Art from the edge - part 1 - Report From Ireland

Art in America, Dec, 1995 by Judith Higgins

The agitated, lustrous blacks and urban grays of Maguire's large expressionist paintings are lit from within by patches of pinks and blues, and by yellows that suggest artificial light and the pallor of faces seen on Dublin streets. Maguire calls his paintings "short stories, psychological portraits." The emotional state of the urgent, primitively painted figures sets up the strong interior architecture. Vertical panels and transverse lines isolate and cage lovers. In Self Burying Demons (1983), the wary-eyed, haunted artist, naked to the waist, is depicted within a divided space that works like a three-part mirror: pressing in on him from the left is the glaring yellow light of the studio, and from the right the struggling dark form of a woman with clawing hands.

Alongside his paintings of himself, his family and friends, Maguire has also expressed his wider concerns for Dublin in his "icons." The images in these paintings are drawn from Dublin's streets: a distraught, impoverished woman with a pram; a young man killed trying to rob the dole office; a flushed, frightened roadside assassin kneeling over his victim. As in all Maguire's paintings, the situation of the central figure dictates the perspective. In Liffey Suicide 1984), the bridge in the painting is seen from underneath because Maguire has assumed the point of view of the corpses floating in the river. Maguire's Dublin paintings (1983-87) have been followed by a series on the city's prisons, where he has taught for the past six years, In the gloomy world of Portloaise--cages, tunnels, little ladders, portholed light--Maguire finds a metaphor for Irish society, and for the human condition. Just as Maguire's paintings expose how vulnerable we are to deprivation and confinement, they also express our capacity for release, for fulfillment. Of his 1990 painting, Dreams and Jail Visiting, Prison, the artist says: "One can find prisons in marriage and great love in a cell."

From Mother Ireland to Sheela-na-Gig: Women Artists Revise Irish History

Living in a society that was both colonized and patriarchal, Irish women have been doubly oppressed, doubly marginalized. "I thought that ours indeed was a land of shame, a land of murder, and a land of strange, throttled, sacrificial women," says a character in an Edna O'Brien story. The unequal status of Irish women--in the eyes of church and state, in marriage and in the workplace--has been reinforced by the frequent depictions of Ireland as a woman in need of rescue, from the beautiful Cathleen ni Houlihan awaiting her deliverer, to Mother Ireland sending her sons off to war.

But the situation for women in Ireland is changing. Just since 1990, Mary Robinson, a crusader for women's rights, was elected Ireland's first woman president; Irish women won their highest number of seats in the Dail (parliament); and anti-abortion laws have been liberalized. Since the early '80s, the feminist spirit behind these political gains has been informing the work of Irish women artists, particularly in the Republic. In 1984, the National Maternity Hospital in Dublin accepted Pauline Cummins's offer to paint a mural to be called Celebration: The Beginning of Labor. Cummins produced an exuberant 13-by-foot mural for the hospital courtyard, in which a nude pregnant woman was conveyed aloft in triumph by two large nude round-thighed running women. The mural, which could be seen from the street, occasioned so much controversy that within a week of its completion the hospital's board of directors had arranged to have it whitewashed. As an indication of how the climate has changed, 10 years later the same hospital, on the occasion of its 100th anniversary, invited Cummins to carry out her plans for another celebration of pregnancy and birth. This time she will create a video installation involving sonogram images of a developing fetus, underwater photography of swimming babies and images of dancers responding to the movements of the babies.