Other Litanies is a major exhibition of new work by Limerick sculptor Tom Fitzgerald. After the proliferating complexities of his formidable installation Ephemeral Lexicon, which was seen in Dublin and Limerick in 1995, he has opted for a notably pared down approach. There are just a dozen pieces in the Butler Gallery and many of them are extremely small and compact. It's only when you get to the last room in the gallery that you come upon quite a large work, the global village of Nuclear Family, a community of model houses blooming like flowers on a clump of tree-trunk stems.
Actually, even this piece is fairly spartan in presentation. The houses are blank, uniform, plaster structures, pierced only by doorways into darkness. They are perched precariously at various angles on top of the naturally curving lines of the tree limbs. To underline their fragility, they rest on shelves of glass. Their blank edifices make them seem mute and joyless. Shouldn't there be a slightly more celebratory response to the fact of their existence?
Not to judge by the tone of the exhibition as a whole, which is one of unease and foreboding, perhaps even of millennial anxiety. The first piece you encounter, Mallet, could be a parable about overpopulation. An image of intertwining limbs adorns the end of a mallet, which rests on a beautifully carved marble "cushion". It is in turn inscribed with an outline map of the world and rests on a base of Portland stone and a massive wooden plinth. The complementary properties of object and material that make up the marble cushion imply that the comfortable, accommodating earth is also vulnerable and brittle.
Fitzgerald provides a more direct parable for the fragility of the earth in a small piece that he calls simply Parable. This time the map of the world is etched onto a flower head in a virtuoso piece of slate carving. There follow cautionary tales on famine and isolationism in works that play on the image of the house. It's all fairly prescriptive and even a bit preachy in terms of thematic content, a content that is hardly contentious and has, it must be said, been well aired by now.
Another group of pieces is more ambiguous. They are a few rather un-cloud-like clouds, one each in bronze, marble and limestone. With their hard, bulbous forms they recall nothing so much as Jean Arp's ambiguous biomorphic sculptures. In one of Fitzgerald's pieces, House-in-a-Cloud, an emergent pair of hands bears a house aloft, making for a striking image.
It is a small piece, elegantly carved from one block of white marble, and makes an interesting contrast with the works that he is still probably best known for, the series of Implements And Apparatus. Aptly named, these resembled implements of early technology, variously combining materials like limestone, slate, wood, leather, iron and lead in carved and assembled constructions. With their hinges, levers, hooks and thongs, they looked functional, as if they might be designed for working the land, say, but of course they were not.
They had to do with the kinship that Fitzgerald felt for the people who had inhabited his neck of the woods and left various fragmented clues to the nature of their communal and individual lives, to be recovered and reconstructed by archaeologists. What was striking about the work was the way it embodied a functional aesthetic, unabashedly featuring the nuts and bolts of construction and joining, and placing the human relationship to materials, and to the land, squarely in the context of practical necessity.
Writing about Fitzgerald's work in 1989, on the occasion of his last major show at the Butler Gallery, Paul O'Reilly perceptively cited Mary Shelley's Frankenstein as a point of reference. Frankenstein the scientist tries to create the ultimate work of art, life itself, by assembling a set of body parts and animating them with a flash of lightning.
"Fitzgerald's methods," O'Reilly wrote, "seem to echo closely those of Frankenstein. The similarity lies in the bare-faced mechanical way Fitzgerald articulates the parts, in the disparate nature of those parts and in the brute gesture power threat that inheres in the resulting whole. What if these sculptures were plugged in and became animate? The effect would be awesome."
Well, Fitzgerald has finally gotten around to turning on the current. One of the pieces in Other Litanies, Sky, is an apparatus with an electrical component. It recalls the technology of another age, but one closer than that of our Iron and Bronze age ancestors. It's more like a piece of Victorian engineering. A sealed brass box is mounted on a stand. By grasping twin handles you can tilt it and apply your eyes to two peepholes. The movement triggers a switch that illuminates, with stroboscopic flashes, what looks like the x-ray image of a hand.
The flash is the lightning that animates Frankenstein's creature and the hand is, presumably, that of the creature, the implement-maker, whose conceptual and manipulative skills pose the threats that preoccupy Fitzgerald elsewhere in the show. It's an extremely effective piece, and its impact might be heightened by more subtle ambient lighting. Here, as elsewhere in the show, the lighting, though controlled, still seems quite harsh.
Purely on the level of sculptural craft, Fitzgerald is an exceptional artist. He is active across a daunting range of materials and techniques and seems effortlessly in tune with them all, though he's an especially adept carver. He is a born maker. And what a maker: this is sculpture with a formidable work ethic. Even given that sculpture can be an extremely labour-intensive pursuit, he applies himself with extraordinary industry.
The title piece, Other Litanies, takes the form of pieces of slate arranged in a spiral pattern on the wall. Each is inscribed with the image of an animal or plant, perhaps symbolising an inventory of living things. The format of the piece incidentally recalls the work of British sculptor Richard Long, who often arranges natural materials in simple geometric patterns. His work too, addresses the human relationship with nature.
The difference between them is that Long wouldn't carve the images of animals into the slate, but would opt to let the materials speak for themselves. He is one of the many artists this century who have acted on the realisation that the human conviction that they can improve on nature is generally misplaced. Hence we have the immensely tactful response to the natural world that characterises his work or, for example, that of Andy Goldsworthy or Chris Drury.
As an artist with a conscience, Fitzgerald would surely share their ethical convictions - but then there's that work ethic to consider. Which is not to say that he shouldn't carve and fabricate. That would be to obviate his major strengths. But perhaps, given that the instinct to do so is so strong within him, he should regard it cautiously. His sculpture has always been susceptible to over-elaboration, to succumbing to runaway detail, to unnecessarily specifying layers of dutiful meaning. He can afford to let the spectators do more work. Still, what he does is always compelling, always worth seeing, and, as here, occasionally brilliant.
Other Litanies by Tom Fitzgerald continues at the Butler Gallery, Kilkenny Castle until August 9th.
