The terrific painting, photography and sculpture at this year's Éigse Carlow reinforces the event's reputation for eclectic programming that pulls in the crowds, writes Aidan Dunne
IN ITS OWN way, the layout of the exhibitions at this year’s Éigse Carlow says a great deal about Ireland’s recent past and difficult present. The shows are distributed across three main venues. The first, St Patrick’s College, home to Carlow College (once a theological hub), has traditionally been the central location. Now, in the college grounds, you can see the sleek form of Carlow’s new arts centre, Visual, due to open later this year. It is an impressive, quiet, deliberately unimposing structure. The second venue is the atrium of Carlow Institute of Technology on Kilkenny Road, a formidable secular educational institution. The third, Shamrock Plaza, still incomplete, is a landmark development on a prize site at the junction of Tullow Street and Green Lane, the main road to Dublin.
Although it may have its fans, the Plaza, developed by Monaco Properties, is a huge generic building, hard and angular, imposing but characterless, a typical product of the Celtic Tiger. Its scale sits oddly with the surrounding streetscapes, including the adjacent – still standing, if only just – blocks. Art tends to colonise unoccupied spaces, and it’s been generously accommodated in some of the vacant office suites. In the long run, though, one wonders how Shamrock Plaza, with its mix of retail, office and residential units, will fare in the new economic climate. The words “sensitive” and “development” do not usually go together in relation to Ireland, but judging by outside appearances at least, Visual seems to merit the juxtaposition. It and Shamrock Plaza might, in years to come, be seen as contrasting legacies of the recent economic boom.
One of the great strengths of Éigse, and one attributable largely to its visual arts coordinator, Paddy McGovern, is its heterogeneity. It gathers together a mixture of contemporary art encompassing the familiar and the unfamiliar, the readily accessible and the relatively abstruse – and the populace, from the locality and from afar, flood in to see it all. It is a quality shared with some other regional festivals, including Kilkenny, Galway, Boyle and Kinsale, and it accounts for Éigse’s high repute, because actually bringing people into contact with art is half the battle.
There is a lot of terrific work to see in Éigse this year, and most of it is, as it happens, accessible, at least in terms of form and content. Not all of it, though, is displayed to best effect.
Inevitably, some work suffers because of the haphazard layout dictated by the varied spaces. A lot ends up lining corridors or dotting entrance halls. There are four great bodies of photographic work, for example, and not one of them is treated to the kind of space it merits. Jackie Nickerson perhaps fares best. She is allotted two corridors in St Patrick's, but given that the work she shows is drawn from Faith, a major project in which she documented the individuals and interiors of closed religious communities in Ireland, the institutional setting is apposite and, in the case of several images, almost eerily so.
Anna Rackard and Gypsy Ray fare less well. They are both in Shamrock Plaza, Rackard in the entrance hall and Ray in an upstairs corridor. Rackard’s photographs are taken from her series of portraits of Irish women involved in farming. Made to a more or less standard format, the photographs are truly outstanding and important, and they merit inclusion in a national collection.
Ray is a beautifully sensitive photographer. She shows a selection of portraits taken over the last 30 years. Her deeply felt, empathetic studies, in richly toned black-and-white, exemplify a classical American photographic tradition, together with a sense of free-spirited vitality.
Who knew that actor Emmet Bergin was also an accomplished photographer? His black-and-white images, including a number of studies of tools, have the textural density and depth of etchings. He only gets the run of one wall in Shamrock Plaza, in a room mostly devoted to Alison Ospina's show of Irish green wood chairs. This features chairs by nine makers, including herself, and it coincides with the publication of her book on the subject, Green Wood Chairs: Chairs and chair-makers of Ireland. She includes several contemporary takes on the form, but in terms of elegant, functional design, the more traditional examples win out.
THERE ARE SEVERAL fine solo painting shows distributed throughout the venues. Stephen McKenna shows pictures from an ongoing series of city ports, a project that involves a lot of – with luck – enjoyable travel for him. The paintings are fresh, bracing and mostly cheerful. McKenna simplifies the infinite visual detail of each location, lending the paintings a pristine, even utopian character.
It’s reality, but not quite as we know it; cleaner, more clearly defined, more generally inviting. You’d like to be there.
Marie Hanlon’s playful, colourful abstracts don’t quite give us anywhere to be, but their musical, rhythmic qualities and their often geometric motifs engage and surprise the eye.
As Paddy McGovern notes in his introduction, Eddie Kennedy’s bleached-out, meditative seascapes bask in the lavish natural light from above in the atrium of the Institute of Technology.
Sligo-based Sinead Aldridge is a fine painter. There is a retrospective aspect to her work in St Patrick’s. Concentric, interlocking forms and toned-down colours recall the great St Ives painter, Peter Lanyon, without any suggestion of repetition or pastiche. When everything clicks, the result is a kind of magic, and there are several superb pieces in her show.
SCULPTURE AND CERAMICS are strongly represented. Nick Evans’s large-scale sculptures alternate between the tightly formalised and the amorphously ambiguous. All evoke bodily fragments, sometimes in an almost gross, in-yer-face way, like a coarse version of Henry Moore.
Alan Counihan responds brilliantly to the location, in an immediate and more general, historical sense, with a site-specific installation.
Richard Mosse strikes a note of foreboding with his dual-screen installation depicting aircraft being lowered into the sea and raised out of it, both indicative, he implies, of the US’s fortunes.
Then there’s Eileen MacDonagh, whose installations, which could be planetary systems or children’s games, look terrific in St Patrick’s. And as for the complex geometric forms that form part of her ongoing Icosahedron series, surely every Irish home would be a better place for having one.
Éigse Carlow exhibitions are at St Patrick’s College, Carlow Institute of Technology and Shamrock Plaza, 12 noon to 6pm daily, until Sunday; eigsecarlow.ie
