Conflicting Spaces
- Rebecca O’Dwyer
A woman walks up to five-bar metal gate, places her hands on two parallel lengths near its centre and swings her legs up to cling onto two lengths on the left. Her body bisects the gate at a diagonal, moving upwards from right to left. Though her feet are entangled in the metal frame, her arms bear the brunt of being in this unnatural position, and eventually crumple under her bodyweight. After falling to the ground, the scene ends, another five-bar gate appears and the woman too. She hoists herself into the same position, more or less, until she falls over again and the process is repeated. On one occasion, her tumble sets off a chain reaction: One gate falls, and the surrounding fence goes down with it.
Rebecca O’Flagherty staged Farmers Gate Frustration (2022) by cycling around the outskirts of her hometown in the north of Ireland, and recreating this action every time she came across a five-bar gate. The gate, after all, can be read both as a point of entry and as an opportunity to emphasise private property and keep everyone else out. Read against the specific socio-political context of Northern Ireland, it might be read as intransigence, an unwillingness to change, as well as a reluctance to work towards the common good. By inserting her body into this context, O’Flagherty prises open a momentary space; bound, though it is, to failure. Expressing but also performing her frustration, the action creates a critical but markedly untenable space.
I am writing this essay from my girlfriend's apartment, built on land that was once the No Man’s Land just inside the eastern perimeter of the Berlin Wall. I’ve seen pictures of the ‘before’ – I think everyone has — have even walked and cycled sections of its former path, its previous visibility now signalled here and there with signs and small markings on the ground. Still, it is now almost impossible to imagine what came before. New developments burst from the ground at speed, further diminishing any trace. Soon, it will be just the same as any other place, and the dividing nothingness — at least in a physical sense — almost completely filled-in.
It is hard not to think about this, now, when I consider Rebecca O’Flagherty’s work, and with it questions of space — how space might be a critical one, or not, and how neither position is ever entirely fixed. What does it even mean to occupy a space that is conflicting? The artists gathered alongside O’Flagherty under this broad category – Artem Trofimenko, Bernadette Keating, Clare Lyons, David Copeland, Pauline Rowan and Richard Gosnold – all try, by various means, to understand this. To use photography or other lens-based media to situate themselves in a contested place, or, better still, to tease open a momentary space of reflection or conflict.
It is a curious phrase, though: conflicting spaces. It is easy to misread. But the thing is, that ‘ing’ implies agency: it is not simply that the spaces are being fought over or in some way contested (conflict-ed) but rather that the spaces are themselves in the process of conflicting. It is definitely not the case that these spaces are being passively acted upon, but rather that they are in active conflict with spaces of other kinds. To me, this definition is much more appealing, because it implies criticality. Just by By beingbeing in conflict with something, they underline imply the an alternative to itpossibility of something other than it.
At its broadest, the artists here appear grouped together on the basis of their shared interest in the notion of place; for some, this takes a literal, spatial quality, while for others, this place is the photographic image itself. All work mainly on the island of Ireland, some north of the border and some to the south of it. In the work of Bernadette Keating (Líne, 2017-2020), in a similar way to O’Flagherty, the border itself is the central idea: not the border separating north and south, but the idea of bordering, full-stop. In examining this, she looks at the hedgerow — that most anodyne feature of the Irish countryside — by tracking and documenting the boundaries of the small Laois farm where she grew up.
In Ireland, our hedgerows are one, seemingly benign, legacy of British rule, inseparable from an aim to split the empire’s land into parts, privatising and rationalising it to maximise yields and profits. Most of these hedgerows were planted following the Enclosure Acts of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. These ensured that land that had previously been in common use of a village, or at least available to its inhabitants for grazing animals or gazing food, became privately owned land, typically with walls, fences or hedges around it.
Taken at night-time, the hedgerows in Keating’s Líne resemble nothing so more as photos taken at a crime scene. Each scene depicts a short length of the hedgerow, and each is divided into two parts by a thin sheathe of tape, rendered luminescent by the harsh and flattening glare of Keating’s flash. Here, bushes, trees and shrubs take on an acidy, lurid and superficial tinge; they look almost too real. Moving from one photo to the next, the eye scans naturally back and forth and up and down. Assuming the legibility of the image, we look for clues — a blunt instrument thrown into the shrub, for example, or a telling scrap of cloth. In looking at Keating’s hedgerows, we become suspicious and wary, and that, I think, is the whole point. Seen this way, they are not natural at all, but instead trace a pointed trajectory of dispossession and loss.
Questions of access and fertility — and specifically, how these questions relate to women’s bodies under patriarchy — are also highly tangible in the work of Dublin-born photographer Pauline Rowan. In her ongoing mixed-media series Under a Vaulted Sky (2017-), Rowan examines a convent and its surrounding gardens, both now scheduled for demolition, along with the newly evicted nuns and her mother, who once studied there. Rowan’s staged portraits have a surreal and almost magical quality. Mother shows the artist’s mother, resplendent in a crown of purple flowers, sitting in a thick wooden chair on the altar of an empty chapel. In another striking image, Altar, the artist reclines on a wooden desk, holding a tree’s leaved branch unfurling from her stomach.
By fusing botanical and religious imagery, Under a Vaulted Sky suggests women’s bodies as just another space — another outpost of patriarchy in general and Catholicism in particular. Similar to the land vis-à-vis its treatment in Keating’s works, women’s bodies are simply another thing to be measured and controlled. Life-giving, but by virtue of this quality, also threatening and in need of being curtailed. In its quiet documentation of a convent being slowly taken apart, Rowan’s series critiques the reality as given by Catholic dogma — in effect, by pointing to the artificial nature of the vaulted “sky” above, which has only ever served for the deleterious treatment of all that is capable of producing life, here on Earth.
