From Alice Springs to Kanganaman

Irish Arts Review

From Alice Springs to KanganamanAuthor(s): Dorothy WalkerSource: Irish Arts Review (1984-1987), Vol. 2, No. 4 (Winter, 1985), pp. 45-48Published by: Irish Arts ReviewStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/20491828 .

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IRISH ARTS REVIEW

FROM ALICE SPRINGS TO KANGANAMAN

M uch Irish blood flows in the veins of Australians and much Irish

hardship has forged the tough Australian character. Many of the political 'con victs' of the nineteenth century brought learning and education to their English fellows, and the greatest Australian artist of the twentieth century, Sidney Nolan, is a descendant of enforced Irish emigrants.

In the light of this background of Irish involvement in Australia, it was all the more interesting to see the results, in the Taylor Galleries, Dublin, in July,

of a year's stay in Australia by the young Irish artist Michael Mulcahy. He went to Sydney in 1984 as an invited artist to participate in the Sydney Biennial exhibition, which had as its theme 'Private Symbol: Social Metaphor.' This

was a world survey of the wave of figurative and largely expressionist painting which has engulfed the Western art world for the last five years. Mulcahy was selected as the most powerful painter in this particular medium in Ireland.

The -small intense paintings of his first solo Dublin exhibition at the Lincoln

Gallery in 1982 were full of a personal demonic imagery too intensely felt to be surrealist and too imaginatively explicit to be wholly expressionist. The scale of the work increased during the follow ing year spent working on the Beara Peninsula in West Cork, and his second solo exhibition at the Project Arts

Centre in Dublin in 1983 included large wintry land and seascapes, arrest ing images of seamen and fishermen,

many with his own face, centred around the theme of 'The Navigator', a meta phor of the artist's journeys in search of himself, of meaning, and of his struggle for survival. The theme of 'The Navi gator' proved prophetic, for the follow ing year he left for Australia, where his large painting 'At War', depicting a

naked corpse hanging from a tree over an abyss of darkness and night sea, was indeed, if a private symbol, a terrifying

metaphor of the evil and insanity of war. That painting was purchased in Sydney and remains in Australia.

While he was there, Mulcahy travel led extensively across the continent, through the desert and the bush, to the sacred mountain of Ayer's Rock, and to the tropical rain-forest of Queensland.

The desert was no new phenomenon

for him, as he had spent two years living and travelling with nomad tribes in the

Western Sahara in the mid-seventies. He came to understand and to respect enormously the desert Arabs' philos ophy of life, their clear way of looking at essentials, of facing up to the problems of survival in a harsh and inhospitable environment. So much so that when he returned to the satiated consumer society of Western Europe, he found it extremely difficult to adjust to the selfish, shallow, spoilt-child values which waste the earth's resources through ignorance and carelessness. He embarked on a series of provocative street actions almost guaranteed to get him into trouble, which indeed they did.

He found, in the Aboriginal culture of Australia, the same sense of belong ing as he had found with the nomads of the Sahara. "Those people are in touch

with the planet, the land is sacred for them, they know how to hold the world

together." Even in West Cork, Mulcahy seems to have an uncommon bond with nature, effortlessly following the rhythms of time and place, rising with the sun in summer at 4 a.m. and painting till dark, sleeping in a hammock "floating out to the stars." It is not surprising that he found such empathy with a people so close to nature.

His images of Australia commence with the quiet, small, but beautiful desert 'Horizons', acrylic on paper, almost like abstract paintings but that their hot dry colours evoke what one has always imagined the Outback to be. "You go two hundred yards off the track and there's no trace of civilization, just thousands of miles of scrub and bush.

That kind of wildness excites me. You go travelling in the mind. We have no idea of the scale, the physical extremes of somewhere like that." In 1983, in Ireland, he produced a memorable horizon painting, 8 ft. wide by I ft. high 'A boat full of strangers', a sea horizon

of the Atlantic off the Kerry coast, the epitome of the vastness of sea and sky and of the possibilities lying over that western horizon. The desert horizons have the same vast proportions locked into their very much smaller scale.

The mythology of the Aborigines fascinated him; even mor so the fact that it was not something which had occurred in the distant past but some thing which was a significant part of daily life and which breathed a spirit life into every aspect of material life. The

Kidichi Man (or Gadaidja Man) of the Aborigines is the human embodiment of the spirit life, the priest or shaman. He is society's avenger, and, as such, is the arbiter of life and death. He can 'point the bone' at a wrong-doer and the wrong-doer will die, so strong is the psychological power of the custom. The Kidichi Man can change his shape, he is the arbiter of appearance and reality. He can make people see things that are not there, can make the mind travel.

Mulcahy has infused his image with the power of the artist who is also an arbiter of appearance and reality. The single heads of the Kidichi Man, painted in black and white, are among the most

striking and most successful of his

Aboriginal images; the shaman does not wear a painted mask, but paints his face, a distinction which acts subtly on the concepts of reality and appearance.

