The Sympathy of Things:
Margo McNulty’s Duality

Luke Gibbons

2020

The leaf of nature detaches from the object and rejoins our total being,

- Maurice Merleau-Ponty

In this age of environmental awareness and the Anthropocene, one of the most remarkable discoveries about the life of trees is how they look out for each other, even if we do not always look out for them. A healthy tree, as the renowned forester Peter Wohlleben has shown, will send nutrients to a struggling or endangered neighbouring tree through fungus tunnels extending from its roots. Trees in forests all join branches, as it were, underneath the ground, the leaves above, in James Joyce’s words in Finnegans Wake, whispering and ‘speafing’ to each other.

Margo McNulty’s exhibition Duality is a visual experiment along these lines, wondering if we as human beings could ever share the same underlying connective tissue, while going about everyday life in our own separate ways. The first thing we notice about the painting series Choill, as in coillte for forest, is how the branches and tendrils of trees can look like colour transparencies, the veins of light, line and colour seeping into their surroundings. To some extent we could be looking inside arboreal life, at the respiratory system of chlorophyll circulating within leaves and branches, giving life to all around it.

This dialogue between inside and outside, above and below, now and then, here and there, is perhaps what is signified by the title Duality – the suggestion that there is always another side, another aspect, to what we encounter. The impression of liquid and translucence found in water colours adds to the shifting boundaries, giving the impression that we too are always in circulation and should not be fixed or set in our ways.        

Trees might appear rooted on the spot – as in W.B. Yeats’s ‘great-rooted blossomer’ – but in another sense, as Yeats also noted, they sway to music and branch out, making contact, and sheltering each other from the storm. What appears to be still may, however imperceptibly, be on the move: it is for this reason that the enigmas of still-life, the slow motion of objects in time, also forms a central part of this exhibition. In two still-lifes, photographs filtered through the process of photo-etching come to resemble the aura of early photography, the halo around objects throwing shapes as if light and shade are taking their time. Several images, of a blue pressed-fern or the intricate lacework of a family heirloom, are cyanotypes, impressions left directly behind by filigrees of light.

In one photo-etching, Coill, tree branches in the left and right foreground frame a mass of leaves and foliage as dense as the black medium of the ink of the print. The darkness is not by accident: these are trees beside the home of Aeneas McNulty interned in Tintown at the Curragh Camp during World War II, and who died tragically soon after his release. In a previous exhibition, Archive, one photograph featured the shadows of those trees on the gable wall of the McNulty house. There is an image of an arum or lily in this exhibition, an emblem of the cause for which many were interned but also of the innocence that goes with internment, imprisonment without trial. Shadows cast by time are a central concern, taking on what might be seen as a material form in the corrosion of rust, the unmistakable sign of the unremembered or those left behind by history.

 ‘I still wonder why rust is more on display in North America than in Europe or Japan,’ writes the eminent critic Jean-Michel Rabaté, perhaps thinking of American rust-belts, but clearly not taking into account cobwebbed corners of sheds in Irish farmyards, not to mention back-lanes of the countryside and bypassed towns. Seamus Heaney describes climbing as a young boy to the top of a dresser which acted as the last refuge of cast-offs, objects deprived of a second chance:

when I managed to climb up there, the yellowing newspaper on the putty, the worn down grains of the sharping-stone, the bent nails, the singed ends of wicks, the dust and stillness and rust all suggested that these objects were living a kind of afterlife and that a previous time was vestigially alive in them. They were not just inert rubbish but dormant energies, meanings that could not be quite deciphered.

Heaney’s evocation, and both Shauna Gilligan’s text and Margo MacNulty’s art in this exhibition, seek to decipher these oxidized forms, retrieving them from their untimely ends. When, as William Blake put it, the mind forges its own manacles, metal fatigue might have its advantages, the wear and time of time reminding us of the duty to remember.

Tintown, the popular name for the Curragh Prison camp, was a home for the forgotten even before the rust set in. This is suggested by several images in the exhibition of the flaking, galvanized walls of the Glass House detention centre, and the barbed wire on a wall leaking from neglect. One of the few high-definition images testifies to an experience when the reality of being inside is all too clear, behind the grid of prison bars (but with a kind of letter box space at the bottom, as if expecting something in the post). A similar image of a window grille is thrown by reflection on what appear to be rows of mute piano keys, bearing out Joyce’s definition of a piano ‘as a ‘coffin of music,’ until brought back to life by the sleight of hand on the keyboard.

In this exhibition, discarded objects are given a second hearing so that, in Shauna Gilligan’s words, we ‘dream a backward dream,’ bringing back memories from, or maybe to, the archive of the overlooked. A surveillance tower looms large until we realize that it is made by a child, and brought down to size. The child seems to appear in another image as an isolated figure in a field of vision but scale again calls for a second look: it is a figurine from the Curragh museum, illuminated on a window ledge.

 Part of the ambiguity of rust lies in the ecology of recycling: rust never sleeps, in Neil Young’s famously words. The word ‘rust’ comes from the same word for ‘ruddy’, i.e. red: it is in the iron in our blood that gives it its colour, and keeps it in circulation. This recirculation is also found in the external world, decomposition and weathering bringing even the strength of iron down to earth, from whence it came in the first place. As with the trees of the Choill series, Duality develops its own ecosystem in gallery space, and as we walk around, we would do well to remind ourselves that the images on the wall may also have their own subterranean ties, communicating with one another under our feet. 

Luke Gibbons

February 15, 2020.