Hughie O'Donoghue sees documentary material alchemically transformed in the 'laboratory' of the painter's studio, writes Aidan Dunne
In 2002, Hughie O'Donoghue came across some old glass plate negatives at a car boot sale close to his home in Co Kilkenny. He was struck by the beauty of the images, by the care and formality with which they had been made. They seemed to him evocative of the early years of the 20th century. In particular, there was a strikingly posed photograph of a young man, "in his Sunday best clothes", standing proudly beside a machine for crushing turnips. There is a strange pathos to the scene.
"I'm interested in identity, how it's formed, or broken, how it is changed by circumstances," O'Donoghue observes. In his attempts to imagine the life and circumstances of this young man, and the lives of others in the photographs, he had the idea of making a body of work on the theme of the Prodigal Son. Although, as he notes, the turnip crusher looks more like a dutiful son who stayed and laboured.
The biblical parable tells the story of a man who has two sons, one loyal and dutiful, the other a wastrel. While the former stays at home and works, the other decamps with his inheritance and blows the lot, returning only when he is penniless and destitute in a famine-stricken land. The dutiful son is enraged when the fatted calf is killed to celebrate the return of his good-for-nothing sibling. But, his father tells him, the shepherd always delights in the return of the lamb who strays.
O'Donoghue sees his paintings as being, in a sense, parables. Their meaning is symbolically encoded in imagined narratives that have a firm basis in historical fact, documentary material that is alchemically transformed in the "laboratory" of the painter's studio. He writes of research as being a kind of drawing. "I think it is. That process of getting to know your subject. You have to be intimate with it, immersed in it. You never know something until you can say it."
For The Parable of the Prodigal Son, at the Fenton Gallery, he has made not only several groups of paintings, including the 12-part narrative centrepiece, but also a complementary publication. Rather than being a catalogue, this is an integral part of the project, and a beautiful piece of work in its own right.
HE POINTS TO the multiple resonances of the story of the Prodigal Son in terms of the Irish experience. From the Famine on, there is a history of emigration and exile. Something about the glass plate negatives reminded him of the first World War, and he went to the Imperial War Museum archive to search for other material. He came across one remarkable image which he has used: A soldier lies against a vegetated bank of earth. He seems to be resting, exhausted, "withdrawn into himself" and, oddly, beside him there is a long wooden staff. In fact, he has sustained a head wound and is waiting for stretcher-bearers to take him to a first aid station. The staff was used as a handle in a canvas stretcher. Yet there is an extraordinary universality about the image, which speaks eloquently of human suffering. What struck O'Donoghue was that, "you really don't need anything added to it to understand it". With the help of Anthony Hobbs, the photographs are physically embedded in the body of the paintings.
With a group of images assembled as a kind of storyboard, he set about writing his own parable. Between words and images, the latter including paintings, photographs and maps, he has produced a striking hybrid, a publication that recalls aspects of WG Sebald's meditative books or John Berger's ambition, in Another Way of Telling, to devise a composite narrative form. Vitally, O'Donoghue does not adhere to a conventional, linear narrative form. What he has made could almost be described as a collage and, he says, "collage is perhaps the dominant form that emerged in 20th-century art".
His parable incorporates digressions, is open-ended, and enjoys an easy interaction between words, images and the background research notes. Including such notes, and a photograph taken in his studio, doesn't, he feels, "take the mystery away from art, it just tries to make it as clear as possible". A residual openness is essential and is, he says, characteristic of his work as a whole.
"My paintings are narratives, but in a more elusive way than just telling a straightforward story. They are parables in a way. Rather then meaning precisely this or that, and closing things down, they try to raise preoccupations in an open way. I believe meaning is elusive in art. It accrues, and, to a large extent, meaning is the product of activity beyond the artist's control. You try to be honest and open when you're working, but to control the meaning is a step too far . . ."
Hughie O'Donoghue's The Parable of the Prodigal Son is at the Fenton Gallery, 5 Wandesford Quay, Cork until March 12th (021-4315294)