Dreams with history
Catherine Marshall
‘… memory never stops. It pairs the dead with the living, real with imaginary beings, dreams with history’.
Annie Ernaux, The Years (2008), translated into English by Alison L. Strayer, 2017. Fitzcarraldo, 2022, p. 14.
Some artists carry such a burden of responsibility towards the wider world, that the hedonistic thrill their colleagues get from working with their materials in the studio, is, for them, fraught with this extra challenge: it’s not enough to make art to the highest standard you can attain, for them it must also attempt to discharge that responsibility. Margo McNulty is one such artist. Whether she is painting or making photo-etchings her subjects are never simply still-life objects or beautiful landscapes, they are chosen, sometimes, perhaps unconsciously, for the important personal and collective meaning (s), contained within them. Whether overt or perceptible only to those who seek it out, there is always a deeper meaning alongside the retinal impression in her work. She makes prints and paintings. The paintings seem to carry the emotional weight of the artist’s immediate response to the stimulus while the prints, usually in monochrome, and usually in the form of photo-etchings that record the ‘facts’, are like the prose that accompanies but is not defined by the poetry of the paintings.
Cézanne critiqued his friend Monet for ‘being just an eye’ even if that eye could see in an exceptional way. No one will accuse Margo McNulty of being ‘just an eye’. Her retinal images point to the histories embedded within them and McNulty’s vocation is to keep that history present, especially as it relates to the most overlooked cohort of all, the women who fought for their country.. Her project attempts to preserve what others believe impossible. In Anton Chekhov’s play, The Three Sisters, one of the characters, Vershinin, responds to Masha’s anxiety about being forgotten by saying,
‘Yes. They’ll forget us. Such is our fate, there is no help for it. What seems to us serious, significant, very important, will one day be forgotten or will seem unimportant. And it’s curious that we can’t possibly tell what exactly will be considered great and important, and what will seem petty and ridiculous’.
Over three decades now, McNulty has sifted through private and public archives, seeking the things that she hopes will be important, matching an object or a place with the secret histories it contains and while these are highly charged in relation to the individuals whose history they are associated with they also reference the formation of the state, republican and feminist struggle and the impact of civil war. They act as a bridge between the individual and the national struggle, mutely evoking the sacrifices that were made. Pointing to an earlier body of her work, Luke Gibbons noted that, ‘[r]ather than being aesthetically pleasing, the images evoke reproach and guilt; it is the Irish viewer that is put on the spot, for the suffering that took place there was done in the name of the nation’. And to take up Chekhov’s point again, the more marginalised and enigmatic the objects in her work, contrary to Vershinin’s assertion I believe, the more effectively they persuade the viewer that they are important. That only works because of McNulty’s careful selection. She puts time into researching public and institutional archives and family relics, talking to those who hold the memory of the items she has chosen, weighing one object against another before finally creating the artwork.
She paints spontaneously to distill but also to discharge the emotional impact of a place and its history, often in the process providing context for the individual objects that appear in her prints. Her allusions are minimal: the glimmer of circular light projected through a spyhole onto a shabby cell wall in Kilmainham Gaol, all the more powerful because there is never a sight of the ghosts of former occupants, dusky, dust-filled corridors that envelop the viewer, graffitied walls that scream silently as you look at them, no comforting details although a glimpse of garden, in this situation, becomes transformative.
Instead the details spill out of the prints. The process of print-making is particularly appropriate in the context of McNulty’s project, to capture and hold the traces of history before they are lost or rendered meaningless as Vershinin predicted. After selecting an object- a photograph is taken and the prints are made by transferring photographs onto a light sensitive plate that picks up the imprint of the object. Ink is spread over the plate, residues are wiped away and the plate and the paper the image is to be transferred to are run through a roller which compresses them together. The results are at once as personal as a fingerprint and as enigmatic as the prints of the mythical Himalayan Yeti. But the very language of the process is redolent with McNulty’s subject matter in this project to celebrate women prisoners; compression, hidden depth, image capture, borderline, print/imprint/fingerprint. The objects existed already, now the print does too, but it is the artist’s intervention that convinces us that this object is important, and why.
One of her earliest prints, made when studying in Louvain, referenced the Wild Geese, the name given to the Irish soldiers who fled Ireland to continue their fight in other European destinations. In 1991 she submitted a screenprint entitled Free Free State to the Women Artists’ Action Group exhibition at the Irish Museum of Modern Art. But it was not until the noughties that her concern with private family archives and museum holdings, inspired by a residency at the National Museum of Ireland’s Folklife Museum, led her to interrogate the secrets treasured by her own and other families, yet never spoken of because of post-civil war trauma. That concern prompted an investigation and a practice that has been developing steadily ever since. During the government-sponsored Decade of Centenaries (1913–2023) this passion found a number of receptive outlets, - the Kathleen Lynn Insider on the Outside Exhibition, Mayo Collaborative, 2016, Archive at the Linenhall Arts Centre 2017, Duality at the Roscommon Arts Centre 2020 and more recently, Keepsakes at the Jackie Clarke Museum in Ballina, 2021 to mention some of the main ones. Given that lead in, it was important that the Decade of Centenaries should conclude with a project by her exploring the seriously overlooked, hidden histories of women who were imprisoned for political activism and where more appropriate for this than in Kilmainham Gaol, the site of their incarceration? The challenge for the artist is to create work that can resist the weight of history already permeating the building itself.
An important aspect of McNulty’s practice in recent years has been her commitment to collaborating with Redfox Press. This team of two artists, Francis Van Maele and Antic-Ham have forged an identity and an international reputation for their artists’ books. Voices will be their fourth collaboration with Margo McNulty and the rapport between all three is clearly evident in the distinctive books that are made to go alongside her exhibitions. Hailing from Belgium and South Korea, they settled in Achill, McNulty’s birthplace, where she, as a child, was encouraged by the example of another migrant, Camille Souter, to believe that it was possible be an artist even in such an isolated place. McNulty grafted international experience onto that background through residencies in Belgium, Germany, Poland, the United States and Britain but never took her eye off the history of Irish women and the sources from which she drew for this body of work.
Her work, in all its manifestations, proves Annie Ernaux right. Memory is always in the present, it never stops but it takes art to turn living memories of past history into current dreams.