Tracking similar terrain, Gosnold’s series, It Starts with Silence is rooted in he and his wife Denise’s personal experience of the cruelty of Northern Irish reproductive law. Despite their legalisation, abortion services remain highly inaccessible in Northern Ireland, with many having to go south or across the sea to England to get the care that they require. Gosnold’s series emphasises that this situation cannot be separated from the religious and political climate of the country. In one image, taken from the road, — taken, presumably, during a journey elsewhere — we see one side of a huge farmhouse building, its facade crowded with words from the King James Bible painted in blocky white type. ‘For God so loved the world,’ it reads, ‘that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life.’
Given the religious climate of the country, pregnancy is shown as a conflicting space; the womb itself a contested territory. Throughout the series, Gosnold’s eye turns repeatedly to the spaces and places he and his wife are forced to move through in their tragedy. They are overwhelmingly cool and banal: we We see medical spaces and equipment; one rather abstract photo, which may be a scan of their baby; a refrigerated box; a fleck of blood on white wool, presumably the blanket in which their baby was wrapped. Throughout, we can make our signifiers of travel. The sea, a plane flying overhead, the view from a car’s passenger seat on a dark rainy night. It appears a restless journey; the couple seemingly passed from pillar to post. However, in this unflinching series, moving in its starkness, pregnancy is not only conflicted and contested as a divisive subject but also the locus of a critical document, a ‘tender protest’. The artist and his wife Denise’s personal tragedy is a chance to critique the places they are forced to travel through.
A similarly ambivalent treatment of place characterises David Copeland’s A Blanket of Woven Shadows (2021), a series of both black-and-white and colour photographs taken in the surroundings of a small town; hazarding a guess, I would say that the place is well known to the artist, and quite possibly his hometown. Much like the title’s unlikely pairing of ‘shadow’ and ‘blanket,' the dark, unpeopled works capture the double meaning of the uncanny; which, in its German original ‘unheimlich’ refers both to the home as well as something secret and hidden. This uncanny, Gothic quality lends the works a distinct sense of unease. Making use of the formal possibilities of his medium, in Copeland’s works the hometown is transformed into something altogether strange and unknown.
Another idea explored in these bodies of work, is the notion of photography itself as a device capable of opening a space for poetry and ambiguity. I am thinking here of the work of Copeland or, even more overtly, of the Cork-based photographer Artem Trofimenko, whose poetic, black-and-white collection Song is Reality resembles glimpses from a barely remembered dream. In them, the contemporary, digital everyday is nowhere to be seen. The time and speed of these photographs is not comparable with our own. When combined with evocative titles – One of us shall stay, for example, or Eyes that dream me — the works invite us into this dream space. However briefly, we inhabit these vignettes, inventing stories and hypothesising connections to make sense of them.
On first glance, Trofimenko seemed to me like an incongruous choice, with little obvious trace of the critical, and sometimes overtly political spirit underlying the rest of these works. However, I then remembered what I know about dreams: According to some psychoanalytic thought, it is not so much their content that matters, but rather the extent to which a conflict or inner struggle is being resolved in them. Then, instead of being places of trivial fantasy, escape or make-believe, dreams are always constructive — places to test out our desires before doing the same in waking life. By this understanding, when I look at Trofimenko’s series, I think about how photography can remake the present and reflect on the thin, almost-nothing sheath of sense separating their reality from ours.
By the same token, Trofimenko also takes up the material quality of the photograph, playing with its physical object-ness — in the work Dislodged, for example — to accentuate its space-creating qualities. This is a similar strategy taken up by the Dublin-based artist Clare Lyons, whose mixed-media series Every Saturday combines photography with tactile organic objects like leaves to reflect on the relationship with her father. Lyons’s photographs are nostalgic and faded; some are printed on leaves or bisected by them. Indeed, Every Saturday emerges from and stays in snapshot-form — a section of frosted glass in His House, for example, or a length of metal fence (Fence) — capturing the partial and fragmented way that childhood is recalled and lives on in adult life.
The space of conflict here is fatherhood, what it means to take on that role and how identity is constituted by it. In the series, Lyons is not exploring the relationship with her biological father, but the man who raised her. In Fist, we see a close-up showing a child’s chubby fingers tugging insistently at her father’s denim shirt. Hands, similarly, shows a child’s hands cradled in those of her father. This recurring motif, again, is about materiality — about a kind of materiality that has nothing to do with genetic inheritance, but rather the real, material fact of continued presence and care. The conflict lies in putting all of these material facts together and accepting that those pieces will never quite fit.
Still, there is no real grand overarching narrative to be gleaned from the works included here. On a formal and thematic level, they are probably as different as they are alike. What we might say, in relative safety, I think, is that they are united by a belief in photography. Perhaps more accurately, we could call it a practical acknowledgement of what the photographic object actually is, namely something that is always a fraught space, as a document of past and present, real and immaterial, and presence and absence. In truth, the photograph is never not conflicted — tugged this way and that, and between here and then. Going even further, we might wager an attempt of performativity that is present across all of these bodies of works. Perhaps, in their difference, each tries to create something positioned in active conflict with dominant modes of expression, systems of knowledge or beliefs, and for it to do something in the world. As photography, impermanence is a given, but that does not stop the fightis no reason to yield.
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Rebecca O’ Dwyer, originally from Tipperary, is currently based in Berlin.
Her writing has appeared in numerous publications, including Paper Visual Art, Source Photographic Review, Art Review and frieze. Rebecca has written texts for exhibitions at the Project Arts Centre, IMMA, Douglas Hyde Gallery, Temple Bar Gallery and mother’s tankstation.
