Caoimhín Gaffney: All at Once Collapsing Together review – A visual rhapsody from an outstanding Irish artist

Caoimhín Gaffney: All at Once Collapsing Together

Butler Gallery, Kilkenny

★★★★★

I’ve been a keen admirer of Caoimhín Gaffney ever since I saw their work in Imma’s Narrow Gate series, in 2021. It’s a standout in Irish contemporary art, and deserves to be recognised as such. Their moving-image artworks, in particular, are mesmerising, ruminative experiments that render the quiet intimacy and fluidity of thought into tangible units of word and image.

Gaffney’s talent lies in their unique sensitivity to both the cinematic and poetic poles of moving-image artistry, exploring and refining each of these distinct features of the artwork with equally compelling results.

From 2014′s Everything Disappears onward, Gaffney has built an oeuvre of film art consisting of stately, slow-moving shots, beautifully staged and lit, accompanied by the narration of a dreamlike voice. Among their peers, the most obvious artist for comparison is Doireann O’Malley, whose installation films are similarly paced and similarly reliant on the imaginative subtleties of the spoken word. The pair also share an interest in the plasticity of self, though the principal aesthetic of O’Malley’s films is one of depersonalisation, whereas Gaffney’s works retain a level of warmth, of vitality and humanity, even as the artist investigates the malleability of the boundaries of personal identity.

Gaffney’s newest exhibition, at the Butler Gallery, feels like the product of a long gestation. All at Once Collapsing Together features photography, text and, of course, an immersive two-screen exhibition film. The combination of these diverse elements is coherent and synchronous, albeit that purposeful cross-currents are at work within the exhibition as a whole.

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The show conjures a fictional world of verdant landscapes that in some scenes pass over into wildernesses suffused with an otherworldly, sublime quality: early German romanticist landscape painters, such as Georg Friedrich Kersting, seem woven into the DNA of Gaffney’s tableaux of forests and caves. Two figures, played by Sian Ní Mhuirí and Helen O’Dea, wander through this realm.

The performers Gaffney chooses to collaborate with are instrumental to their projects’ success: Ní Mhuirí and O’Dea are pitch-perfect, appearing natural and at ease whatever the demands of the script. Ní Mhuirí delivers the plaintive monologue, a spoken form between elliptical storytelling and poetry, and the music of her voice permeates the exhibition, carrying and condensing the atmosphere of that other world into our own.

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The nature of the pair’s relationship is unclear, although it seems that Ní Mhuirí has coaxed O’Dea into life, equal parts mother and midwife, by ushering her into coherence from a surreal uterine bath draped in red latex. As they explore their surroundings, Gaffney constructs a visual rhapsody that alludes to environmentalism, Irish mythology and intergenerational care.

Not to be missed.

All at Once Collapsing Together is at the Butler Gallery, Kilkenny, until Sunday, July 28th