When Kathy Prendergast won the Premio 2000, a major award for the best artist under the age of 40, at the Venice Biennale in 1995, it was as though she had backed into the limelight. Long regarded as one of the finest Irish artists of her generation, with a strikingly original imagination, she is nevertheless shy and unassuming. And her work, as well, while hugely diverse, is usually quiet and understated, insinuating its way into your consciousness rather than wowing you with shock tactics.
To its credit, the Irish Museum of Modern Art moved quickly to acquire the works that had won her the award, her as yet uncompleted series of City Drawings, 113 of which form the centrepiece of her current exhibition there, The End and the Beginning. Eventually, these small, intricate pencil drawings, based on city maps, will include every capital city in the world (approximately, she reckons, 180 in all, "though there seem to be more and more new capitals all the time"). So far, Dublin is a notable absentee.
Reduced to small, delicate traceries of interwoven lines, the cities have a distinctly organic feel. She pushes the analogy further, thinking of them as portraits, and pointing out that each one is more or less the size of a face. This isn't a sentimental conceit. Each city, set adrift from its geographical moorings, minus the trappings of place names, really does resemble an autonomous organism, something changing and growing over time like a living thing.
The idea came from an original, much larger drawing, one of a set of three made in 1989 which depict and equate a leaf, a hand and a city, all drawn so that they are exactly the same size. Characteristically, these drawings play with our habitual sense of scale. Her tent-sculpture, Land does so in another way. She once described her work as "a personal geography" and Land is a personal landscape, based on the notion of a portable mountain range. It is a fabric tent which, on closer inspection, turns out to be a three-dimensional map, carefully coloured according to cartographic convention.
Maps, which have from the first played a major role in her work, are a means to an end, a useful metaphor. "I think of them as a kind of language that I happened to use early on in my work that I've tended to go back to." More recently, she has gone back to maps of Ireland. "I have a road atlas of Ireland, and I was struck by the sheer level of detail. I never knew there were so many rivers in the country. So I decided to make a map including only rivers." Then she made more abstract maps based on the outlines of Irish lakes "jumbled on the page".
For another piece, Empty Atlas, she painted out the names of towns and features on the pages of a Times Atlas of the World, and made a computer-generated version of a map of North America in which every feature is "lost": Lost Creek, Lost Lake, Lost Springs. Our assumed familiarity with the world, she implies, is an illusion. We should look again.
Though based in London since 1982, she was born in Dublin. She was, she has recounted, an indifferent pupil at school, but art was her strong point. It was something that was, she once said memorably, "more exciting than ordinary living". Still, it took her two tries to get into the National College of Art and Design in 1976 and, once there, she found herself at a bit of a loss. After getting her diploma she went to RTE where she trained and worked as a camera operator before going back to get a degree. After that, time spent completing an MA at London's Royal College of Art was quantitatively productive but, she felt, qualitatively irrelevant to her abiding concerns.
The span of the IMMA show, from 1992 to now, coincides with a significant down-sizing of her output, when she began to produce, as a rule, smaller, more intimate pieces. It is presumably no coincidence that during this time she has had three children (one who is now five years old and, within the past few months, twins).
"It wasn't just one thing," she says. "Though there is no doubt that having a baby means a change in your life. You don't have time to do anything, for one thing. To an extent a change in the way of making work was a kind of survival mechanism in the sense that it was a means of carrying on working in different circumstances. That's not so much a question of changing scale, though, as a change in my working process. I've tended to work not on one piece at a time but moving from one thing to another."
The move to making smaller pieces "wasn't just a response to having a baby. I'd found anyway that the big sculptures create all sorts of problems - even storing them is a problem. And, because I tend to work in a very detailed way, they take so long. So I had a huge rethink and consciously decided not to make anything large. But for me, small pieces, in the way I can use detail, can be equivalent to large pieces."
The activities of knitting and sewing feature prominently in much of the work at IMMA. This isn't necessarily something new. Her first mature work Waiting used dress patterns as a metaphor for social conventions, for how lives are tailored to society's allotted roles, and was partly inspired by a photograph of her parents at a dance.
"My mother was always knitting, sewing or crocheting, always making something. But as a child I was terrible at knitting, I think because I'm left-handed. At national school the girls - never the boys of course - got these knitting projects, and a woman called Mrs Piggot toured the schools assessing what you'd done. In my case my mother used to knit up whatever garment I was supposed to make and I'd bring it in and pass it off as my own. Then in my late teens I learned how to knit effectively, by going at it back-ways, basically."
A great deal of her recent, small work entails not just the meticulous application of such craft skills, but also direct domestic references: pillows, a baby blanket, a baby's knitted jumper, gloves, hair brushes, thread. But invariably, the object is reinvented or given a metaphoric spin, lending it a surreal, dreamlike and often disturbing quality.
There is a real tenderness in these works, but also a certain toughness. For example, her Grave Blanket, a baby blanket with associations of nurture and protectiveness, is, you realise, rather chillingly interwoven with the marble chippings widely used as coverings on graves. The spool of thread in one of the pieces from which the show takes its title is actually human hair, a literal thread of life, from three generations: Kathy's, her mother's and her son's. As she puts it: "Taken together, if I had to find a general theme, I'd say these pieces are concerned with life cycles. That is, some with birth, some with death, some with the area between."
Kathy Prendergast: The End and the Beginning is at IMMA, the Royal Hospital, Kilmainham until March 26th, 2000
