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BETH O’HALLORAN is a Dublin based visual artist working primarily through painting and photography. She has exhibited widely in Ireland, the U.S, London and Japan. Recent solo shows include Acadia Diamond Mist, The Lab, Dublin, and In Like a Lion… Out Like a Lamb, Basement Gallery, Dundalk, both in 2006.
Beth O’Halloran was Stone Gallery’s nominee for the Louis O’Sullivan award (in conjunction with ART 08) in May 2008. Below is her statement on the work presented for this award. Work presented for this award included Atomsmasher, 2008, Remote Viewer, 2008, Uncertainty Principle, 2008, Smaller than the Smallest Thing, 2008 and Isolated Events, 2008.
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Beth O’Halloran : Statement 12 April 2008
Within quantum mechanics, the study of matter at an atomic level, we have come to understand that “physical reality has revealed all the aspects of a transcendent reality; with non-material entities at the basis of material things.”1
My practice has long been concerned with exploring the dichotomy between the physical and the abstract using a multi-disciplinary approach. This most recent body of work marks a more detailed enquiry by incorporating a rudimentary study of certain basic principles of quantum physics and an interest in the Japanese aesthetic paradigm wabi-sabi. An essential principle they share is addressing the insubstantiality of matter. Quantum mechanics explores the very fundamental dematerialisation of all things to their elemental, universal point. Wabi-sabi is a 400-year-old Japanese aesthetic ideology that emphasises the merits of the imperfect, impermanent and incomplete in both physical and metaphysical terms and extols immateriality as an ideal.
The work presented is two-fold: a series of large black paper-based images made by perforating a series of personal photographs, and a series of paintings on crude blocks of wood. The latter address the physical by placing emphasis on the ‘object-ness’ of the painting surface and the ephemeral or immaterial by the choice of subject matter, palette and media. The aim is to address ideas of matter in flux - “as wabi-sabi is defined as a constant, never-ending state of becoming or dissolving.”2 The paintings are comprised of diluted paint, muted colours, and pencil marks. The paper pieces are a configuration of dots which echo imagery of atoms and the patterns formed reference images from the quantum physics ‘double-slit’ experiment which proves the duality of light - as the results showed that light can behave as a particle or a wave at the same time - hence illustrating a duality at the heart of physicality.
Wabi-sabi aesthetics looks to colours, which come in an infinite spectrum of greys but also in the “light, almost pastel colours associated with a recent emergence from nothingness. Imagery/objects have a vague, blurry or attenuated quality. Once-bright, saturated colours fade into muddy earth tones or to the smoky hues of dawn and dusk.”3 The imagery depicts delicate traces, feint evidence at the cusp of emergence or dissipation which addresses immateriality as an ideal - things on the point of dematerialisation in their fragile, desiccated state.”4
The wooden blocks are re-cycled scaffold planks and were chosen for their histories of use and misuse. They are rough, irregular and ostensibly crude which “accommodates to degradation and attrition”5 and the 22 x 34cm dimensions are slightly awkward. The variegated quality of the dots in both the paper pieces and paintings emphasise the imperfect, and the spaces between the dots and painterly marks are of equal importance as reference to the possibility of nothingness itself being full of potential rather than a nihilistic state.
1 Bruce Gregory, Inventing Reality: Physics as Language, Wiley Science Editions, New York, 1988
2 Leonard Koren, Wabi-Sabi, Stone Bridge Press, Berkeley, California, 1994
3 Ibid.
4 Ibid.
5 Ibid.
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Acadia Diamond Mist
Beth O’Halloran’s work touches on the almost untouchable. The bare silhouette of a place. Nordic temperatures permeate a vapour-white fog. Trees barely (in)substantial are lost in a veil of near nothingness, their blurred shadows hint at presence, we are somewhere, not yet nowhere – a space in between. O’Halloran’s photograph suggests the possibility of seeing what is not physically there, a slice of time captured by a high shutter-speed film produces a grainy abstract surface. The scene suggests both distance and immersion, some place is faintly hinted at, it appears far-removed yet seems all around, it contains a fleeting presence we sense more than see. Horizon, air, water are indistinguishable. It is atmosphere not place. Memory seized before the remembering. The artist’s photograph embodies and captures a mysterious relation between world and self. Her camera, as an arm of consciousness1 produces a scene of absence within presence, or perhaps, more precisely, of presence in absence. The stilling of time carries here a mood of loss, of melancholia. Her photograph moves beyond evidence of outward experience, of the something concrete, to touch on an inner meditation, the not-there. Not visible. Near-silent. The diffused almost empty scene suggests a moment of transition. A threshold. A dream-like place, perhaps a space before death.
