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It is impossible to express in words the shock and sorrow we feel in Na Cailleacha at the sudden death of Helen. So we are reproducing here an essay about her, published on the occasion of her solo exhibition at the Kilkenny Arts Festival in 2021.
Making sense of the Maelstrom, The Nineteen; new work by Helen Comerford
But at certain moments and on certain subjects,… painting’s muteness gives it a peculiar advantage over the spoken word.1
Paintings present as mute objects for contemplation. But their muteness should not be. confused with silence. Indeed paintings can often appear noisy, even clamorous (think of Delacroix’s Liberty at the Barricades, or Roy Lichenstein’s Wham), but the painting itself remains mute and separate, hugging its secrets to itself. It may even present a trail of clues to its meaning but our interpretations will never be confirmed by the painting, and only occasionally by the artist. Kant believed that the actual artwork emerged from the space between the object and the individual viewer, and did not reside fully in the object but rather in the rapport between it and the receptive viewer. It, therefore, offers something different to all of us, tantalising with its mystery, but giving the perceptive viewer the precious gift of something quite unique each time we look at it. And muteness can be electrifying, or provocative, dynamic as well as soothing, inspiring or celebratory.
All of these thoughts surfaced for me when looking at The Nineteen. The title’s absolute denial of adornment and its abstract nature are entirely in keeping with Helen Comerford’s down to earth approach to making the work. Yet there is nothing matter of fact about the paintings, and why nineteen? It’s an unusual number for a group of paintings and it doesn’t appear to have any widely recognisable symbolic or mystical connections. Did the artist run out of steam at nineteen? Hardly, because the choice of a number as a title suggests a deliberate sequential and finite arrangement, ( nothing random, such as Untitled (no. 1, 2) etc.) especially as the first and last paintings seem to read as a natural beginning and end, while the careful viewer will note internal references that suggest a placing leading to and away from a centre point. The Nineteen were begun by Helen Comerford in 2019 to parallel an emotional and intellectual mapping of creation but were developed and completed during the long months of Covid 19 lockdowns in 2020 and 2021. Any reference to the naming of this strain of corona virus and the title of the series is purely coincidental. What is not coincidental is the increased intensity of the artist’s connection to the wider cosmic narrative during the long periods of isolation, fear, self-questioning and contemplation imposed by the pandemic.
Children used to be told they were born under a head of cabbage. Comerford was always told that she was born in a mill stream near the generations-old, family bakery business in Thomastown, Co Kilkenny. On the evidence of The Nineteen you would be forgiven for thinking that ‘born in a maelstrom’ is an even more appropriate origin myth.
Making sense of the Maelstrom, The Nineteen; new work by Helen Comerford
But at certain moments and on certain subjects,… painting’s muteness gives it a peculiar advantage over the spoken word.1
Paintings present as mute objects for contemplation. But their muteness should not be. confused with silence. Indeed paintings can often appear noisy, even clamorous (think of Delacroix’s Liberty at the Barricades, or Roy Lichenstein’s Wham), but the painting itself remains mute and separate, hugging its secrets to itself. It may even present a trail of clues to its meaning but our interpretations will never be confirmed by the painting, and only occasionally by the artist. Kant believed that the actual artwork emerged from the space between the object and the individual viewer, and did not reside fully in the object but rather in the rapport between it and the receptive viewer. It, therefore, offers something different to all of us, tantalising with its mystery, but giving the perceptive viewer the precious gift of something quite unique each time we look at it. And muteness can be electrifying, or provocative, dynamic as well as soothing, inspiring or celebratory.
All of these thoughts surfaced for me when looking at The Nineteen. The title’s absolute denial of adornment and its abstract nature are entirely in keeping with Helen Comerford’s down to earth approach to making the work. Yet there is nothing matter of fact about the paintings, and why nineteen? It’s an unusual number for a group of paintings and it doesn’t appear to have any widely recognisable symbolic or mystical connections. Did the artist run out of steam at nineteen? Hardly, because the choice of a number as a title suggests a deliberate sequential and finite arrangement, ( nothing random, such as Untitled (no. 1, 2) etc.) especially as the first and last paintings seem to read as a natural beginning and end, while the careful viewer will note internal references that suggest a placing leading to and away from a centre point. The Nineteen were begun by Helen Comerford in 2019 to parallel an emotional and intellectual mapping of creation but were developed and completed during the long months of Covid 19 lockdowns in 2020 and 2021. Any reference to the naming of this strain of corona virus and the title of the series is purely coincidental. What is not coincidental is the increased intensity of the artist’s connection to the wider cosmic narrative during the long periods of isolation, fear, self-questioning and contemplation imposed by the pandemic.
