In an exhibition in Skibbereen, Kate Byrne explores how ageing can make us invisible and challenge our sense of identity - it's an antidote to the myths of physical perfection and perpetual youth pushed by advertisers, writes Hilary Fannin
"We do not grow old absolutely, chronologically. We grow sometimes in one dimension, and not in another; unevenly. We grow partially. We are relative. We are mature in one realm, childish in another. The past, present, and future mingle and pull us backward, forward, or fix us in the present. We are made up of layers, cells, constellations"- Anaïs Nin
CAUGHT IN TRAFFIC recently, behind the back of a beached bus, I found myself contemplating, with more alarm and discomfort than I usually permit myself when faced with advertising billboard perfection, 20ft or so of crisp thighs, taut abdomens, sun-kissed, flawless skin, supernaturally white teeth and glistening manes. Advertising a range of cosmetics under the provocative slogan "campaign for real beauty", this particular bevy of lovelies, gleefully holding up the back of the bus in their freshly laundered underwear, made me feel truly depressed.
If these are realwomen (and my jury is out on that particular question), not the airbrushed confections wrapped around just about every product you can think of, from cereal bowls to spark plugs, and I'm a real woman, then how come I don't look like that when I'm scarpering up and down the stairs in my underwear, looking for the car keys? Why, as I sit here behind this tragically inert bus, is my stomach lapping over my Caesarean scar, and why are my thighs threatening the seams of my jeans? Why, come to think of it, are my eyes getting smaller, my skin getting coarser and my neck getting looser? Why, when I really need tweezers, am I suddenly too blind to use it? Oh and why, when I stand at a bar, waiting too long to be served, do I feel like I am becoming invisible?
"I grow old, I grow old, I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled." Whether, like TS Eliot, you are endowed with persuasive talent and wit, or whether, like the rest of us, you are just another vacant soul sloshing around trying to pay the mortgage and catch the barman's eye, there is one inescapable truth that has been tickling our dreams since we first drew breath: we will all grow old. And in our savagely youth-orientated culture, many of us will become vulnerable and increasingly unnoticed as we age.
A challenging and valiant new exhibition, in Skibbereen's West Cork Arts Centre, investigates how identity can become marginalised by ageing, how it feels "to be old, with a lean, predictable future ahead". Artist Kate Byrne's exploration - through video, a photographic installation, and drawings - brings us face-to-face with the elderly, and asks whether midlife (a port to which I'm currently moored) represents a transitional period, "a time when identity is challenged and we become characterised by our destiny of old age".
For her examination of "a culturally endemic fear and dread of ageing", Byrne photographed the faces of numerous women who have spent a lifetime on the peninsula of Howth in Co Dublin, which is also the artist's home. Then, in a move more usually reserved for Eva Herzigova in a push-up bra or Britney Spears brandishing a circus whip, she has blown these extraordinarily arresting and unsentimental portraits up to four square feet. The sheer breadth and audacity of the images, much as when confronted by Lucian Freud's gigantic full-figure paintings of Leigh Bowery (when you find yourself eye-high to his elephantine genitalia) or the same artist's unforgettable gargantuan painting of a benefits supervisor's voluminous, mottled body, lend themselves, strangely, to a kind of forensic intimacy.
While "the subjects photographed all feel their identity marginalised and compromised by their elder years", the photographs themselves render the women visible. None of the women has make-up on and each wears a simple white blouse, and although our eyes (normally dulled by manufactured, unattainable and insipid perfection) are drawn to every stray hair and wrinkle, every blemish and vein, the very starkness of the images emphasises the women's strength. In each set of naked eyes one can read confidence, independence, endurance and humour.
Accompanying Byrne's simple and evocative autobiographical line drawings, which, with a smile on her face, she describes as "a paranoid concern with the body's visible signs of deterioration", but which are infused with a lightness and grace, there are also video projections on two screens. On one screen, a 15-year-old girl, Miriam, confidently applies her make-up in preparation for a night out; on the other, Marie, who is in her 80s, also applies her mask with which to face the day. Byrne's simple technique of swapping the soundtracks of the two videotapes, thus playing Marie's recorded voice (talking about her fears, hopes and attitudes towards ageing) over Miriam's footage, and vice versa, is deeply arresting and illuminating.
"When I look at recent photographs, I see an old woman. In my mind I am attractive and I am not old," says Marie, painting on her eyebrows with the precision of an old master. Later, lipstick poised, she adds: "I wouldn't put the bins out without my make-up on" - and believe me, after years of searching for her eyebrow pencil while the dumpster hurtled down the street, I can vouch for that statement, Marie being my own mother. Interestingly, though Marie and Miriam are separated by a clutch of decades, their self-perception, in a world that seems to reward beauty over all else, is markedly similar.
"Can I see the pictures when you get them back?" asked one of Byrne's older subjects, a vigorous 93-year-old, as she swung out of Byrne's car after their session. "Nobody photographs me any more." It was a poignant statement that now provides the apt title for Byrne's provocative look at a country we must someday all visit.
nobody photographs me any more. . . opens today in the West Cork Arts Centre, Skibbereen, and runs for five weeks