The photograph is taken in Acadia– a heavily wooded coastal region of North America. A sublime landscape. A place to walk, to think, a place to go to deal with what the artist describes as an anxious waiting. It is a place to become disorientated, lose bearings. The ritual exercise of walking and photographing becomes a method for dealing with a personal crisis and opens a space for what she calls ‘a deep yet detached attentiveness’. It enables a proactive engagement with a loss before the actual loss, and the return of, and remembering of previous losses. It is as if the ‘repeated’ walk, always to the same place, continuously performs a rehearsal for loss.2 The photographic image imbues distance. As a translation/representation of what is physically present, reality always remains detached. It is semblance not mark3. And yet, this photograph seems to move beyond its representational capacity and filters something deeper within. If a sense of solitude, of grief pervades perhaps it is an incalculable communication of unconscious states - a making present the fact the unpresentable exists4. Within this space O Halloran creates something profound and worthy of fuller exploration. Without intention, this photograph snapped while walking, becomes the source for a new body of work Acadia Diamond Mist.
Acadia Diamond Mists was exhibited in the LAB, Dublin City Council’s new gallery space, in 2006. Consisting of paintings, sculpture, collages and the photographs. All the work is made out of the series of photographs taken during this time – the last weeks Beth would spend with her dying mother. The intensive use – reworking, recycling, reproducing - of the photograph reflects an obsessive desire to make the most of this material, to distil its memory further, to make something tangible, multilayered, to introduce translucence. Darkness encountered and traversed becomes a source of new light – a Black Sun.5 Thus O’Halloran hones into sections of the photographic print, dawn’s speckled-light surface is copied in paintings; a sculpture, the same height as her mother, is made from scaffolding planks piled in a stack - their thick edges dribbled with paint echoing the colour of sunshine - the utilitarian altered, the ordinary transfigered; and photocopies, scanned from the photograph, are produced in order to make collages, without destroying the original finger-stained prints. The paintings - small in scale - are brought to the point of near abstraction. They are of pure-weather, air, water, atmosphere, the different light changes in a day, creating a liminal space, without depth or definition. Their surface, a gentle transformation from orange into soft-red, the nuanced tones within turquoise blue. Weather’s rhythms are quiet movements here– the scattered pattern of tiny particles - diamond mists in air, or specks for stars that are light-years from now. In these intimate yet distant scenes, O’Halloran’s cathartic process opens a space for contemplation, a meditation perhaps, on our interconnection with matter, that we are made of the same flesh as the world,6 transcendent and immanent. The collages - perforated photocopied paper placed between sheets of tracing paper - are like ghost-marks in ice, their insignificant traces, faintly coloured perfect little circles, will (we imagine) fade.
Beth O’Halloran has been inspired by the Latvian painter Vija Celmins whose paintings are closely nuanced engagements with nature - oceans’ surfaces, night skies with stars, or the surface of the desert - mediated through photography she keeps as an archive of broken-surface images.7 And the writer WG Sebald, also a devoted photographer, who scatters photographs throughout the pags of his books. His suspended narration creates prose of extreme sensitivity, melancholia, of a perpetual uncertainty, teetering on the edges of an infinite tedium. It has been said of him ‘he writes like a ghost.8 Like Celmins and Sebald, O’Halloran possesses an acute sensibility; an ability to make work on the edges of tedium, to find in dreary weather or in the tiny particles of matter, an inner depth, an infinite space. In these minimalist and spare works, O’Halloran creates something almost stilling – a strange quiet, a perfect moment between mania and despair - perhaps an authentic acceptance of ‘being-towards-death’.9
Clíodhna Shaffrey
December 2006
1 Susan Sontag, On Photography ed. Penguin Books, 1977, p.4 - Photographs are real experienced captured and the camera is the ideal arm of consciousness in its acquisitive mood”.
2 The reference here is to Peggy Phelan’s suggestion that the psychic needs to rehearse for loss especially for death. See Peggy Phelan Mourning Sex, Performing Public Memories, Routledge 1997, p.3
3 Walter Benjamin, Paintings, or Signs and Marks in Selected Writings, Volume 1, 1913-1926. Ed. Marcus Bullock and Michael W. Jennings, p.84. ‘The mark is always absolute and resembles nothing else in its manifestation”.
4 J-F Lyotard, The Sublime and the Avant Garde, p 97
5 The reference to Black Sun is taken from the writings of Julia Kristeva, as referenced in Richard Kearney’s Strangers Gods and Monsters, Routledge, 2003, p 176 – The melancholic imagination struggles with extremes of mania and despair, succumbing to inner dark or turning it into song - the black sun can swing either way. If we embrace our mortality of limited-experience of irreversible loss, we can transform the disease of melancholy into healing insight.
6 The reference here is to Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology in The Visible and Invisible - here –Merleau-Ponty talks of the body as “flesh’, made of the same flesh of the world, and it is because the flesh of the body is of the flesh of the world that we can know and understand the world’.
7 Robert Gober, Vija Celmins, Phaidon, 2004
8 Geoff Dwyer – The Threepenny Review – A Symposium on WG Sebald
9 M. Heidegger, Being and Time, section 42., trans. J. Macquarrie and E. Robinson, Blackwell, Oxford, 1973.
