paper visual art journal –

All too clearly do I recall being dragged around garden centres as a sullen pre-adolescent by my mother and hers. For them it was an occasion in itself, though they never seemed to need anything in particular. In any case, we would load up the car with pots and compost and shrubbery, and return home to further subdue that outside terrain known as ‘garden’.

Mairead O’hEocha: Gorilla Ornament, Arboretum, Co Carlow, 38×53 cm, oil on board, 2012; Courtesy mother’s tankstation.

Both artificial and somewhat superfluous, the garden centre is a strange place to start, and yet it is here that Mairead O’hEocha sites her new body of work. A succinct collection of seven paintings, mostly in oil on board, The Sky was Yellow and the Sun was Blue firmly embeds itself in the rural garden centre of my childhood. In these works, however, the spaces are washed out and cavernous, punctuated only by a bizarre proliferation of garden paraphernalia. In one particularly striking work, Gorilla Ornament, Arboretum, Co. Carlow, said faux-gorilla sits center stage, a surreal cacophony of refracted pastel hues. In another, Plant and Frog, a large palm plant sits between two ornamental garden frogs. In limbo: not yet bought or appropriated to other surroundings, the tawdry curios of these paintings fully divulge their singular oddity. Their strangeness is echoed in the works’ execution: the painterly decisions – that of colour and line – serve only to further reinforce the surreal quality of the subject matter. To me the colours resemble those that peek out and shimmer as light hits oil; always unforeseen, but strangely natural at one and the same time. The sky might be yellow, or mauve and pink for that matter, but there is somehow a ‘rightness’ in its surreal incongruity.

Mairead O’hEocha: Plant and Frog, oil on board, 46×55 cm, 2012; Courtesy mother’s tankstation.

O’hEocha’s style thus might somehow be considered realist, but of a loose and subjective kind. For me, her work is best described as situated on a realist trajectory, as if entering into, or indeed departing from, realism. One work, Bird Feeders and Saplings, Enniskerry, Co. Wicklow, seems to visually support such a view: these delicate and sparsely hewn forms stand in processional grandeur, creating an avenue-like effect through their sinewy forms. For me, the desire to enter into their trajectory is enticing, though its destination never wholly articulated. What is suggested is a kind of wish to interact with the works formally; thwarted and bent out of shape; misshapen and fully ‘wrong’ on the level of colour, they delimit the frame of an oddly tantalising and wonky realism. In another work, Freezing Fountain, Lusk, Co. Dublin, the fountain is transformed into a spiky geometric palimpsest: linear sketches of stalled, frozen jets of water come to resemble something a classical abstract modernist might garner from such a quotidian scene. Certainly, moving closer to the painting, the work further elucidates its debt to abstraction: the attempt at space is reduced to a flattened plane of colour and line. And yet the works never fully renege their allegiance to realism; O’hEocha’s work sees fit to find the abstract tendencies implied by bondage to what really is there.

There is both something of the ruin and utopia in O’hEocha’s subject matter: ruin, because these scenes appear as empty in their contextual zero-ground; they subsist in the hope of a deciphering futurisity that will bestow them with meaning: utopian, because within this hypothetical future clings still a kind of promise, forced and artificial though it may be. This duality in mind, the paintings’ execution teeters paradoxically between sheer banality and revelatory luminosity: a sidestep out of the predominantly grey and mauve colour scheme permits the subject matter’s reappraisal not as dead sites, but as sites simply on hold, waiting. A noticeable trait is that the sites depicted are empty of people, and so possibly they wait on humanity. Taking another view, these sites and the objects that populate them might simply be waiting on a context outside of exchange value. Taken as they are, they are purely that – decorative and wholly artificial, they exist as objects performing nothing but the uncanny desirability of objecthood. As signifiers of exchange value, they are resplendent: empty of use or context, these objects wait to be bought, appropriated and fattened up with context and use. O’hEocha’s clear decision to title every work with a deliberate specificity of place and content – for example Preformed Ponds and Water Barrel, Co. Dublin – resembles a fight against this vacancy; by binding these sites and objects to real ones, she attempts to imbue them with a life-force she knows to be absent.

Mairead O’hEocha: Garden Pond Centre, oil on board, 2012; Courtesy mother’s tankstation.

The rural garden centre is a strange premise, though: born of the desire to reclaim, tame and aestheticise the land, they are sites rooted in the wish to check nature itself. The question of taste rears its head with O’hEocha’s garish frogs and gorillas, and exotic plants wholly alien to the rural environment outside, ever redefined. And yet there is a strange optimism about these places, also. As aesthetic objects and sites, there is a luminescence that supersedes their status as pure exchange value; caught in the optimistic gaze of O’hEocha’s works, a preformed pond becomes the possibility of transcendence, the sky an unseen wash of pinks and greys and greens. The brilliance of an unspoken promise is transmitted in every work – the promise of painting, surely, but also the promise of aesthetics or beauty more generally. Wholly artificial spaces and objects though they might depict, O’hEocha’s paintings articulate the hope or promise of beauty that pervades and supports the everyday.

Rebecca O’Dwyer is a writer and researcher based in Dublin.

