Mousse Magazine, Mairead O’hEocha “Light Spells Enter” at P420, Bologna 05.04.2023

Mairead O’hEocha presents an unprecedented series of nocturnal still lifes created during the lockdown, when the artist was shut away in a Georgian house in Dublin: a reflection on the contemporary gaze now accustomed to a light source coming from behind the screen. As O’hEocha herself states: “This new series of paintings feature transparent objects on tables and like a glass calendar are inspired by events in my life in the years 2020–22. A time when global mobility was suddenly paused and my dining table and the optics of small objects replaced all of my horizons. The consolations of digital technology brought comfort but also dissolved the distinctions between appearance and reality. The somewhat larger-than-life scale of the objects and their luminous back-lit scenes frame domestic confinement through a digital screen.” Through her careful manipulation of the oil, O’hEocha’s compositions each contain an element of ambiguity: the subject shrouded in darkness takes on a new, unexpected and magical appearance. “The thing about Mairead O’hEocha’s still lifes is that they are very reluctant to stay still,” writes Ben Eastham in the text accompanying the exhibition, “The longer I look at them, the more restive they become. [. . .] They all take place in a more-or-less ghastly dark and are lit by the unnatural light that springs from the glass vessels at their centre. These contain or connect the viewer to some discernible form of life (nocturnal creatures flit and skitter around these paintings) and suggest (to me, at least) the electric force that through the fuse of the body drives all living things. If the appearance of this light suggests some kind of commune with the spirit realm, then its ghostly glow also conjures the backlit screens through which we communicated with other living beings through the lonely nights of the pandemic. O’hEocha describes her experience of that period as ‘triple- glazed,’ and the phrase suggests the way that screens distort our worlds in ways consistent with the often monstrous proportions of objects in these paintings. Yet it also conjures the sense of being caught between panes of glass, trapped in the airless and claustrophobic space between two worlds. And here all order breaks down, as I consider where the light of these paintings comes from and what it might entail. Am I on the outside looking in, or on the inside looking out?”

at P420, Bologna
 until April 29, 2023

Noble Sister Widow, Oil on Board 80 x 65cms, 2023.

Visual Artists Critique Mairead O’hEocha ‘Tale Ends and Eternal Wakes’

The Visual Artists’ News Sheet Critique

Mairead O’hEocha ‘Tale Ends and Eternal Wakes’

Mairead O’hEocha, ‘Tale Ends and Eternal Wakes’, installation view, Temple Bar Gallery + Studios, 2020; photograph Denis Mortell, courtesy of the artist and mother’s tankstation Dublin | London

THE WORLD IS on pause and we must now stay at home; we are all in a state of suspension. There is a strangeness to the world that we inhabit today, as we sit and wait. With only brief excursions outdoors allowed, the experience of nature can only be snatched in fleeting moments.

As I write this review, Mairead O’hEocha’s exhibition, ‘Tale Ends and Eternal Wakes’ at Temple Bar Gallery + Studios, is closed to the world. It is in its own state of suspension, not unlike the world outside the gallery and the subjects of her paintings, which feature diora- mas from Dublin’s Natural History Museum, known as the ‘dead zoo’. Like the museum’s curator, O’hEocha echoes the role of ‘The Keep- er’. She has carefully displayed her paintings and drawings in a way not unlike the tableau vivant, where actors pose silently, theatrically lit and in costume. This staging of the work is in keeping with the themes of display, artifice and the rep- resentation of nature that she has explored in previous exhibitions, most notably ‘Blackbirds in the Garden of Prisms’ at mother’s tankstation, Dublin, in 2016.

This new show is something of a departure for O’hEocha in terms of medium. Here, she presents drawings for the first time, as well as show- ing some large-scale paintings (something that she hasn’t done much in the past). The drawings are displayed physically and perhaps symbolically, in opposition to the paintings. In terms of her approach to the medium, the paintings are executed in her usual studied and thoughtfully composed manner, whereas the drawings have the appearance of spontaneity and fluidity in the movement of the ink and brush. The arrangement of the drawings invite the viewer’s eye to move from one to another, from the monkey, to the bat, to the lion, and perhaps to pause on the herons and how the arch of their long graceful necks is fluidly sketched out in one movement of the brush.

