In/Visible, an installation by Eva Mc Cauley
Wandesford Quay Gallery August 24th – September 15th
Detail of Eva Mc Cauley’s installation ‘In/visible’
I am a self confessed print junkie and personally I love combining print and textiles with installation in my own work, so I was really looking forward to seeing this show, and it doesn’t disappoint.
Mc Cauley lives and studied in Ontario, but spends much of her time in Ireland. She works primarily in painting and printmaking.
The work is well situated in this long gallery with it’s strong natural light. On entering the gallery the viewer is faced with floor to ceiling length panels of translucent scrim fabric, printed with large faces. These are staggered one after the other along the length of the gallery like a forest of prints. Each print is visible through the layers of fabric. The further away the faces or landscape, the more vague and ghostly they become, like a journey through time and memory.
The images Cauley uses come from her time spent at an artists residency in Cill Rialig, County Kerry. She became inspired by the village she was staying in which was abandoned in the 1960’s, she say’s ‘ I became interested in the people who lived in this village before it was abandoned in the 1960’s. There is a strong sense of history in this place because of archeological remains’[1]
This awareness of archeological remains is evident within the work, even in her choice of lithography as a medium, as it is a print process using thick limestone slabs, which are imbedded with thousands of years of history in themselves. The artist uses digitally captured images of monoprints and lithographs which she enlarges before printing with a large format printer. The marks and tones captured by the original prints of the faces seems to express the tones and textures of the wild, rocky and windswept landscapes of Cill Rialig and perhaps how these conditions are imbedded in the physical appearance of the people who inhabited this harsh environment.
The larger than life-size faces create a sense of strength and force, bigger that the viewer. This heightens the sense of presence that Mc Cauley is trying to portray as they are lingering and enveloping the viewer, watching from all angles.
With the subtle movements of draughts and people walking past, the panels gently move, which changes and gives life to the entire composition of the installation, like a moving landscape or live portrait.
It is exciting to see an installation in Cork which fills the entire gallery space, which is interactive and evolving constantly through the changes in the gallery environment and the viewers movement through the space.
In/Visible by Eva Mc Cauley runs August 24th – September 15th in The Wandesford Quay Gallery
[1] Eva Mc Cauley, In/Visible, exhibition brochure
Cork Arts Review 