Brendan Earley and Kevin Cosgrove’s Nor for Nought, at mother’s tankstation, is a show in which very little happens: directly counteracting the desire for action or stimulation, the work explicates a space wherein such properties are stopped dead in their tracks. The two very different kinds of work – Cosgrove’s modestly sized, figurative oils, and Earley’s sculptural assemblages, which act almost like thwarted readymades – exist in a relationship jointly informed by the language of making both in and of itself. The objects in Cosgrove’s paintings – a car, a tractor, a small dumper truck – are both created from something, by people or other machines, and furthermore are proponents of creation; they are created for the purpose of further creation. Here, however, they lie dormant, and oddly so. The paintings appear almost as portraits of these objects, studying them in unproductive cessation. Adjacent to Cosgrove’s studies of the things and places of making, Earley’s sculptural forms thwart traditional expectations of productivity or usefulness. The materials used – aluminium, plasterboard, fibreglass, a reassembled IKEA kitchen, workbenches, and so forth – all point to an interest in making as process. There is a sense of incompletion, however; the workbench, typically used as a prop for the creation of something, becomes the final resting site for that which it creates (Pieces of the City are Forming like Islands (2010), and Workbench (2011)). Function breaks down as the work ceases to be passed on to another locale, and thus put to use. Instead, it gathers the site of production – the workbench – to itself, and realigns itself as useless, aesthetic. In both bodies of work, the site of non-creation, where function or purpose breaks down, is viewed productively, and enacted upon to make something new.

Brendan Earley: They Bedded Down for the Night, woolen blanket, foam, plastic ties, melamine, 2011; Image courtesy mother’s tankstation and the artist.

The title of the exhibition, Nor for Nought, also gives some shading to the pairing of these two artists. The title cites a passage from the Bible, a tract in which Paul puts forward to the Thessalonians the value of earning, and working for sustenance; it is a reward in itself, once it has been earned. Recompense exists in such a scenario, regardless of what form it takes. There is value, he suggests, in the simple process of work. As previously mentioned, both Cosgrove and Earley appear to share in this view. Both, through their varied depictions in the breakdown of function or usability, negate a dominant demand for an end result that is finalised, or useful. In such a way, they glean a view of working that accepts the half-done, the static or abandoned, as befitting the labour that precedes its formation. The pleasure in working is its own reward; it does not stipulate a clear and defined outcome or product. That is not to say that the artworks contained in the exhibition are neither finished nor complete – they are – but rather that they use a breakdown in function or activity as a starting point in productively giving rise to a product that diverges from both.

Kevin Cosgrove: Workshop (with cardboad), oil on linen, 2011; Image courtesy mother’s tankstation and the artist.

The exhibition itself contains paintings by Cosgrove and a collection of sculptural forms by Earley, which quietly intersperse the painterly depictions of the things and places of making. An unoccupied yellow workshop, emitting that too-bright fluoro-hue common to offices everywhere, hangs above Earley’s The Lights Are On (2011). This floor-based assemblage combines a thwarted IKEA kitchen, plastic ties, foam, and fluorescent tubes. The exchange between object and image on traversing the gallery is intriguing; one might imagine the objects being made in such spaces as Cosgrove’s, but the question of function creeps interminably in – just what kind of space would this be if given over to the creation of objects such as these? Do such spaces make any sense once the prerequisite condition of function has been abandoned? There is an almost belligerent celebration in the subversion of the object’s expected uses and narratives in Earley’s work, for example in his alternative, counter-intuitive usage of flat-pack constructions. Furthermore, another piece, Don’t Look Back (2010), uses mahogany – generally seen as an almost precious wood – in such a way as to render it virtually invisible. This wall piece comprises an aluminium form perching above a sheet of mahogany affixed to the wall, over which a sheet of black glutinous perspex is overlaid. It is infuriating both formally and ergonomically. And yet it is here that the work is interesting: to hide away that which is most valued is to run counter to economic expectations. Function does not come into the equation, but rather a dominant expectation founded on the consumerist predicate; in any case, to use mahogany here simply seems wholly function-less – MDF would have done the job just as well. It is not dissimilar to the approach taken by Cosgrove in his paintings, as he meticulously paints, pointedly in oils, spaces in which nothing is happening, or machines which at the moment he paints them, have ceased to function. A prevailing disinclination towards light and contrast – most of the works are of a similar breed tonally – further iterates the humdrum quality of these spaces and things. And yet he works towards representation of these scenes, running counter to an expectation of what, really, a painting should be. This is still life in the truest sense, empty of people, devoid of activity, and thus still yet a site of possible creation or epiphany. Another work, Workshop (with cardboard) (2011), shows a grimy workshop, all gnarled shapes and forms seeping out from a soot-black darkness. Sheets of cardboard are haphazardly thrown onto these surfaces, and out of the darkness jumps a luminous gold shade; so extravagant it appears as almost baroque. There’s an excessiveness present here that seems out of place, and it is this that holds the viewer. In other works, a swath of light serves the same purpose, pointing to a resonance which supersedes that which is represented in the work. As with Earley’s work, these paintings present us with a moment of resistance or intransigence.

Kevin Cosgrove & Brendan Earley: Nor for Nought, installation view, 2011(Foreground: Brendan Earley: All the Lights are On, reassembled IKEA kitchen, plastic ties, foam, florescent tubes, 2011); Image courtesy mother’s tankstation and the artists.

It is not for nothing that this exhibition appears to say little, or to deny a sense of finality. It is in this repudiation of a normative cycle – work, progress, completion – that both artists celebrate the process of making as an activity in itself. In offering an alternative finality, dependent on moments of inactivity or subversion, both Cosgrove and Earley put forward an alternative notion of finality. This is something that exists in a symbiotic relation to incompletion, and finds its own resting place – in time and space – through the simple acts of making, and of working.

Rebecca O’ Dwyer is a writer currently based in Sydney. She holds a BA Fine Art Sculpture (2008) and MA Art in the Contemporary World (2010), both from NCAD, Dublin. She plans to commence doctoral studies at NCAD next year, focusing on the role of transcendentalism in contemporary art. O’Dwyer is also co-editor of the publication Not Drowning but Waving,and compiles a personal blog at:

www.rebeccaodwyer.wordpress.com.