The display of the paintings can be viewed in marked contrast to the drawings. In the paintings, the brush marks disappear into subject matter and the subject matter is enfolded into the material of paint. O’hEocha’s handling of paint, in particular her systematic colour palette, is assured and confident and makes a definite nod to artifice. The colours work from high-key acidic yellows and turquoises – colours not readily found in the natural world and definitely not the colour scheme of the animals and birds characterised. For me, it is her colour choices that distinguish these works utterly as ‘paintings’. They reveal how, in painting, the subject matter takes a secondary place to the execution of the painting itself.

Whilst the overall exhibition is charged with a positive vitality in the use of colour and expressive brushwork, the drawings are also imbued with a sense of melancholia, when considering the subject of animals on display, frozen in time. The press release makes reference to John Berger’s classic essay, ‘Why Look at Animals’ as a touchstone for O’ hEocha.2 Berger On Drawing is also worth considering here, in particular his essay, ‘Drawn to That Moment’, in which Berger reflects on the process of drawing his recently deceased father. This has pertinence for O’hEocha’s drawings of dead animals. In the essay, Berger writes:

“As I drew his mouth, his brows, his eyelids, as their specific forms emerged with lines from the whiteness of the paper,

I felt the history and the experience which had made them as they were. His life was now as finite as the rectangle of paper on which I was drawing, but within it, in a way infinitely more mysterious than any drawing, his character, his destiny has emerged. I was making a record of his face and his face was already a record of his life. Each drawing then was nothing but the site of a departure.”

Perhaps I am also prompted by life as it is now, at this moment of writing, when I consider a point that is made in O’hEocha’s press release, regarding public display and artifice, which states: “It would be a shame at this point to ignore that the art gallery, its visitors and its windows facing the busy city street reflect a parallel menagerie.”3 Indeed, for now the lights are off, the gallery is silent, the streets outside equally so. The public space of the gallery and its exhibition must wait in suspension, like the animals in the dioramas of the dead zoo, to be animated once again by the presence of a visiting public.

Mairead O’hEocha visual artists Ireland .png

Alison Pilkington is an artist based in Dublin.
alisonpilkington.com

 
Mairead O’hEocha, Antelope, Natural History Museum (detail), Dublin, 2020, oil on canvas, 150 × 100 cm; courtesy of the artist and mother’s tankstation Dublin | London

Mairead O’hEocha, Antelope, Natural History Museum (detail), Dublin, 2020, oil on canvas, 150 × 100 cm; courtesy of the artist and mother’s tankstation Dublin | London

 

Frieze.com Mairead O'heocha Review By Declan Long

Frieze.com Review Declan Long

Mairead O’hEocha’s paintings take peculiar, beguiled pleasure in the low-key scenes they calmly depict. Some of her best pictures have been prompted by quotidian curios or fleeting revelations: a gorilla ornament at a garden centre; a merry-go-round glowing against night sky; a petrol station’s circus-mirror reflection on the surface of a streaming canal. Each discovery is met with measured, distracted delight. Each becomes a quietly spellbound painting: distilled and designed as a tidy arrangement of zesty highlighter tones against cooler, moodier shades. Sometimes, their ostensibly good-humoured outlook seems comparable to the wide-eyed crediting of everyday marvels in Robert Walser’s sto- ries, a writer for whom, as William H. Gass has said, ‘everything is fresh and astonishing; to him everything presents a pleasant puzzle.’ But if her paintings are immaculately concentrated re- cords of insouciant noticing, they contain trace levels of mel- ancholy too. O’hEocha’s worldview is intermittently enchanted, but not innocent. (Gass scatters comparable adjectives around Walser’s style: ‘sad, removed, amused, ironic, obsessively reflex- ive’.)

