Tina O'Connell's questioning sculptures and installations mock modern art's tendency towards grandiosity, writes Aidan Dunne
Tina O'Connell makes sculptures and installations that mock modern art's tendency towards grandiosity. But her work is not really about art. It prompts us to question our assumptions about the way things are and the way we see them. In her exhibition at Limerick City Gallery of Art, a pair of beautiful shiny cubes sit on a low plinth. They come across as classic minimalist sculpture. But there is something funny about them. It's as if they are struggling against gravity, sagging - and they are. Made from bitumen, they will eventually subside into glossy blobs.
But you don't have to wait. In the here's-one-I-made-earlier spirit she has provided cubes at a later stage of development. As she says: "You have the seductive surface of the perfect, finished cube. But then you still have that seductive surface when it collapses. I like that in- between space, where you're not quite sure." The work succinctly encompasses ideas about ambition, transience, the impossibility of perfection, the absurdity of pretension and the droll pragmatism of everyday life.
It's hard to look at Peckham Pothole, an imposing block of transparent acrylic indented with the cast form of a humble pothole, from the road outside the artist's home at the time, without thinking of Rachel Whiteread's House and other "negative" forms. Whiteread's work excites much high-flown theoretical commentary, for which it's unfair to blame the artist. It's as if O'Connell is saying hold on, let's not get carried away with all this: a pothole is a pothole. And she often says how matter-of-fact her work is, that what you see is what you get.
She is from Co Limerick, from a place called Bóthar, as flatly descriptive a name as you could imagine, close to Limerick Junction. In person as in her work she had a bluff, no-nonsense manner and a good sense of humour. She studied at Limerick School of Art in the mid-1980s. "There was nowhere here to do postgrad. So you had to leave Ireland. Of course that's all different now." She went to Chelsea, then Marseille. "Chelsea was object-related and France was the antithesis of that. There they'd spend seven years in art college talking about Balzac. They called me Chelsea Baroque and were dismissive of British sculpture, which they saw as being basically derivative of Henry Moore. They were the children of Duchamp and Beuys. The thinking is what was important for them, not the object. It made me question the critical context of my own work." Although her work is characterised by conceptual rigour, she is no less painstaking when it comes to technique. Every material, every process is painstakingly researched and assessed. Often she uses materials in novel ways that entail specialist expertise.
For a decade and more she has been based in London, although she makes a point of spending at least three months of each year elsewhere, including back at home. But she is not overly sentimental about Ireland. "I don't care too much about the geography of it. I care more about how where I am relates to working. London is good for me because I have a good working space, I do some teaching and have it organised so that I have enough time to devote to my own work as well. And Ireland is expensive. I don't think I could afford to live in Dublin now, or even in Limerick." Professionally, London is a tough, challenging environment. "I'm extremely pragmatic about it. You have the whole YBA [Young British Artists\] thing, and to an extent you're always an outsider. I've had solo shows in Ireland, France and Germany but not yet in London."
That happens in April, when she is the subject of one of the Artist Platform exhibitions at the Jerwood Gallery.
Among the pieces in the Limerick show are three huge crystal balls commissioned for the Irish College in Paris. One is strategically positioned in the room that houses the municipal art collection. O'Connell's idea is that the sphere reflects and distorts the environment, in this case the grid-like arrangement of pictures, and in effect refers us back to it. This derives from the fact that, having left Limerick, it occurred to her that, although she thought she was familiar with the gallery's collection, she couldn't recall a single piece.
The sphere works well as a beautiful and enigmatic object deposited in the space - and it does what a great deal of her work does, which is to make us see anew its architectural and cultural setting. The largest work, for example, is almost invisible. A huge tiled floor installed in the new wing, floating above the actual floor, is a platform for a sentence that will be spelled out throughout the course of the exhibition. It is, she says, a "coquettish" tactic to bring people back and make them look again and perhaps ask themselves what it is they are looking at, the words or the platform.
When a tutor at Chelsea asked her where she would position herself in the art world, she was stymied. "I didn't see myself anywhere. But it was a good question." Now she sees herself as part of a generation of female artists who have the potential to change things in the art world. "It's still a patriarchal world out there, but a lot of people aren't really aware of that. I've heard a collector say, well, I won't buy a piece by her because she'll have a child and give up. But I think women of my generation might finally change that perception."
Tina O'Connell is at Limerick City Gallery of Art until February 25th
