Painting in the Expanded Field
A conversation around the exhibition
Go under the ivy, away from the party.
126 Gallery, 10 – 25 February 2024.
This is an edited transcript of a conversation that took place on Friday 16th of February at 126 to discuss the process behind the
exhibition. Participants were: artists Fionna Murray, Helen Roberts and Anne O’Byrne, producer Sona Smedkova and writer Michaële Cutaya. All images credits to Vanessa Jordan.
Image 1: Exhibition view
Michaele
Good afternoon, I’m delighted to be meeting you all today for this conversation. A big thank you to Sona and 126 Gallery to have invited me to respond to this exhibition.
When looking at the show on the opening night, what struck me first was how closely your artworks interacted with each other and with the space; how the use of light became an active part of the show in acting as a frame or in differentiating areas of the show by varying the luminosity. All of this suggests that much of the decisions were made through an engaged collaborative installation process. Hence the idea of having this conversation with you as my response to the exhibition, to get a better idea of how you came to work together and speak about processes. And it starts with you Sona as the producer of the exhibition.
Sona
Yes, the process began around February or March of last year when the 126 Gallery board began considering potential programming for the upcoming year. Normally, when preparing our funding application with the Arts Council Ireland, we invite artists and issue open calls. However, last year we decided to take a different approach by conducting studio visits first, in order to familiarise ourselves with local artists before reaching out elsewhere. We visited Artspace in Liosban estate, the Black Box, Mart, Engage Art Studios, and even made some private visits to Engage’s orbital members.
When I saw Fionna’s current work, I became extremely excited and immediately started contemplating whose work would complement hers. During my visits to the studios at Liosban estate, I came across the works of Helen Roberts and Anne O’Byrne, and something visually and conceptually clicked for me right away. There were intriguing connections between their works. From the start, I knew that this wouldn’t be a pre-planned exhibition, and I didn’t want to be the typical curator who simply selects works and instals the show. For me, it was very important to invite the artists into a space and create something site specific but also something which comes from mutual conversations. And it’s good to do this talk because the process and the conversations are almost as important as the work itself.
We had many conversations in the studios or in the gallery leading up to the exhibition and the installation period extended beyond the usual duration. This is something we have been diligently pursuing at 126. In the past, we would organise up to 12 shows annually, resulting in a frantic turnaround between exhibitions. However, this year, we made the decision to allocate more time to both the artists and ourselves. It seems that we have discovered the optimal timeframe, which amounts to nine days.
Image 2: Fionna Murray, Petal
Michaele
So how did you artists respond to this invitation and how did it affect the way you work?
Fionna
We each individually would have had thoughts about what we wanted to do. But then once we started talking in the space, looking at each other’s work, we began to come up with new ideas about what the show was going to be. It was like a moving thing. And then we brought a lot of works down to the gallery and quite a few pieces didn’t go in, it was a real editing process. For instance, the paper piece (image 2: Petal) happened very close to the show; it came out of things I was doing in the paintings, a lot of oval shapes referring to framed vignettes in paintings and portraits. But then, the oval became part of this more minimal paper piece. And with the lighting, a lovely unexpected thing was that the spotlight became an oval around the other installation piece, so there’s these subtle readings between the works. (image 3: Untitled installation is a wall arrangement of elements – paper, plastic, foil, thread – around the painting, Mossy Saw a Ghost, whose overall framing is the oval of the spotlight.) Readings of the work could suggest containment; where we contain spaces with boundaries and how the boundaries have become ambiguous or loose within the show.
Image 3: Fionna Murray, Untitled Installation, Mossy Saw a Ghost.
Michaele
Yes, there are these motifs that cross all of your works: this notion of framing and containment, the theme of the house and the shelter, the garden also, which means enclosure or fence, so another kind of containment. And the interplay between geometrical shapes that these enclosures take: the rectangles, the ovals.
Fionna
And then the oval also connects to Helen’s garden. You know, this girl lying in this secret space with an oval mirror, reflecting the sky (image 3: Helen Roberts, Explorers of the richness of the phenomenal world). And then in Anne’s, the secure place of a home and something containing a space that is secure or not, these works form a really nice conversation.
Image 4: Helen Roberts, Explorers of the richness of the phenomenal world.
