration. I did a lot of wood carving, as an apprentice. It was very good training.”
That continued, “until I made my first sculpture. It just happened, over a weekend. It was like something came out by itself, it was amazing. There was a piece of pearwood. I had all the chisels, the work bench, everything you need to do it with. The wood was probably sitting there, and I saw something… it was a little self-portrait figure. Lovely. I still have it. It really was such a surprise to me.
“So I started from there, going really slowly. One sculpture, then three or four months later another sculpture. I’d no intention of being an artist, I didn’t think of myself as an artist. That came
‘I’m not lazy. I feel less guilt — I don’t have to keep producing!’
much later. I was just making pieces.”
Her first “proper” show in Ireland came in 1990. “I had done this huge big group of dancers, life-size figures, seven of them, with no idea of what or where or what it was for… again, it was youth and gormlessness. I knew nobody. I left Ireland at 17 never having gone to art college. I had no knowledge of anybody.”
Somehow, she got the dancers seen by Declan McGonagle, then at the Orchard Gallery — “I sent it to the Orchard Hospital actually, and it got rerouted!” — and Paul O’Reilly at the Project Art Gallery. “We got this show off the ground, at the Crawford Gallery first, then the Project. That first show put me on the map in Ireland. I met a lot of people through that, and it took off from there…”
In 1996, Janet moved back to Ireland — “because I was showing more. But I kept my studio in Italy, I couldn’t do without it.”
She also travels, often and far. “I’ve done shows in India, Mexico, New York, Cambodia. Out-of-the-way places are where I like travelling to.” Without the possibility of travel, “I’d probably go bonkers! You get itchy feet.”
She doesn’t currently have a partner — “They come and go,” she says. “But all are still friends. I sometimes thought of myself as a wild Spanish type who gets into a flaming fury and says ‘that’s it, forever!’ but I’m actually not that type! I’ve had lovely partners who have helped me, and still help me.”
These days, she begins work in the late afternoon. “I would generally get into the studio around 5pm, but I’m working up to it. I can stay late, it depends on what I’m doing. It used to be much more of a working day and now it’s less because I’m older and I get things done faster, or I go quicker, or whatever.
“I’m not lazy, it’s just a different way. I feel less guilt — I don’t have to keep producing! I haven’t got rid of guilt,” she adds. “It’s a very Catholic thing, but funnily enough, it is a driving force. It can be very positive. But it’s mostly very damaging: The voice, a figure, up here,” she points to her shoulder — “saying ‘That’s no good!’ ‘Who do you think you are?’ I don’t get that much anymore,” she says, “but I know it. I recognise it straight away.”
IMMA Collection: Then and Now by Janet Mullarney, February 15 - September 29. On February 16 at 3pm, Janet will be giving a talk with fellow artist Helen O’Leary. www.imma.ie.