Reviewed:
Chung Eun-Mo, paintings, Kerlin Gallery until March 17th;
For the Safety of All, National Photographic Archive, Temple Bar until April 28th (01-6030371)
Chung Eun-Mo's paintings invariably have a strong architectonic element. To all intents and purposes they are abstract, but they evoke real spaces through their combination of geometric patterns of clean, regular lines and the use of a distinctly atmospheric palette. This slightly retro palette of toned down, usually warm colours suggests walls caressed by sunlight, walls with the absorbent textures of stone and terracotta. It all amounts to an unforced affinity with Art Deco and the Italian Pittura Metafisica movement of Giorgio de Chirico, characterised by paintings of strangely evocative deserted piazzas, spaces that invite us to inhabit them. The architectonic qualities of Chung's work can make it good installation material, as a site-specific project she undertook at IMMA some years ago demonstrated.
Her latest show, at the Kerlin, does so as well. Most of the work adopts a circular format, and these paintings are perfectly pitched against just a few rectilinear compositions. Much of what she does in her compositions could be described as spatial play, in the sense that she draws our eyes into the pictures and then proceeds to keep them moving, negotiating and renegotiating the spaces and boundaries that permit and deny access. Maria Vela, in a short poem printed in the exhibition catalogue, pins down the sensation when she writes:
"Never ending, never seen." The pictures are never seen in the sense that what they are pictures of is unseen. That is, the almost tangible spaces within them that never end. The circular format allows some elaborate loops and other ocular acrobatics, yet despite the abiding openness, the sense that one form leads us indefinitely on to another, there is also a curious, poised calmness to the images. Perhaps this is because, with just a couple of exceptions, they are generally centred, orientated against a cruciform axis that allows us to maintain our stability despite being kept, figuratively speaking, constantly on the move. It is in all both a finely accomplished body of work and a fine installation.
It may not be art, but For the Safety of All is a thoroughly engrossing exhibition, comprising some 70 photographs from an archive of 500 donated to the National Photographic Archive by the Commissioners of Irish Lights. The images, of lighthouse stations and the people who worked on them, of islands and the coastal regions, are backed up by some other exhibits, including a boatswain's chair. The chair turns out to be nothing more than a small wooden disc on a rope: fairly sobering when you see photographs of men suspended high over rough-looking seas with nothing more than this basic gadget between them and eternity.
The sea, and the various occupations associated with it, exert a strong and enduring fascination, and what makes this show particularly engaging is that most of the photographs were taken, around the turn of the 19th century, by one man, Sir Robert Ball, a bit of a polymath who also found time to work as an inspector and scientific adviser to the Commissioners of Irish Lights. This involved annual circumnavigations of the Irish coastline to visit some 100 sites including lighthouses, lightships, buoys and beacons, and Ball, as it happened, was a very good documentary photographer who thought all these things worth recording.
The photographs fall into several distinct groups. Perhaps the best, amounting to a kind of journalistic photo-essay, records stages in the construction of the Fastnet Lighthouse between 1899 and 1903. Ball captured the dauntless construction crew manoeuvring some of the more than 2,000 huge, beautifully cut granite blocks into position, using fairly elementary technology, on a vertiginous, weather-beaten lump of rock in the Atlantic Ocean. Those who invoke aliens to explain the Egyptian pyramids and the stone heads of Easter Island would do well to have a good look at these images of a relatively small group of workmen performing a miracle of engineering construction.
Lighthouses and their compounds were usually well-maintained (at least when the inspectors were due to call), and in their oddness, cleanliness and clarity they seem to have dropped mysteriously into the landscape, a quality picked up on by Stephen McKenna in his lighthouse paintings.
Ball also recorded the innovative, exceptionally elegant ferroconcrete bridge to Mizen Head Station, and other highlights include a set of stunning images of the Skelligs, and views of Waterford from the sea. His compilation of albums of panoramic coastal studies was so systematic and meticulous that he must have had it in mind to provide a comprehensive coastal inventory of some kind yet, while his motives were undoubtedly scientific, his project would not look out of place in today's art world in which the huge category of "research" has merged with art as previously understood. The exhibition doesn't need to be assigned artistic credentials to justify itself; it is worth seeing on any number of counts.
One quibble might be that it is not particularly well designed - the images are just arranged in a line along the walls - but this is partly down to the fact that the Archive, like just about every other exhibition venue in Temple Bar, is designed as if exhibitions were at the bottom of the list of priorities, or perhaps not on the list at all.