Impressed by the emotional power, the aesthetic beauty and the psychic intensity of Michael

Mulcahy's paintings in his 1985 exhibition in the Taylor Galleries,

Dublin, art critic Dorothy Walker talked to the artist and writes here

about the man and his work.

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IRISH ARTS REVIEW

FROM ALICE SPRINGS TO KANGANAMAN

Many of Mulcahy's own images of the desert, and of the Aboriginal culture have fluctuating, changing shapes, the ambiguity of the desert mirage, the difficulty of being certain of anything seen at a temperature of 120?F through the perpetual quiver of heat. Likewise the dark, darting jungle, where snakes, trees, exotic flowers, imagined demons, interweave, flow or shimmer in con stantly changing shapes. Irish images flow into the Australian work, like the starfish found on a pier in a tiny West

Cork harbour. The Australian images are so powerful because they seem to be seen from inside the artist's own vision,

with an instinctive understanding of the place. By contrast, Mary Swanzy's paint ings of Samoa, for example, although she enjoyed a prolonged stay. there, are never more than a visitor's cool impress ion of a picturesque South Sea island. Mulcahy has used a rich variety of

media to convey the teeming forms of life of both nature and culture: pitch, bitumen, gold leaf, acrylic, oil, water colour, pencil, graphite, oil crayon, oil pastel, conte crayon, flies, feathers, wool, beeswax, turf mould, and earth from Ayer's Rock. The combination of gold leaf and black bitumastic paint is especially rich and strange; the black paint is so thick that he has carved and incised linear motifs into it, with an effect like carving on wooden shields or masks.

When he went to Papua New Guinea, to the great shrine at Kanganaman, he found an even richer culture and a reverence for the human skull akin to the old Celtic cult. "The skull is a vital symbol of death and rebirth, birth into dream time. For them death means entry into another universe, it's a beautiful and exciting prospect, with nothing about judgment or fears of going to hell. It's a difference in attitude. The skulls are beautiful. They keep the heads of the best priests or shamans when they die and take them out on ceremonial occasions, decorate them with flowers, ask their advice, talk to them." The large painting 'A prayer to the ancestors' is about such a decorated skull, against a ground of warm pink terracotta. Skulls appear frequently in the paintings but not as a traditional Western image of gloom.

Often they are in gold leaf, with quite a happy aspect, and the gold leaf has a

strong formal function in that it brings the surface forward, but at the same time tunnels a volume backwards through the picture plane, adding a dimension of time, of human history, to the painted surface.

All Mulcahy's antipodean paintings are extremely interesting from a formal and technical point of view, particularly in view of their apparent spontaneity.

The use of the black pitch and black bitumastic paint has opened new possi bilities for the exploitation of black as a colour and as a texture, and he has again married Irish spiral motifs with New Guinean traditional carved motifs without forcing either tradition, thereby transposing the carved medium of sculpture quite easily into the painted

medium of canvas. The large painting 'Sepik River as the

sun goes sleeping' combines the land scape, vegetation, animals and artefacts of Papua New Guinea in a superbly controlled but dynamic interaction of images, with a crayonned surface over acrylic, the light, drifting crayon suggest ing the ceaseless scurrying of insect life

while at the same time acting as a purely formal device to unify the surface. A papier colle' image of a face that

dominates the upper area of the paint ing, the heavily incised black paint of the shield-like shapes at the base, the great organic tropical growth like a sea anemone, the half-monkey, half-demon, half-snake rearing up on the left of the painting, and the mysterious dark shape looming behind the whole scene, give a sense of unknown dangers, an unknown

world. It is a most splendidly realized work, a classic painting of world class which will surely end up in a major public gallery; all the technical elements go to reinforce the emotional power and aesthetic beauty of the canvas.

Another superb painting is 'In the beginning', a stunning landscape with huge dominant rock shapes and, in the foreground, a light pale flowery shape

which might have come from under water - the Great Barrier Reef is not far off-shore - or might be an exotic jungle orchid. Bare wind-blown trees bend along the upper part of the canvas. The rocks are like a vastly magnified version of those Renaissance landscapes which form the background to religious scenes.

A natural pantheistic instinct runs through all Mulcahy's paintings whether from Ireland or New Ireland, a sympathy not only with nature and 'natives', with the normal painterly interests of light, colour and texture, but with the inherent spirit of a place; even more

intriguing, with the spirits of a place. The spirits have given him a freedom which has flowed, uninhibited, directly into his method of painting to result in the psychic intensity of the most exciting painting seen in Ireland for

many a long day.

Dorothy Walker

All quotations are from conversations with the artist in 1985.

4

Osmois/Osmosis Mixed media on canvas. 168 cms x 161 cms, 1985

An Sepik le lui na greine/ Sepik River as the sun goes sleeping

Mixed media on canvas. 206 cms x 213 cms, 1985

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From Alice Springs to Kanganaman