Once a day every day all day long. Locky Morris, Nerve Visual, Derry. 11:00am – 5:00pm until 1 September 2019.

Toraí Beo. An Grianan Theatre, Letterkenny. Monday – Friday, 9:30am to 5:00pm until 30 August 2019.

Ealaín ón gCladach. Cathal McGinley, Regional Cultural Centre, Letterkenny. Tuesday – Friday, 9:30am – 5:00pm; Saturday 11.00am – 5.00pm until 23 September 2019.

21st Century Ireland In 21 Artworks. Curated by Cristin Leach. Glebe Gallery, Churchhill, Donegal. 11:00am – 6:30pm until 1 September 2019.

 

With a nice packed lunch and a bit of determination, you could see all four shows of Irish contemporary art in one day, starting in Derry and hopping – while you still can – across the border into Donegal. If there are common underlying themes, they are change or transition, memory and inheritance. What has changed and is changing in Ireland North and South, socially and politically, in the self-understanding of this highly self-reflective country; and how is the relationship between past and present navigated in the work of the artists? How does art, as content and process, document and facilitate social and personal change?  What are the vestiges of Ireland’s troubled and bucolic past, and how are they experienced and visualised now?

Locky Morris’s “once a day every day all day long” neatly occupies the twin, clean white galleries of Nerve Visual in Ebrington Square, Derry. Those who follow Locky Morris’s Instagram account will know that he has an exceptional eye for the serendipitous moment and ephemera, for composition and colour. That is reflected in this exhibition along with an inventive and engaging, light touch approach to the installations. This exhibition, the catalogue explains, “references changes in his personal circumstances and also the transformed landscape of post-conflict Northern Ireland.”

Up to 100 (2000). Artist: Locky Morris. Photographer: Paola Bernadelli.

You are directed to start in one room, where many of the installations refer at least obliquely to memory and the ‘past’. They use photographs, sound and video, light and shade, and various contraptions, simply but thoughtfully, some with humour, some puzzling and enigmatic. The work simultaneously asks and answers questions, reveals and obscures. The genius of Locky Morris’s work is that each piece draws us into a story, some more explicit than others – and a story also about the process by which it was conceived and made.

VHS (2018). Artist: Locky Morris. Photographer: Courtesy artist.

VHS (2018) is a large, glossy photograph, held by white bulldog clips, of an abandoned litter bin, surrounded by nettles against an unlikely blue sky. Old video tapes are piled inside and carefully stacked on top, so that it looks like an old sanger or a dalek. Festooned with cobwebs and dried leaves, it is a curiously lyrical, desolate reflection on obsolescence, and indeed the ‘past’ – and, perhaps, how difficult it is to erase. In Bush (2017), a large, square, brilliant white photo canvas, pinned by two nails to the wall, hints at the Turin Shroud. At the centre is a smaller black and white image of an old duvet, filled uneasily with stuff, impaled on a thorn bush. In Up to a Hundred (2000) a pitifully distressed and deflated old football sits on a speaker, from which a recording plays of a middle-aged man exhaustedly bouncing a football and counting – never getting past the twenties. In Tyre Fire (2016), a beautifully simple image, a new high, shiny, black, undulating corrugated fence – which might or might not be an interface fence – has been vandalised by a burnt tyre, leaving the memory of the flame.

 

Tyre Fire (2016). Artist: Locky Morris. Photographer: Courtesy artist.

Many of the works in the first room seem to reference memories and the ‘past’ (in Northern Ireland a loaded word, of course) in a light-hearted, personal, or more disturbing way. The second room seems to be freer, more playful, more about present moment noticing. In an intriguing installation, The Drop (2007/2016) tells the story of what happened when Locky visited the mechanic’s and his sunglasses fell into the “underbody wash pit.” In From Day One (2008) we are left wondering what came first – the perfect cube of an illuminated glass display case, with its two indented door handles, or the crumpled cardboard collar stiffener from a child’s new school shirt, presented on a square of carpet.

A half hour’s drive away, in Letterkenny, in the foyer of An Grianan theatre, there is a group show of the Tory Island Painters, featuring a second generation of artists from the island. There are a few pictures by Patsy Dan Rodgers, King of Tory, who passed away last October, and a couple of exquisite small landscapes by Anton Meenan, the youngest of the original group to have been discovered and nurtured by the late English artist Derek Hill, and the only one to have attended art school. Several of the paintings reference Hill’s tiny and remote hut, which remains. Most of the pictures are by the sons and daughters of Rodgers and Meenan. Some echo the talents, style and preoccupations of the previous generation – while some have evolved into a more mature style. Muirdhreach by Patsy Dan’s daughter Majella Rogers is a lyrical seascape painted in wintry tones of palest grey and blue. Daniel Cullin’s evocative Toraigh an Oiche Gheimridh (Tory on a Winter’s Night) shows a village on a wet winter’s night, yellow-lit by the single street lamp, with a solitary figure with a walking stick and rain poncho – people are rarely shown in Tory paintings. It is good to see that this fragile island’s artistic tradition has survived and indeed thrived.

 

Both. Artist: Cathal McGinley. Photographer: Eugene McGinty.

