RACHEL PARRY has exhibited her sculptures before, but even though her exceptional feeling for materials, her technical precision and her amazing attention to detail were apparent, nothing she’s shown previously has quite prepared us for the extraordinary quality of her work at the Fenton Gallery. For one thing it is a large exhibition, one that wouldn’t be out of place in a museum setting, such as IMMA.
It includes a formidable body of work but, more than that, it includes several kinds of work, each quite distinctive, carefully considered and fully thought through, so that it is like several exhibitions in one.
Parry is drawn to allegory and myth as narrative forms and sources of imagery. She uses biblical and folkloric sources in a variety of ways. Concerned with questions of life and death, she addresses death in a stark, matter-of-fact way and also with an imagination that is at times cheerfully macabre. Her unsentimental openness to the basic terms of existence bespeaks the experience of someone who lives close to nature, and natural materials in myriad forms permeate her work, often used with great skill and ingenuity.
Her Eve dancing atop the branches of an apple tree while she juggles apples, has the skin of a snake. The tree is apple wood. Lichen, sand and clay and other materials are also employed to create a terrific sculptural piece. In another work, the figures of Eve and Adam emerge hesitantly from the hollowed-out interior of a copy of The Bible. Her Lilith is another tour de force. She depicts the mythological character in her owl form, or more accurately as a human-owl hybrid, perched on a tree branch with a scattering of bones beneath.
A series of busts, Sometimes Feelings Seem Very Real, are almost frightening in their intensity as they seek to convey the extremity of several emotional states. The most remarkable is perhaps number four in the series. Here the head and shoulders, shrouded in vivid orange lichen, are studded with naturally patinated coins, a reference to the folk practice of inserting coins in trees or stones at significant sites as votive offerings. Two intricate video installations are set up in the catacomb-like spaces off the main Fenton Gallery. One incorporates the skull of a cow, the other the skull of a gannet gilded with gold leaf. The title in each case is Thoughts Before Deathand we see, through circular holes in the skulls, imagery of the living creatures. As with much of Parry's work, it could be described as morbid, but here as elsewhere, her feat is to transform this dark material into something magical and stubbornly affirmative.
THE TITLE OF It Goes On, a group exhibition curated by Rayne Booth for Temple Bar Gallery, sounds almost resigned, but no negative sentiment is intended. Booth highlights a number of artists who have graduated from art schools within the last five years or so. Her proposition is that artists at this stage of their development are still engaged in the process of finding their own voices, as well as coping with the practical demands of making a living. The show's title is Robert Frost's succinct statement of all that he'd learned about life. Booth applies it to art. Artists, she says, will go on making work that "satisfies their own concerns and interests", despite recession and other difficulties and setbacks, because they are absorbed in what they do.
Her show is “a snapshot of what is going on” in Dublin among artists of a younger generation. They are not a group and there is no unanimity of aims or means, but some patterns and commonalities do emerge. One is a keenness to embrace technological possibilities, but a keenness tempered by a certain wariness. Eilis McDonald trawls the internet and applies a “water-effect” generator to images she finds, lending an incongruously picturesque quality to otherwise workaday scenes. Ivan Twohig explores the area between the virtual space of computer-generated design and the three-dimensional, sculptural reality of the built environment, painstakingly making concrete objects that have been created onscreen with a curious lack of effort and friction.
As with James Merrigan, whose improvised construction plays on a moment of perpetual expectation, as though something is about to commence, McDonald and Twohig set about dismantling and reassigning technologies with regard to their cultural roles and meanings. Alan Butler investigates the workings of what might be termed the culture industry, in this case by commissioning work from a painting factory.
Intrigued by a news photograph depicting ranks of painters dutifully producing multiple copies of an iconic portrait of a bearded, patriarchal figure, he set about finding out more about him. It’s a tangled tale, carefully related in a text that accompanies the two images that resulted: one a painting of the workshop of painters at work, the other a portrait of the bearded man.
Brendan Flaherty's intriguing, layered paintings eschew any one conventional pictorial structure, instead accepting a plurality of imagery and narratives. In a similar spirit, Soft Blonde Moustache is a collective of four artists (Nessa Darcy, Mar-Jo Gilligan, Julia McConville and Aileen Murphy) whose art-making involves not just the fragmentary works on paper, card and other surfaces we see on view at Temple Bar, but also singing and play. Their collaboration doesn't entail any diminution of individual identity, and their work is cheerfully promiscuous in terms of style and content. It Goes Onis an unfailingly lively, provocative, thoroughly approachable show.
Rachel Parry, sculptural work in many media. Fenton Gallery, 5 Wandesford Quay Until July 11 021-214315294
It Goes On, work by six emerging Irish artists: Alan Butler, Brendan Flaherty, Eilis McDonald, James Merrigan, Ivan Twohig and Soft Blonde Moustache. Curated by Rayne Booth. Temple Bar Gallery, 5-9 Temple Bar, Dublin Until July 18 01-6710073
