A new exhibition at the Chester Beatty Library combines 21st-century art with age-old techniques to portray gardens of earthly delight. Jane Powers reports
A black Indian elephant stomps across an ordered landscape. His red blanket and gold-tipped tusks indicate that he is tame, but his mahout is nowhere to be seen. There's a glint in his eye and a purposefulness to his step that can come only from knowing that this delicious moment of freedom among the blue and red flowers has been stolen, and may not last long.
Taking the Air, a mezzotint by Robert Russell, is just one of the prints in the Graphic Studio's Gardens of Earthly Delight exhibition, which opens on Friday at the Chester Beatty Library, at Dublin Castle. Most of the works have been made by Irish artists, but there is a strong international flavour, with England, Scotland, Sweden, Finland, Canada, New Zealand and Japan - including the big hitters Christopher Le Brun, Norman Ackroyd, William Crozier and Elizabeth Blackadder - figuring in the mix.
The 39 original prints are conceived loosely around the idea of a garden: as a location for horticultural pastimes and pleasures, as a spot for contemplation and exhilaration, as a metaphor for the abundance of this planet, for order, for temptation, for good times - for whatever you're having yourself.
Some of the pieces, such as Russell's elephant and Jean Bardon's exquisite etching Flora Japonica, based on brocade-backed oriental scrolls, pay homage to the library's collection of East Asian art. Gwen O'Dowd's menacing liver-coloured Arum Dracunculus was inspired by John Robert Thornton's 19th-century Temple of Flora and its almost fearful description of the foul-smelling plant (a species that is enjoying a renewed popularity today). Carmel Benson's decorative, colour-saturated Dogs in a Garden looks to the work of Persian masters.
Others artists' gardens of earthly delight are idealised or remembered landscapes, such as Janet Pierce's Gerwhali Raga, an aquatint of the Himalayan foothills at the mouth of the Ganges ("as close to heaven as anything I have ever seen"). James McCreary's A Visit by a Japanese Emperor is one of several fantastical images, depicting a prickly pear cactus being visited by ladybirds, and a shimmering Japanese emperor butterfly.
McCreary, along with fellow studio artists Jean Bardon, Grainne Cuffe and Cliona Doyle, came up with the idea for the exhibition about two years ago. The Chester Beatty Library was happy to work with them, having collaborated before, in 2002, on the acclaimed Holy Show. The library's director, Dr Michael Ryan, says: "We've found it a very congenial relationship. It's a natural fit, because we have a print collection here already."
It is a natural fit also because, although the art is 21st-century, Graphic Studio's workshop, off Hanover Quay, uses the same methods of printing as the makers of the works held by the Chester Beatty. Albrecht Dürer's 16th-century engravings, for example, would have been printed on similar presses. (In fact, at the Graphic Studio, one of the woodblock presses in use dates from 1898.)
At the studio every print is made by hand from start to finish. The image is engraved on a plate or block, using specialised tools and, in the case of an etching or aquatint, acid. Printing an edition is hard and highly skilled labour. Inking a plate for a single impression can take an hour or more. At the Graphic Studio the presses are all manual, and printmakers are likely to build up powerful muscles in the arms and shoulders. This is an ancient art, using old and venerable technology.
And it's a vulnerable art, because the old warehouse where the studio hangs on by the skin of its teeth is in the frenetic construction zone of Dublin's docklands. Twenty years ago, rents drove the workshop from Upper Mount Street to the then-deserted Green Street East. Now the place is a demented world of cranes and half-made buildings, traversed by madly careering construction vehicles. The dockland printmakers are an endangered species.
The prints in Gardens of Earthly Delight are in editions of 50. Prices are from €180, for a beautiful, barely-there drypoint called Portrait of a Tuft of Grass by Lars Nyberg, to €900 for Blackadder's elegant and serene Japanese Garden.
There are also 19 complete sets of the 39 prints for sale (€10,500), each set presented in a fire-engine-red, linen-bound solander. Daniel Solander (1736-1782), incidentally, was a Swedish botanist and student of Linnaeus. He invented the book-like box for storing manuscripts, drawings and herbarium specimens. He would have been pleased to have his namesake containers encasing such a treasury of contemporary art.
Gardens of Earthly Delight is at the Chester Beatty Library, Dublin Castle, from Friday until October 2nd. Garden-related and botanical works from the library's collection will also be on show.