At the Regional Cultural Centre behind An Grianan, there is another “island artist” show, Ealaín ón gCladach, the culmination of a three year residency at RCC of Cathal McGinley, who employs a variety of media – sculpture, video and vibrant landscapes – straddling the traditional and more conceptual to celebrate his roots in and ongoing relationship with the island and its community. At the centre of the exhibition, his Bothóg recalls the rough shepherd’s shelter that used to be made of turf or whatever came to hand. It is made, in this case, of a meticulous patchwork of hundreds of origami-folded sheets of discarded cultural centre flyers. Chatting with me at the opening of the Glebe Gallery exhibition, Cathal McGinley explains that he always had a fascination with origami and experiences it as a “calming, therapeutic activity”. Just as the bothóg was a place of calm and safety for shepherds in earlier times, for McGinley the practice of origami is a refuge from the stresses and strains of modern life. All the works, including sculptures made from washed-up plastic, and videos of the island, speak powerfully of McGinley’s passion for the island of his birth. He is preoccupied by the question of “what use is an artist anyway”. His work aims to be approachable, engaging and relevant and he has worked with the local community to facilitate the large charcoal island landscape of the mainland seen from the island (Meitheal Líníochta).

 

Eadáil Gan Úsáid. Artist: Cathal McGinley. Photographer: Eugene McGinty.

Further into Donegal, but perhaps a great place to head for that picnic lunch, returning to Derry via the Letterkenny shows, is the Gallery at the Glebe, Derek Hill’s former home. It is currently showing 21 Works of Art for the 21st Century, an intriguing and ambitious show curated by art critic Cristin Leach, based on a series she produced for RTE.ie. The aim of the show is, said Cristin Leach at the opening, to be “forward-looking” and say something about “Ireland now in this tumultuous era” – “where we are psychologically, emotionally, geographically and politically” as artist Mick O’Dea, one of those represented in the show, put it. It was the idea of Adrian Kelly curator of the (unfortunately very seasonal) Glebe Gallery to produce a show based on the “listicle” – and the mini-articles now accompany the artworks as substantial and sometimes didactic captions.

Anthony Haughey’s Settlement (2011) shows a ghost estate in a ghostly light; Corban Walker’s Grid Stack 2 is an elegant, mesmerising stack of sheets of iridescent glass “like a corporate concept offering, a glittering set of skyscrapers for some precious Emerald City.” The watershed moment of the Queen’s visit permits an unironic display of Colin Davidson’s portraits of Queen Elizabeth. The collapse of the economy is the subject of Risk (2010), a video diptych in which artist Michele Brown facilitates a conversation with four nervous male financiers over the board game in one screen while chairs are shown precariously tipping from a diving board in the other.

It was not possible in all 21 cases to show the actual artwork chosen by Cristin Leach for the original series. This difficulty has been cleverly managed in some of the exhibits. The black and white image from a Dublin gable wall of a male couple – Joe Caslin’s The Claddagh Embrace (2014) —  is represented by the front page of the International New York Times, dated 20 May 2015, the day of the result of the same sex referendum, showing the image. Unfortunately, the sometimes lengthy articles from the original series, which serve as captions, do not always match the artworks and it’s a pity that it was apparently too much trouble to rewrite them. So, a gallery visitor was searching in vain for the “kneeling figure” in the thickets of Gary Coyle’s Forest Path (2006) and Dorothy Cross’s Music Stand (2007) which features a guillemot has a lengthy caption describing an artwork about a heron.

There are lacunae and no doubt Cristin Leach would be the first to admit that her choice could not be comprehensive or definitive. There is no reference to the Magdalene laundries, Tuam babies or clerical and institutional child abuse – and the seismic shift in the status of the Catholic church in Irish society; none to the Travelling community; none to an increasingly multi-cultural society. To plug one gap, a twenty-second work has been added as an afterthought, Vukašin Nedeljkovic’s Lissywollen Accommodation Centre, Athlone (2013). Artist Nedeljkovic was an asylum seeker from 2007 to 2009 and established www.asylumarchive.com to document the conditions of Direct Provision, established by the Irish government in 1999 to house asylum seekers.

The exhibition aims to look forward, but several works inevitably echo a number of memes recalling the past:  Donegal artist Ann Quinn’s dreamlike, nostalgic memory of My Father’s Cows making their Way back down to the Burn Field after Milking Time (2013), stills from Willie Doherty’s video Remains (2013), about a punishment shooting in Derry which is about “the past as present,” and Here After (2017) the late Patrick Jolley’s film of an abandoned flat in the now demolished, notorious Ballymun housing estate. Joe Hogan’s engaging Primal Energy No 6 “Cast a cold eye” (2016) features a log held within the bowl of an abstract wicker container – and gives so completely the impression of a ram’s skull that I find it hard to see the wood it is actually made of. This aims to be “fine art led craft,” a “modern take on ancient traditions” or, notes Leach’s caption, “we can just call it art.”

 

Primal Energy No 6 (2016). Artist: Joe Hogan. Photographer: Vicky Cosstick.

No commentary on modern day Ireland would be complete without a mention of Brexit, which unfortunately drags Ireland back into the quagmire of its dependency on the British economy. So one of Mick O’Dea’s delicate, tumbling cardboard figures from a 2016 exhibition The Ever Present, which aimed to celebrate the centenary of the Easter Rising and is about Ireland’s “constantly evolving relationship with the past,” suspended perilously above the idyllic Boy (2008), by Geraldine O’Neill, invites reimagining in the present context and seems a fitting final image from the show.

 

The Ever Present (2016) and Boy (2008). Respective artists: Mick O’Dea, Geraldine O’Neill. Photographer: Vicky Cosstick.