BODY OF WORK
What if the world had been designed by women? GEMMA TIPTON talks to some of Ireland’s most talented female artists, whose work is featured in a powerful exhibition at Drogheda’s Highlanes Gallery, to take a glimpse.
Gemma Tipton on the quiet revolution led by Irish women artists
How the world changes! Back in 1971, Linda Nochlin, an American art historian, wrote an essay asking, “Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?” It was a genuine question: the collections of the world’s museums, and the halls of its galleries were filled with the work of men. Fifty years previously, in her novel To the Lighthouse, Virginia Woolf had the unpleasant Mr Tansley whisper something similar in Lily Briscoe’s ear: “Women can’t paint, women can’t write…”
All that nonsense seems like several lifetimes ago, but something is still not quite right. In the last decade, the English critic Brian Sewell declared that “there has never been a first-rank woman artist”. Even more recently, the famous German artist Georg Baselitz, whose work sells for millions, announced that women lacked the character to become great painters, saying, “The market doesn’t lie.” The art world responded by sending Baselitz friendly lists of women who outranked him at auction.
You can’t dismiss an entire gender just because some are absolute eejits, but the recurring theme does open up a different kind of conversation. If the worlds of art, politics, sports, sexuality and even language have been structured by men in power, what might a world shaped by women look like? It’s a teasing thought, and the exhibition, Elliptical Affinities, currently at the Highlanes Gallery, is a very good place to explore it.
Featuring the work of 13 female Irish artists, the exhibition covers 1984 to the present day. It’s a period that also begins with the Eighth Amendment being passed into law, the death of Ann Lovett, and the Kerry Babies case. Since then, homosexuality was decriminalised, the abuses of the Magdalene laundries have been exposed, and the Eighth was repealed.
So, does that mean the battles have been won?
Central to the exhibition is one of Ireland’s leading artists, Alice Maher, who also worked on the Artists’ Campaign to Repeal the Eighth, alongside Aideen Barry and Rachel Fallon, whose work is also in the show. “We still need to fight every battle,” says Maher. “The vigilance has to be unending. We need to be eternally aware of whom and what the laws of our country seek to control or oppress.”
Maher was a student in 1984. “I don’t remember even registering the Eighth Amendment,” she says. “What I do remember was the death of Ann Lovett, who died aged 15 giving birth in a grotto in Longford. Her death changed everything for a lot of young women, it burned into our consciousness. And that was before people even discovered the enslavement of women and trafficking of children by the Catholic Church in the Magdalene laundries. We had so internalised self-hatred, this idea of women as lesser beings, that we didn’t fully register the scale of what was going on.”
Maher’s art is powerful and extraordinary. In the exhibition, individual works by her are shown alongside 6SKIN, her film with Aideen Barry, which is a wild ride into, and out of, the body and mind. “I tried to find a way to make an image of woman
“Women’s art has been an intense, and not always quiet revolution, poking under the skin of society.”
that could not be objectified,” says Maher. “An image that expressed feeling and agency from within the body, not one that could be projected upon from without. From that standpoint, it was probably a natural movement into questioning laws that actively discriminated against women.”
What about that question of “women’s art”? “I can’t believe we had all those stupid arguments in pubs years ago, about whether there were any great female artists,” says Maher. “Seems so ridiculous now. Yet those attitudes are probably still there, just gone underground.”
The arguments may have been stupid, and definitely frustrating, but perhaps some of the reason for the antagonism, or to put it more charitably, misunderstanding, is the idea that art made by women could look and be different. Amanda Coogan’s performance, which opened the exhibition Snails, After Alice Maher saw her standing, framed as if in a classical portrait, as 50 snails crawled across her body. You can see how easy it might be for someone to dismiss this. It’s hardly the aggressive macho painting done by the likes of Baselitz.
“My work is unapologetically embodied,” explains Coogan. “That is to say I make from the experience of being a woman, an Irish woman.” It’s a position that makes you start to see how we might be involved in something utterly new. Coogan remembers the insertion of the Eighth Amendment into the Constitution: “I was a school girl, but remember it as a frightening time; adults were shouting and people wore these (beautiful) gold badges with tiny feet on them. Living in Ireland with a female body was scary, we were in fear of our sexual selves.”
Looking at the exhibition in this light, the work by the artists – also including Dorothy Cross, Sarah Browne, Breda Lynch, Jesse Jones, Patricia Hurl, Kathy Prendergast, Alanna O’Kelly and Louise Walsh – explores and teases at those questions: how do we see, inhabit and know ourselves? How do we represent women in art, when women have traditionally been merely model and muse?
“I have had beautifully rich readings of this work,” Coogan says. “From considerations of sex to readings of the snails’ bodies as foetus. All of the meaning-making of the work is read through the fecund female body.” Still, standing for two hours in a gallery is no mean feat. “When I had to move, I moved in super-slow motion. Sometimes simple is the most difficult, and it was November, so both myself and the beautiful snails were cold!
Mostly I try to think of nothing, but I don’t often succeed…” she adds.
In an exhibition that ranges from performance to sculpture, film to installation, Patricia Hurl gives the lie to the line that “women can’t paint”. Her work, dating from 1984 and 1985, is a scream against discrimination, control and the power held by someone else choosing how you are seen, and how you are allowed to exist. “Madonna (Irish Gothic 2)”, and “The Kerry Babies Trial” are a pair of powerful oils that demand attention. Hurl says that her mantra for the past 40 years has been that art can and must affect politics.
Describing herself as coming “from the thin ice school of life,” she says that “I’m finding the ground just as fragile as I age. Women who espouse their demise proudly still get ignored,” she says of the ageing process. “Fashion in art comes and goes,” she adds. “Until an angel, such as a genius curator [and here she pauses to credit Elliptical Affinities curators Aoife Ruane and Dr Fionna Barber] comes and gives a genre the kiss of life.” Fashion is one thing, but female rage, and the need for it, is nothing new. “I want to scare people with the power we have within us,” says Hurl, of her wild and unapologetic use of paint.
Women’s art has been an intense, and not always quiet revolution, poking under the skin of society. “Art operates in the long note,” concludes Alice Maher. “You can see it, and then think about it for a long time. Art gives you time to digest, to think out the complexity. It operates in the cracks. That is the place where you can find new language, and maybe make new myths.”
Elliptical Affinities is at the Highlanes Gallery, Drogheda until January 25, highlanes.ie; and at the Limerick City Gallery from February 6 to March 22, gallery.limerick.ie.