It's rare to find a work of art made specifically with an audience of children in mind. Rarer still to find one that succeeds on that and practically every other level as well. But John Kindness has come pretty close to providing a good example with his exhibition, The Museum Of The Old Lady Who Swallowed A Fly at the Hugh Lane Gallery. The Museum is destined for the new children's hospital at the Royal Victoria Hospital in Belfast, which makes it an inspired piece of commissioning.
The introductory image is appropriately unsettling: a woman with a fly on her tongue. It serves as a prelude to a collection of tall tales of swallowing, inspired in part by a Philadelphia museum that displays some of the less orthodox things that people have managed to swallow. Besides rounding out our vision of the lady with items from her china cabinet, including a fly-patterned tea set (with the co-operation of potter Nicholas Mosse), and some spider-patterned lace (with lace-maker Geraldine Clarke), there is an imaginative inventory of ingestive feats. For the most part these are embodied by means of a technique that Kindness has made his own: recycling broken crockery and various other materials in dazzling sculptural mosaics.
There is the cow that swallowed a horse, the goat that swallowed a dog, the dog that swallowed the cat, the cat that swallowed a hen: you get the picture. All of these, together with a giant china cabinet fly, are not only beautifully made but funny as well. A large part of their appeal is the ingenuity with which the disparate fragments are knitted together. In his Monument To A China Cabinet, Kindness has a field day, shattering and reintegrating a hysterical array of kitsch ornaments in one mad, glorious folly. More conventional materials like bronze are also used in another group of sculptures. These include an Egyptian-looking dog with the arc of a cat's tail protruding from its mouth like a vast gold torc.
As with his Squashed Fly and Chimney Bird frescoes, a sly subversion is involved. Irreverent, distasteful imagery is phrased in the idiom of fine art. In this Kindness is, quite rightly, playing to the gallery. He is an artist for whom accessibility has long been a priority. During one of Aer Rianta's annual arts festivals at Dublin Airport, he invited people to contribute discarded footwear. The response was enthusiastic, and from a veritable mountain of old shoe leather he proceeded to make, on the spot, while chatting to passers-by, an extraordinary sculpture called simply Big Shoe Dog.
During the 1980s much of the content of his work was shaped by events in Northern Ireland - though he lives now in Co Carlow, he is from Belfast. With the guiding idea of an animal allegory, he depicted the conflict in savagely satirical terms. A Monkey Town Besieged By Dogs conflated the siege of Derry with the contemporary situation and cast unionists as dogs and nationalists as monkeys: Northern Ireland as Animal Farm.
The best expression of this idea took the form of a big ceramic sculpture, Monkey And Dog, in which the two struggling animals, inextricably intertwined, made a single spherical shape. His paintings and drawings on this and such related themes as sectarian assassination looked to comic books.
They were undeniably effective but looked heavy-handed by comparison with his sculpture. This is still to some extent true. Though he has made much better paintings in the meantime, sculpture remains his strongest area. He wasn't, however, obsessed with or limited to the North. In Dublin, and then New York (where he spent a year on a PS 1 fellowship) he embarked on similarly satirical projects. When some artists were each given an advertising billboard in Dublin to work with, he adapted the classic John Hinde postcard of two children and the donkey with turf creels, substituting plastic bags of heroin for turf in the creels. For Art on the Dart he made posters advertising such unlikely products as "Food Chip", the all-in-one wall-covering and tasty snack, and "Chumrose", the tinned food equally suitable for dogs and low-income families. Very broad humour, admittedly, but it got the message across.
His New York work retained a satirical edge but was more subtle. He treated the contemporary iconography of the city - using the ubiquitous yellow cabs, for example - as archaeological evidence of a lost, classical civilisation. There was a real mellowing with his Belfast Frescoes, now in the Ulster Museum. They provide a warm, nostalgic account of his Belfast childhood, recounted in a series of anecdotes. He mastered the technique of fresco to make them, the joke being that, like the New York pieces, they are fragments surviving from antiquity. Like his Museum, they manage to be both genuinely accessible and genuinely complex, without patronising their audience in the slightest.
The Museum Of The Old Lady Who Swallowed A Fly can be seen at the Hugh Lane Municipal Gallery until August 23rd.
