Despite the hackneyed images of Irishness the term 'Forty Shades of Green' summons, an art and crafts exhibition tackles the theme in inventive ways, sometimes sidestepping it altogether, writes Aidan Dunne.
Last year we had Blue, Colm Toibin's chromatically inspired exploration of the riches of the Chester Beatty Library and now, to kick off 2005, we have Forty Shades of Green at the Glucksman Gallery. Curated by Brian Kennedy for the Crafts Council of Ireland, the show takes the "City of Making" aspect of Cork 2005 to heart by bringing together the work of craftspeople and artists in an obliquely identity-defining exhibition. Not quite the full 40, mind you, because the work of three contributors takes written form in an accompanying Coracle Press publication that is a work of art in itself.
It is rash or brave - or both - to take such a cliched signifier of Irishness as a theme, but in the event the implications of the Forty Shades do not seem to significantly preoccupy most of the exhibitors. The notable exception to that is the trio of writers, all of whom buckle down dutifully to explore various aspects of greenness.
Scientist Dermot Diamond's contribution takes the form of a short story, a meditation on chlorophyll and ageing, and a detailed account of the labour and thrill of applied research. Eoin MacNamee's contribution takes the form of an offhand miscellany, a sequence of freeform associations, encompassing "green satin basques and other vintage erotica", Mary O'Hara, "the convention that green as a colour does not suit the Irish complexion" and Green Grow the Rushes O.
Marianne Mays, an academic, offers Notes Towards an Ecocriticism of Irish Art and Craft. Hers is actually the keynote piece in the publication, not least in that it offers a way of looking at the show as a whole. She acknowledges the colour green's status as a symbol of Ireland, and the factual basis of the symbolism: Ireland is very, multifariously green. But then she leapfrogs over a brief historical account of the significance of green in relation to an emergent national identity to land in the middle of a much thornier issue altogether: Ecology Green. In the traditional Bord Fáilte view we flatter ourselves on our environmental values. That pervasive green stands for something more than leprechauns and Paddy's Day - it stands for the unspoilt character of the Irish countryside, the qualities that draw people here.
She is tactful, but let's face it, there is nothing very green about the Celtic Tiger. A history of widespread corruption in the planning process, an erratic approach to planning issues, water pollution by industry, agriculture and sewage, systematic illegal disposal of refuse, general litter, a curious and callous indifference to the quality of rural Ireland: she has a long list to draw on, and everything on it has rather dented our vision of ourselves as somehow untouched by the environmental depredations of modernity.
One can see the day when the Emerald Isle might be redefined as an illegal landfill site on the edge of Europe. Mays outlines an argument that sees environmental responsibility as a component of artistic responsibility, and espouses an ecocritical approach to art and craft - not an exclusive approach, she emphasises, but an integral one, as an essential strand of broad contemporary critical discourse. An acknowledgement that art and craft inevitably place us in relation to the wider environment and can be viewed in that light. It's a reasonable point, reasonably made.
Given the involvement of the Crafts Council, it's not really surprising that on the whole the show leans towards craft work. This impression is heightened by the work of several of the artists, employing woven or modular patterns and forms of one kind or another.
One would think that craft workers, designers and makers enjoy a certain inbuilt advantage in terms of Mays's ecocritical approach. For the most part, they employ natural materials and apply venerable techniques. It seems reasonable to presume they are more attuned to the wider context than the average Celtic kitten - that urbanised species, at home in a world of consumerism and commodification, well insulated from the elements. Yet the temptation to sketch out a stark polarity should be resisted. Craft workers live in the real world, and that involves compromise.
Alison Fitzgerald's woven willow baskets maintain a tradition that reflects an elegant balance of form and function, while Joe Hogan's work quizzes form and function to explore the nature of both. One could look at the work of wood turners Glenn Lucas, Liam Flynn and Roger Bennet in similar terms. The question of innovation arises with the last two. In a sense Fitzgerald's baskets, which rehearse traditional forms, simply cannot be bettered. But neither is there anything wrong with pushing the boundaries. Problems tend to arise when craft is enlisted to fulfil some fashionable aim, to be self-consciously contemporary. Woodworker Laura Mays marries the demands of convention and innovation beautifully. Perhaps the more versatile the medium the harder it is to come up with viable novelty. To attempt any practical skill is to enjoy a crash course in the abilities and ingenuity of those who have gone before you. Ceramics is a case in point. The established forms and methods have a centrality and persistence that is astonishing, and yet they allow continual scope for difference.
Fine artists enjoy exceptional freedom in that they are no longer tied to particular media or forms. But again, a persistent concern for natural process and context is apparent in much contemporary art. Martina Galvin, for example, knits wire filament into what could equally be described as three-dimensional drawings or low-relief sculptural pieces. They evoke networks, systems fabricated or evolving and craft and natural processes. They are beautiful. In a similar vein, Maud Cotter creates modular systems that might be delicate or robustly invasive, pieces that might extend indefinitely and, as she puts it, "break free of the containing order and run wild".
Michael Boran's photographs of both the naturally occurring and the manufactured repeat patterns, including the honeycomb of shrinking mud in a dried out rive bed. Similarly, Remco de Fouw's extraordinary photographs of water patterns, made without the use of a camera by immersing photographic paper in flowing water at night and illuminating it, are a striking record of unnoticed complexity, of incredibly involved overlapping networks of line. They are comparable to the shimmering light that animates from the intricate surfaces of Anka McKernan's merino wool scarves. Christine Mackey's drawings, with their emphasis on repetitive actions and the lived experience of making something, appeal to the practises of several crafts. Clodagh Emoe's drawings, which take as their subject our attempts at orientation in a context without viable limits are, along with their other qualities, ecocritically spot on. They have a sense of wonder and mystery about them. And where, they seem to ask, do we think we are?
Forty Shades of Green is at the Lewis Glucksman Gallery, University College Cork