Mairead O’hEocha , Vallayer-Coster Rose 2016. Oil On Board 73 58 cm

If, at times, O’hEocha’s work evokes moments of fugitive serenity – the tipsy late-night peacefulness suggested by that luminous petrol station scene, for instance – there is frequent severity, too. In Hoarding, Lights and Rain (2014), the bright, diagonal streaks of a downpour are more like laser-beams than raindrops. Very beautifully, they slice the picture to pieces. The bizarrely radiant colours of Chopped Trees, Castle Leslie (also 2014) — lively stripes of lilac, lime green, baby blue and more — decorate the sundered remains of a destroyed tree-trunk, absurdly sugar- coating a brutal image. It’s sweetly jarring, like cracking your tooth on hard candy. Despite such jolting contrasts, the variously tough and tender effects of these paintings feel mostly unforced. And however downbeat things get, a degree of light-heartedness – even light-headedness – persists. Rarely does O’Eocha seem inclined to scale the slopes of a grand theme. Rather, she crafts gorgeous, offbeat odes to low-lying, ordinary landscapes, prizing the calculated inconsequentiality of her subjects.

O’hEocha’s newest paintings – seven of which feature at Moth- er’s Tankstation – also seek latent vitality in undervalued material, this time by turning her admiring attention to that most banal of art genres: the still life. Cryptically titled ‘Blackbirds in the Gar- den of Prisms’ (2016), this body of effulgent botanical painting is, perhaps, more deliriously sensuous than much of the artist’s work to date. Zoom in on the bursting, drooping blooms of Plant Dressage with Escaped Cobra – a medley of scarlet, creamy white, and pale blue flowers against a glamorously intense black background – and we see the intimate micro-world of O’hEocha’s reticently excited brushwork: dainty smears, smudges and scrib- bles that bring these fragile organic forms into lustrous being. Paintings such as Omnivourasaur and Ring Flash Bouquet are bravura outcomes of O’hEocha’s apparent relish in the task of representing, and re-imagining, differently sinuous floral growths. Still life, pursued with such rapt persistence, must be an exhila- rating aesthetic test –despite, or, even, because of its historically circumscribed status. (O’Eocha has in mind the genre’s relevance to the erstwhile predicament of women artists: once prevented from partaking in education relating to the ‘higher’ classifications of representational painting.)

Mairead O’hEocha - Plant Dressage with escaped Cobra 2016 - Oil on board 80 x 58 cm

 

Irish Independent Mairead O'heocha Review By Niall MacMonagle

Irish Independent - Review Niall MacMonagle

Hoarding, Lights and Rain, by Mairead O'hEocha

Commuting isn't always awful. A US survey discovered that some motorists just loved their warm, child- free zone with coffee and doughnuts, music or audio book: a little daily oasis of "me-time".

Artist Mairead O'hEocha benefited in a more interesting way from schlepping it up and down the N11. Driving the Wexford/Dublin road got her thinking about our history of dispossession, place, space and light and the aggressive building projects that dotted the countryside especially during the boom.

She painted roadways, sky, houses, back gardens, a washing line, an ancient ruin, and in all of her work "light is an essential element, light is a substantial element".

And her style has changed. Her clouds, for example, are now more fresh, more theatrical, more movement-filled and often three-dimensional. In Lusk she found the perfect light experience. A polytunnel, in a garden centre, contained a "strange disorienting dizzying light" which drew her back again and again.

The shifting light, its "instability", is what fascinates her when it comes to image-making. Trained as a photographer, "but I wouldn't be winning any prizes", lens-based media still fascinates her; but using sketches and drawings rather than photographs O'hEocha also draws on her interest in neurobiology when preparing a work.

This recent work, Hoarding Lights and Rain, features a hoarding in Stephens Green. As subject matter, a hoarding with industrial lights in rain shouldn't be of much interest, but O'hEocha creates a composition that is dramatic, energetic and beautiful. The thin wintry branches, the troubled sky, the brownbox hoarding lit with a gloriously beautiful prismatic downward plunging light and the slanting driving rain are pure drama. And that swathe of blue lifts the scene so that colour, movement, form are magnificently handled here.

Though O'hEocha loves pre-Renaissance art for its "misunderstanding of perspective and space" her eye, in this instance, is sharp in its depiction of pyramids of light, man-made structures, clumps of greenery left and right and an empty foreground.

For O'hEocha painting is "the impressive delivery of information". This 2014 work, now in a private US collection, delivers, impresses, informs and inspires.

Mairead O’hEocha , Hoarding, Lights and Rain