HUGHIE O'DONOGHUE'S work is steeped in his family history, in the stories of his mother and father and their families, in their roots in Ireland, in their emigration to England and, especially, in his father's wartime experiences, writes AIDAN DUNNE
Road, the title work and centrepiece of his Galway Arts Festival exhibition, consists of 48 panels. Eventually it will be double that size. "In a way," the artist says, "it's an expanded version of an earlier piece, Anabasis, which is an account of my father's war from beginning to end. Road reaches further back and elaborates on other episodes and experiences."
In fact the first image in the show incorporates a black-and-white photograph of the suitcase his paternal grandfather carried when he left his home in Co Kerry to travel to England in the early 20th century. O’Donoghue, who has the mind of an artist, an archaeologist and an archivist combined, held on to the case, sure he would make use of it at some stage and also appreciating its aura in both personal and public contexts. The humble cardboard suitcase is an iconic object in 20th-century history, bespeaking myriad tales of emigration, displacement and, often, disaster.
Anabasisrefers to Xenophon's classic account from the fifth century BC of a gruelling military campaign against the Persians and a lengthy journey home. Similarly, Roadis like an epic poem and uses as a template the form of a book. It is presented as a series of double-page spreads. Where Anabasisis painted on the opened volumes of an edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica, Roadincorporates the pages of Gramina Britannica,a lavishly illustrated Victorian book on British grasses.
For O’Donoghue, grass implies multitudes, the mass of humanity, and what’s significant about his father’s war is that: “It concerns the happenstance experiences of an ordinary individual, not a mythological hero, not really a hero in the conventional sense at all, but he is heroic, even as he is an Everyman character.”
As James Joyce recast Ulysses as Leopold Bloom, an ordinary Dubliner making his way through a day in the city, O’Donoghue sets his father’s “happenstance experiences” in an epic, mythic framework.
“In using the illustrations of grasses as a ground for the work, I was also thinking of the way people were sacrificed in wars throughout the 20th century,” he says. “There’s an account of the Battle of the Somme in the first World War that describes the waves of troops being ‘mown down like grass’ as they advanced into machine-gun fire.”
O’Donoghue was born in Manchester, where his father, Daniel, worked as a railway clerk. His mother, Sheila, had emigrated from Bangor Erris in Mayo and the family returned there on holiday every summer. Theirs is a not uncommon family history. As with countless thousands of people, his father was drawn into the second World War, serving first with the British Expeditionary Force as a motorcyclist and then, with the fall of France, finding his way back to England via Cherbourg.
Subsequently he was dispatched to North Africa and took part in the harsh Italian campaign. He almost drowned while crossing the Rapido river near Monte Cassino. Despite this, and other close calls, he survived to return to civilian life.
Daniel was an amateur musician, a keen photographer and a regular correspondent and diarist. “He was also a magpie,” O’Donoghue says. When his father died he inherited his archive and found himself sifting through a mass of material, including all manner of ephemera: “He kept everything, even bus tickets from Cairo, concert programmes, everything.”
O’Donoghue didn’t initially set out with the intention of making work about his parents and their lives. For most of the time, he has said, he and his father weren’t particularly close. They tended to be at odds with each other. Yet he was drawn more and more to addressing Daniel’s and Sheila’s stories and backgrounds, not out of some fetish about personal history and identity but because of his larger artistic project. Simply put, that has been to a significant degree the restoration of the human subject in painting, from which it had been exiled not only or mainly by abstraction but also, to oversimplify just a little, by the pervasive irony of postmodernism. In O’Donoghue’s earlier work, this ambition is most clearly expressed in his series of paintings and drawings on the theme of the passion.
Sifting through his father’s possessions and matching bus tickets and concert programmes to photographs, letters and diary entries, he realised, “Looking at the evidence of a life is a way of opening up some meaning.” He began to use documentary material in various forms, not only his father’s but also that gathered through further research, including retracing his father’s steps during the war. He and Anthony Hobbs devised a way of printing photographic images onto a translucent membrane so that, affixed to a canvas, it could become part of the skin of the painting.
He likens the painting process to archaeology, working the surface over and over, unearthing an image within the substance of the painting. “There’s this sense that you keep reworking something, you wear things down to get to an essence.” There is a responsibility to remember, his work implicitly argues, and “through studying the past in a personal way” one can recuperate and restore what has been lost, the memories of lives swallowed up by time and circumstances.
A recurrent motif is the family home, usually a house long since abandoned and given up to decay. “My mother never spoke of Manchester as home. Home was always Mayo. She was afraid we’d lose any sense of a permanent connection to a place: you couldn’t have that to a jumbled up city like Manchester. She and my father really wanted to connect us back to some sort of place in Ireland.” Yet, as his paintings of a one-time family home in Bangor Erris show, it was an unforgiving environment. In its very severity and stark beauty, it was more real than the city; it was somewhere rather than anywhere.
Recently, he found the house his grandfather left in Barraduff, near Killarney, just as it was due to be demolished. He persuaded the owner to give him access to the house and documented it before it was knocked down. "My grandfather was the youngest son: he had to go. It was that simple. There was no livelihood for him there." Roadbrings us back to that moment of departure.
Another series, The Last Summer, also revisits Ireland at the beginning of the 20th century. It derives from a set of glass-plate positives O'Donoghue and his wife, Clare, happened upon at a car-boot sale in Kilkenny. "The photographs are a record of the 18th battalion of the Boys' Brigade at a summer camp in 1909. They seemed to me to anticipate World War I. But they were playing at war, drilling, exercising, practising first aid. It was all a game. It's curiously innocent and ominous when you think of what was to come. They reminded me of those stories about the long, idyllic summers prior to the war, when everyone was lulled into a false sense of security."
The Last Summer, like Roadand most of what O'Donoghue has made in the last 15 years or so, could be described as history paintings, once the most prestigious of the academic genres, latterly discounted until artists such as he and Anselm Kiefer set about reinventing it for our time. "I think what happened," he says, "is that history painting became irrelevant, and it became corny." O'Donoghue ditches any hint of grandiosity and looks to the lives of ordinary people, putting them centre stage.
Roadis an epic. How best should it be approached? "There are elements of narrative to it," O'Donoghue reflects. "And there are elements of documentary. The events are real, the dates are accurate; in fact dates and numbers are really important. But at the same time, it's not a linear story: it's a sequence of episodes. It's a subjective documentary, a poetic documentary."
The Roadby Hughie O'Donoghue is at the Absolut Festival Gallery, Galway Shopping Centre until July 24th