A Kind of Nearness Sue Rainsford - Roscommon Arts Centre.
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A Kind of Nearness Sue Rainsford A text in response to: Duality, Margo McNulty
A Kind of Nearness Sue Rainsford A text in response to: Duality, Margo McNulty Roscommon Arts Centre 15th February – 17th April, 2020
Sue Rainsford A Kind of Nearness
*
What trace does incarceration leave behind? Perhaps a hut
worn down to its foundations, or an impression in the earth
where a person spent their days kneeling. Or else; barbed
wire atop a high wall, a broken lock discarded on the
‘The trace is appearance of nearness, however far
ground. These physical remnants might evoke not only the
removed the thing that left it behind may be.’1
fact of a perimeter, but the message that it was a boundary
enforced: one intended to contain.
‘Crossing a frontier is quite an emotive thing to do: an
imaginary limit, made material by a wooden barrier...is
In a human body, we might intuit such traces long before
enough to change everything,
we can give them a name.
even the landscape.’2
The some 2000 IRA men who were interred at the camp
called Tin Town, for instance, upon their release found
‘children...fragile and small scale’3. Having spent years in
1 Walter Benjamin, Arcades Project confinement with only other adult men, a child’s body now
2 Georges Perec, Species of Spaces
seemed incongruously frail.
The somatic connection to captivity, here, feels undeniable
and ineffable in equal measure.
‘There was no builder’s time sheet, but his own body was
record enough.’4
The logic that saw these men shrink away from the slight
frames of children holds, also, that soil might be a vessel
for something other than threaded root and mineral. It
holds that internment might lodge itself in earth and later
resurface in unforeseeable ways, that nostalgia might
solidify in a child’s figurine or heartache sit like sediment
in a body of water.
3 Tim Pat Coogan, The IRA
4 Michel Tournier, The Other Island
6 7
Sue Rainsford A Kind of Nearness
‘This is the emotional history of material.’5
Margo McNulty’s work seems to parse such logic; the
archival processes by which substances store their
impressions away, and how they later divulge traces of the
things they know.
*
‘Perhaps I should say that documenting is when you add thing
plus light...’6
There’s a pleasing dissonance between the cool, drenched
quality of McNulty’s paintings and the monochrome hum of
her prints. The paintings are marked with a kind of halted
frenzy; these are branches that have only just stopped
moving after a storm passed through, each streak of paint
a swathe of atmosphere transposed to canvas. They are
gestural works that push up against their margins, the muted
blues and greens bespeaking damp places that keep their
cool on the hottest days. They feel responsive—reactive.
The prints, meanwhile, are vibratory: these objects are
working to contain repercussions that, although invisible to
the human eye, readily thrum within the lens of a camera.
In their refusal to settle or cohere, they feel like images
we are recalling rather than seeing for the first time. And,
like any recollected image, they have a hazy relationship
to narrative: though much is suggested, no single
interpretation will solidify.
Mother, Margo McNulty, cyanotype, 38x26cm
5 Maria Fusco, Legend of the Necessary Dreamer
6 Valeria Luiselli, Lost Children Archive
8 9Sue Rainsford A Kind of Nearness
But it isn’t weather alone that sets these cross-sections
of landscape pulsing, or a shuddering lens that makes
the prints quiver with partial recognition. Rather, all these
images seem to be in a prolonged, untenable state of
aftermath. There is a sense that, either a decade or a few
moments ago, something potent came to pass and drank
up all the emotive resonance these spaces and objects
had to offer. What they occupy now in an interminable
ongoingness with no ready culmination in sight, only this
steady tempo in which landscapes and domestic items
disclose traces, impressions and slivers of what they’ve
seen—albeit on a frequency the human ear is unattuned to.
‘...if these walls might gain their tongue and begin to speak...a
language by and for walls only.’7
It’s this sense of buried knowledge on the brink of
disclosure, of being nudged toward something we can
suspect or haltingly fathom but never be able call by name,
that produces a feeling of strange proximity in these
works. This is a kind of nearness in which intuition reigns,
but certainty is voided. We see the trace, the aftermath,
but never the root cause—‘the thing which left it behind’8.
7 Fusco
8 Benjamin
Choill 1, Margo McNulty, oil on canvas, 80x80cm
10 11Sue Rainsford A Kind of Nearness
*
We might wonder if the men released from Tin Town,
after being so thoroughly confronted with their own
vulnerability, no longer saw children as children, but as
precarious bodies dressed from head to toe in nothing
but their own fragility. We might wonder if a milk jug
caught between a couple fighting at the kitchen table
might absorb something of their shared fear and passion,
and thereafter shudder with the force of their dispute.
‘Why is it that looking through someone’s things is always
somehow so sad and also endearing, as if the deep
fragility of the person becomes exposed...through their
belongings?’9
Similarly, the varied poetics of re-emergence by which
a substance (natural or domestic, organic or inorganic)
works to divulge the things it knows might be akin to a
vase suddenly and inexplicably cracking, or to an inflamed
heel working to expel a thorn.
Either way, the pleasure of these works is the knowledge
that something has entered our field of vision but still
cannot be seen. The pleasure is the lurking sense we
might yet strike against some eloquent ornament or some
loquacious stone and that—now jolted from its slumber—
it will set about confessing.
‘After all, when they are perfectly sideways...the greatest
surface area of their bodies is visible to me…’10
Choill 3, Margo McNulty, oil on canvas, 80x80cm
9 Luiselli
10 Lydia Davis, Can’t and Won’t
12 13A Kind of Nearness
About Roscommon Arts Centre's
Visual Art Writer In Residence
Visual Art Writer’s Sue Rainsford and Joanne Laws are the Roscommon
Arts Centre’s Visual Art Writer’s in Residence for 2019. During this time,
Joanne & Sue are invited to write critical texts on selected exhibitions and
projects happening across the county. The intention of this residency is to
allow writers to experiment with their writing style and explore new ways of
disseminating their work. Their writings will be available at Roscommon Arts
Centre and online as they are published.
Sue Rainsford is a writer & researcher based in Dublin. Her practice is
concerned with hybrid, lyric and embodied texts, and explicit fusions
of critical and corporeal enquiry. She is a recipient of the VAI/DCC
Critical Writing Award and the Arts Council Literature Bursary Award.
Recent projects include The Freud Project Residency at IMMA, where
she collaborated with Bridget O’Gorman to respond to Lucian Freud’s
assertion ‘I want the paint to feel like flesh’. Her debut novel, Follow Me To
Ground, is available from New Island Books, and she was recently awarded
a fellowship at The MacDowell Colony, New Hampshire.
Margo McNulty was born in Achill Island, Co. Mayo. She studied Fine
Art in Galway and completed her Masters in NCAD, Dublin. McNulty has
exhibited widely over the last few years with solo exhibitions and group
shows in Ireland, Sweden, Poland and the UK. She has taken part in a
number of Irish and international residencies, and her work resides in
major collections nationwide.
14 15Sue Rainsford
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