Michaele
Something I was thinking about was that the three of you are painters. And the show does feel very painterly, but it is also truly an installation. It’s really interesting how the three of you have come out of the canvas and opened up to a different way of engaging with the space. While looking at the exhibition I kept having in my head the title of this famous essay by Rosalyn Krauss, ‘Sculpture in the Expanded Field’ but instead, with painting. It felt like an apt description of the show somehow.
Helen, how did you go about selecting the work and engaging with the other’s work and space?
Image 5: Helen Roberts, cluster of paintings.
Helen
We first visited Fionna’s studio and then Anne’s studio. When I was looking at their work, I was trying to think how my paintings could work with their work. Because mine felt different, heavier. The paintings I’ve made recently were on a larger scale as well. So I was looking at their work thinking what would most speak to their work in mine and what can I bring out. I was looking at the colours that you both use, and imagining them with my colours. I thought of using a cluster of small paintings, to create a shape with them and use space around them to make them feel lighter. (image 4: Cluster of paintings is composed of six small oil paintings that are brought together by a rectangle of light.)
Michaele
Yes, the paintings that are rich in detail form points of intensity within the cluster, but included within the framing of the spotlight and with the space around them, they feel more diffused as part of a larger entity.
Image 6: Helen Roberts, Untitled
Helen
And then I started cutting up paintings as well to use them differently.
I had cut out a painting a while ago but it was just laying around and I didn’t know quite how I wanted to look at it. (image 5: Untitled, is an oil painting on canvas that has been cut out from its frame and presented here within a tight rectangular spotlight.)
Sona
‘It looks like it’s on a tile’. This observation is attributed to the lighting, which gives it an unusual texture. Also, I just wanted to comment on the way you felt about your work, Helen, as compared to Fionna’s and Anne’s: I think it was crucial to have your work to break down the similarities in the palettes of colour and the minimal approach. We needed this difference of intensity to create a dynamic space and make it flow.
Helen
Thinking about space was a way in as well, because I’m always trying to create an imagined space and to think of the other artworks and the physical spaces occupied and contained by them. There was this idea of shelter: like an extra layer of yourself, of protection and safety.
Image 7: Anne O’Byrne, ‘Sheltermakers’ (We need to build more houses)
Michaele
Yes, these layers of protection and enclosures echo and communicate with each other. And you, Anne with your suspended garden of spaghetti houses. And that we need a lot more houses. (image 6: ‘Sheltermakers’ (We need to build more houses) is an installation of coloured spaghetti strands glued together to form little houses suspended by fishing lines.)
Anne
We do. A lot of my work has to do with what’s happening now on the ground, and issues that are really important to us all in that sense. We do need more houses, and my work has always been concerned with space and place and creating spaces and what we do with houses, how we live in them and how we use them. And then to break that down to the materials that we use to build. A lot of my work has to do with sustainability, what basic materials we use to build structures, and also the elements needed to build our own persona. A constant learning process. Sometimes we look at the end product and we don’t really see the process. We don’t look at how something is made and the materials that go into making it. We just look at the end product. That was what was lovely in this installation process, it was so hands on and organic. So that the work is doing its own thing. It’s morphing, it has a mind of its own.
Michaele
There were really suggestive visual resonances between the work and how they deployed themselves in the exhibition space: Fionna’s little fenced circular garden, for instance with its delicate cellophane flowers and the loops of the fence forming fine lines over the concrete floor of the gallery just next to the projected shadows of your suspended spaghetti houses that are like a drawing (Image 7: Brave Flowers is a floor installation made of paper, masking tape, cellophane, netting and tissue).
Image 8: Fionna Murray, Brave Flowers
Anne
These shadow lines were really something I wanted to happen. The lighting was very important in this exhibition because it is such a dark space. There’s no natural light. Sona and Connor Burke (a 126 board member) were very helpful during the installation of the exhibition. It all had to be spot lit. But you can do so much with the lights: you can have light coming from an angle which gives that lovely oval shape on your work Fionna, then the framing spotlight on your work Helen, and my spaghetti houses are lit from three different angles giving a unifying aspect to the gallery space.
Michaele
and obviously it’s rather unusual for a painting show to be in the dark with only artificial light.
Helen
When we did the very first visit to the space – that was before Christmas, in December – that was one of the first things that you said to us, Sona: that it all comes together with the light.
Sona
Absolutely! Additionally, we decided to maintain the grey colour of some walls from the previous show and paint others with a brighter shade since there were paintings displayed in the exhibition. This worked well and also divided the space really nicely.
