Common Thread Maighread Tobin

Common Thread Maighread Tobin 1 Cover: Scratched Ovoid’s, Oil on gesso panel, 52.5 x 61cm, 2019 2 3 Common Thread Maighread Tobin Limerick City Gallery of Art 8th July – 12th September 2021 4 5 Contents Foreword page 10 Common Thread page 12 Niamh Nic Ghabhann In Conversation page 18 Frances McDonald with Maighread Tobin Works page 23 6 7 Landscape, 2020, oil on gesso panels, 122 x 420cm (7 parts) 8 9 Foreword Limerick City Gallery of Art (LCGA) is delighted to host the My sincere thanks to Niamh NicGhabhann for her insightful exhibition, Common Thread, by Limerick-based artist, Maighread essay and to Frances McDonald for her illuminating conversation Tobin. This will be Tobin’s first instituional solo show and will centre with the artist. I also want to thank the amazing team here at LCGA. on her continued passion with gardens. It is timely that we should I wish to thank the wider public whose continued support, in these be coming out of the interminable gloom of “lockdown” to the post-Covid days, allows us to recognise the importance of galleries, lightness of this exhibiton – a veritable Garden of Earthly Delights such as LCGA, for their redemptive role while we navigate our way back to normality. Tobin has worked on this exhibiton over the past three years and within all seasons, and she has studied and extracted materials This exhibition will continue the Gallery's interest in exploring from numerous gardens, made studies and created work inspired works with a botanical focus and conlcude the three-year cycle by the natural environment.The artist has developed a body of which included the work of Karl Blossfeld, Naomi Draper and work that explores a particular environment she has visited many Fiona O' Dwyer. times, the National Botanical Gardens in Dublin. Spending time in this unique environment has allowed her to research a diverse I also wish to acknowldge our main funding bodies; Limerick City collection of tropical plants and other exotic species many of which and Counnty Council and The Arts Council/An Chomhairle Ealaíon cannot be seen anywhere else in Ireland, creating works that will whose financial support enables us to push artistic boundaries and incorporate both oil and mixed media on gesso board. engage with the public in a meaningful way. In realising these paintings Tobin does not wish to recreate Above all I want to extend my sincere thanks to Maighread for botanical accuracy but to experiment with a varied colour pallet, working so generously with us to ensure that we could introduce structures and shapes, ultimately enjoying the experience of this new body of work to a loyal audience and bring her work to the working closely with her twin passions of nature and paint. The attention of others. artist will also investigate the notion of cataloguing the progression of plants throughout the seasons, documenting their changing forms and colours. Tobin is a graduate of LSAD and has recently started painting which is move away from her sculptural work for Úna McCarthy which she has a strong reputation. Director/Curator May 2021 10 11 Common Thread Maighread Tobin Taking a step back, it might seem a little odd that so many artists have spent so much time responding to the natural world. It is, after all, right there (for now, at least). The trees come into leaf, Niamh Nic Ghabhann hum with green, turn red and yellow, crumble, and then return to black spidery silhouettes against the winter sky year after year. The light falls on the waves every day, and they sparkle most of the time. The sun sets, hills roll etc. It would make more sense, in a way, for artists to spend their paint and stone and energy picturing the unseeable – angels, devils, saints, palaces and monarchs, or even exotic scenes that are out of reach for most. And yet, the natural world has always been a subject for exploration by artists – a process of looking and re-looking, of holding moments of observation and experience in time in different ways. The art of the natural world can be seen as a kind of centuries-long conversation between humans and nature, encompassing themes of power, fear, attention, dependence, inspiration, freedom and ownership. This conversation has taken form across many registers – from Gian Lorenzo Bernini’s allegorical sculptures in which women turn into trees, narrowly escaping their attackers, to Christo and Jeanne- Claude’s 1976 Running Fence. In the context of Irish art history, representations of landscapes have been produced in many different contexts, and with different motivations. The early modern maps that traced the contours of the island, for example, were inextricably linked to processes of colonisation, carefully delineating placenames and families associated with specific territories. Birds-eye demesne portraits set the cultivated and civilised grounds of the estate against the savage ‘wilderness’ beyond its boundaries. Picturesque images of genteel poverty in the landscape – bare feet hardly touching the stony ground – were the preference of the art market by the nineteenth century, not to mention images of ivy-clad sculpted crosses and crumbling churches, often lit by a setting sun. By the early twentieth century, the Irish landscape as a subject for 12 13 aesthetic experimentation, refracted through the innovations of Hilary Pyle reviewed an exhibition of Tobin’s work held at modernist ideas, as well as a space to project the dreams and Limerick’s Riverrun Gallery in April 1990, and described her as hopes of an independent nation. All this is to say that by the end ‘a creator of stone pictures’. Writing about Tobin’s career, Pyle of the twentieth century, artists in Ireland drawn to the subject remarked that ‘she starts with slate, limestone or marble, and of landscape in their practice had a raft of competing visions to uses leather or stained wood, sometimes a little paint, to draw contend with.1 Some works, like Kathy Prendergast’s Body Map her abstract designs’. Pyle’s review comments on the resonances Series (1983, IMMA collection) address this legacy head on, while of the natural world across the sculptures in the show – Swallow painters like Mairead O’hEocha break new ground in a landscape with an angular carved pattern that ‘speaks of flight, incessant tradition of formal experimentation and innovation. swooping flight’. She also found ‘medieval, charismatic’ elements within Tobin’s carved work.4 Pyle makes the connection between Maighread Tobin’s body of work is centrally concerned with Tom Fitzgerald’s sculptures in stone and Tobin’s work, and remarks the natural world. Writing about her practice for Limerick’s Hunt that ‘this relating of heraldic or ritual signs with sensual human Museum in 2014, she noted that her work had ‘almost always been elements, even prehistoric mannerisms, is not uncommon among influenced by my deep connection with my garden’, and that this contemporary Irish artists, particularly the sculptors, who are had ‘been a constant source of stimulation’. Tobin described the discovering the secrets and history of stone’. A Limerick Leader way in which the ‘real energy comes from the making; the physical review from June 1990 titled ‘Women artists: good examples’ activity, the sense of exploration which is so much part of the describes Tobin’s work as being ‘made of a variety of materials end result’. Tellingly, she states that her work is never intended (very much a Limerick tradition), and as being ‘suggestive of Celtic as a ‘literal transcription of a particular plant series, but rather a iconography and inspiration’.5 suggested recording of an experience or an observation’.2 These insights into Tobin’s practice are very helpful in tracing connections Thinking about Tobin’s sculptural approach to form in the broader across her the work in different media. From her early work in context of Irish art history certainly connects her to Fitzgerald, and stone and slate, to her more recent paintings, these key ideas are his use of relief carving and careful pattern-making (as in his Family evident – the energetic connection to nature and natural forms, the Fragments (1998) in the Hunt Museum), but also recalls Albert importance of processes and actions of exploration and response, Power’s Connemara Trout (1944, collection of the National Gallery and the act of catching experience, observation and sensation. of Ireland), emerging from a block of irregular green Connemara Tobin’s own words are echoed in Luke Clancy’s description of her marble. This line of inquiry connects her to the work of Dorothy practice as reflecting ‘an apparent desire to turn fish, birds, flowers Cross, in the integration of natural materials and forms in her into hieroglyphic representations of themselves’.3 sculpture, and in their shared concern with experience, physicality, movement and process in their exploration of the natural world. Indeed, Tobin’s striking Mask With Twig (2011), in the National Self- 1 The history of Irish landscape painting was the subject of a comprehensive exhibition, titled Shaping Ireland: Landscapes in Irish 4 Hilary Pyle, ‘Maighread, a creator of stone pictures’, Irish Examiner Art, held at the National Gallery of Ireland from 13 April-7 July 2019. 14 April, 1990, pg. 2. 2 https://www.huntmuseum.com/event/coffee-corner-conversation-at- 5 ‘Women artists: good examples’, Limerick Leader, 23 June 1990, pg. 4. the-hunt/ (accessed 6 April 2021) 3 Luke Clancy, ‘Maighread Tobin’, Irish Times, 12 November, 1997. 14 15 Portrait Collection at the University of Limerick, connects with the patterns. In conversation with Tobin, she described the process work of Alice Maher, Janet Mullarney, and Cross in her combination of building her surfaces – preparing the layers of size and chalk of materials, and in her tightrope walk between the real and the for the gesso panel – and then using this as a plane to excavate surreal.

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