Cecily Brennan: PRESSURE / In Pieces: Navigating the body in contemporary Irish art

Cecily Brennan: PRESSURE
In her decades long career, Cecily Brennan has explored themes of physical and psychological pressure, creating works in sculpture, painting, drawing, photography and screen media that explore the vulnerability and perseverance of the human condition. This major survey exhibition presents new work by the artist including the gallery premiere of the short film The Devil’s Pool and photographs from her Six Men project, alongside a selection of earlier pieces that also investigate the connections between mind and body, mental and material forces.

In her tender paintings of patients with eczema and psoriasis, common but often embarrassing skin diseases, the artist foregrounds the way in which the skin is a canvas with blemishes, rashes and discolouration that seem almost beautiful in their painted form. By inviting us to look at something where we might usually divert our eyes, Brennan’s paintings increase our empathy for sufferers of these discomfiting afflictions. In her sculptural works, she moves to creating something of a personal armoury, a coping arsenal of artefacts that protect and solidify our fragile bodies. Her compelling film work ranges in tempo from the fierce blast of manual experimentation expressed in the steam power reaction of Hero’s Engine to the achingly slow bleed of black fluid that in Melancholia gradually seeps out from a rectangular white box that contains a prone female nude. In Brennan’s most recent moving image work, The Devil’s Pool, the pace of these internal and external forces combine as a trapped male figure frantically evades and is eventually overwhelmed by wave after wave of violently sloshing heavy dark liquid.

In Pieces: Navigating the body in contemporary Irish art
Artists: Bassam Issa Al-Sabah, Aideen Barry, Amanda Coogan, Léann Herlihy, Riki Matsuda, Pádraig Spillane, Corban Walker. 

Curated by Chris Clarke.

In Pieces looks at how Irish contemporary artists have explored the body as subject, material and medium, to signify identity, sexuality, vitality, illness, wholeness and disintegration. In emphasizing the fragmented body, the partial glimpse or reflection, the exhibition recognizes the diversity of these representations and challenges traditional ideas of the body as gendered, stable or singular. In Riki Matsuda’s Wearable Objects, the sleeves of woolen garments are stitched together, bonding two individuals into a distinct entity, while her series of paintings present stylized variations of couplings, threesomes, and groups. In Léann Herlihy’s filmed exploration of trans* identities, the artist sits in a van, igniting the engine before replacing the pressure enforced by their feet with two large rocks. Stepping out of the van, the ghost engine roars while their fleshy body emulates the reverberations. In Bassam Issa Al-Sabah’s video, a floating animated figure acquires new, unanticipated features: flowers bloom from their head, bubbles or pins attach themselves, and prismatic light springs out from their body. A new sculptural configuration of oversized, 3-D rendered limbs reveals discontinuities in proportion and arrangement, a familiar yet re-arranged representation of human anatomy.

Pádraig Spillane’s photographs explore desire through the intersection of mass-produced cultural imagery. Legs, arms and hands entwine to the point that specific limbs become indistinguishable, rearranged beyond their intended meanings. Aideen Barry’s Monocopsis series of digital prints, produced during the Covid-19 lockdown, envisages technology as an extension of the body, with the digital screen of a mobile phone becoming an artificial eye or prosthetic device for exploring our surrounding environment. In Corban Walker’s work, he uses his own height and dimensions to determine the life-size scale of his steel sculpture, fracturing the modernist grid into something more irregular, while his Ambidextrous Drawing emphasises the slight deviations between drawn lines and different hands. Amanda Coogan’s performance-based artworks use the medium of her body to challenge social and political structures. In her triptych of photographs, her head (with miner’s headlamp attached) breaches a sheet of taut, blue fabric, dives underneath the surface, and ploughs a path through a new and unfamiliar environment.  

Cecily Brennan: PRESSURE and In Pieces: Navigating the body in contemporary Irish art are supported by the Arts Council of Ireland, University College Cork, and private philanthropy through Cork University Foundation.