Image 9: Helen Roberts, Untitled installation
Michaele
It’s always interesting when you have different artworks sharing the same space, how it pulls out, makes you notice certain aspects of the work that you might not have paid attention to in isolation. To see Fionna’s work, for instance, beside Helen’s brought out to me the vegetal and animal elements in it. Which had always been there I guess but felt suddenly obvious. Helen’s paintings are so teeming with forms of organic life, it seems to overflow and make organic even the geometric. Reciprocally, the shelter dimension of Helen’s paintings may not have come through in such a way for me if it weren’t for Anne’s houses next to them. And of course, there is the canvas shelter itself in the corner of the gallery. A little protected space to meditate. (Image 8: a suspended canvas onto which is projected a painting of a night sky, protecting a bench with cushions onto which the visitor is invited to sit and look up.)
Sona
Helen’s paintings can be compared to small windows, providing a view of the external world rather than peering into someone’s personal space. We have not yet discussed the audio aspect. The melodic chirping of starlings appears to emanate from the storage area, creating uncertainty as to whether a bird is actually trapped inside or if it is a deliberate part of the exhibition. This auditory element is an interesting part of Helen’s installation and plays every ten minutes, occasionally causing slight confusion in visitors’ perceptions.
Fionna
I was just thinking there was something about sitting underneath the projection; that people were allowed to go and sit underneath. They are physically in this other sphere that’s been proposed in all the works, and can actually sit in and be there looking up into the sky as though they’re in that garden.
Image 10: Anne O’Byrne, Homescape.
Michaele
Anne, seeing your deconstructed house, this miniature construction site (image 9: Homescape) takes on an emotional aspect in the way it ties up with the story of your own rebuilding.
Anne
Yes, it’s a construction piece with just little remnants of wood. Materials that go into the making of something else. The wood shavings on the floor were the result of the cutting of the pieces of wood which are so beautiful in themselves. Some are curled, and others straight, and they’re cracking under your feet. It’s that lovely tactile feeling, and the straw colour of raw wood that gives resonance to the idea of construction. (image 10, Homescape and Remnants.)
Image 11: Anne O’Byrne, Homescape and Remnants.
Michaele
Do any of you think that the experience of this exhibition might open up new ways of working in the future?
Fionna
Definitely! I have been collecting stuff for quite a long time and have often thought about trying out these material things that come out of painting. I had made objects some years before during a residency and really enjoyed it. I remember thinking that I would like to do that again. But I didn’t have the opportunity and then with 126, it was a perfect situation. It was a delight to play with these ideas and be given the space to try them out in the gallery.
Anne
One of the students actually said that she now could feel your whole practice, Fionna, because before she just knew you as a painter. All our practices have many dimensions and it was nice to be able to show that.
Helen
This show made me really want to work with other people. Because it’s so much fun. A solo show could be lonely.
Sona
Yes, to be an artist can be lonely, we often need one another to lean on each other. And share these experiences. I learned something from each new show. And this one was very enjoyable. We are all very process-led thinkers, and makers. So I felt from the start, this will really work. And it did!
Helen
I think you start to see so much more in your own work when you’re working alongside other people, and you’re not just waiting for the actual show to see how people receive it; you get to hear what they might see in it that you didn’t know about yourself.
Fionna
And the importance of playfulness. A playfulness that has serious intent, as well. In our works I think we are all talking about the importance of this conceptual space, that we can have a space for the imagination, for freedom of imagination, and that’s a serious intent.
Michaele
I suppose this is what makes it so important to preserve these spaces of creation. So much is happening to be packaged and presented online, perfectly framed and finished. To be consumed as a finished product, with little opportunity for confrontations and accidents. So to have, like here, time and space to experiment and to bounce off each other, to try new ideas and to see what happens is very precious.
Fionna
And that it is here in 126, I think, it’s amazing. When you think of the history of 126 and all the graduates that have come out of the Contemporary Art programme in Galway. How they’ve kept 126 going after it was started by lecturers, Austin and Ben who could see that Galway didn’t have these kinds of spaces to play and experiment with. They did it themselves and then they handed it on, and the graduates have kept it going. It just feels great that it’s still thriving. And that we are part of it with the current show.
Sona
And the baby is going to be 20 years old next year! So that tells you a lot about 126 and the community that supports it. We’ll see what happens in the next 20 years.