Children used to be told they were born under a head of cabbage. Comerford was always told that she was born in a mill stream near the generations-old, family bakery business in Thomastown, Co Kilkenny. On the evidence of The Nineteen you would be forgiven for thinking that ‘born in a maelstrom’ is an even more appropriate origin myth.
The paintings in the group, each one metre square, heavily encrusted and textured, chart the parallel stories of emerging human consciousness in the context of cosmic development and of endurance and celebration during the silence and loneliness of the lockdowns. But just as James Joyce used the epic story of Odysseus to give structure and significance to Leopold Bloom’s journey across Dublin on June sixteenth, 1904, so Comerford drew on Rudolf Steiner’s Anthroposophical account of creation to give the pandemic experience more universal significance. Having found the narrative framework however, Comerford abandons all literal reference. As she describes it; ‘In order to avoid meaningless decorative abstracts my starting point has to be clear and deeply meaningful to me. My struggle is then to get rid of the narrative and penetrate to the essence.’2
Modernism’s urge towards abstraction, or more precisely, non-figurative representation was, of course, a reaction against traditionalist hierarchies in which the visual arts were seen as secondary to literature and narrative, while within the visual arts, history or subject painting was still perceived as more significant than other disciplines, such as portraiture or landscape. Comerford’s reaction to Modernism took her a step further; inspired by Eva Hesse, she was one of the first artists in Ireland, to use abstraction as a strategy for social comment, in the process, challenging the empty formalism of patriarchal models. Pointing to the female allusions in Comerford’s hemispherical shapes and her proclivity for working in series, Dorothy Walker noted a ‘strong balance between an abstract numerical idea [and] a seemingly soft natural form’.3 Already by the late 1970s and early 1980s Comerford’s feminist, non-representational and numerical concerns were well established..
The mill origin story is of some importance, since Helen Comerford grew up in the precincts of her family’s bakery, virtually on the banks of the Nore river, where she spent much of her early years contemplating the energy and flow of the water and the accumulations of time on the stones of the bridge that spanned it. Fascinated by both movement and materials, and the daily experience of grinding, kneading, stirring, rising, shaping and baking that was the ubiquitous life of the bakery, it is not surprising that she opted for sculpture as her discipline of choice at NCAD, and later at art college in Belfast and Utrecht. Seriously underwhelmed by art education in Ireland in the 1960s, she was particularly drawn to Eva Hesse’s experiments with materials, pre-existing objects and previously derided practices associated with women’s work, such as knitting and cutting. When she returned to Ireland and struggled to combine child care with art practice, the feminist activism of Judy Chicago and Mary Beth Edelson offered further decisive alternatives to the kind of art produced by the male orientated artworld there in the 1970s.
Her first solo exhibition at the Taylor Galleries in 1980, The Bag Pieces, attracted the attention of Dorothy Walker for their evocations of gestation, seams and wounds. For this body of work she had begun to use translucent bags, to bring light into her work and to allude to the female form. Instead of carving, casting and chiselling she turned to tearing, gluing, and stitching, and used muslin, torn paper, resin, straw and other ubiquitous materials to make her sculptural wall hangings and installations. Circle of Women an installation made up of 8 female figures, some without backs, some frontless, and installed in the landscape was made in response to the nuclear explosion at Chernobyl. It was made from papier maché, a natural extension of her work with torn paper, and a sculptural material that retains a sense of lightness and softness. Critical attention was unwaveringly positive, earning her GPA awards and a place in Lucy Lippard’s prestigious touring exhibition Crossroads, Divisions, Turns of Mind (1985), which was designed to inform American audiences about what avant-garde Irish artists were doing at the height of the Troubles.
Maintaining a sculptural practice, especially if you use unusual materials, brings its own challenges. Through all of this, her dogged pursuit of her vision and her practicality ring through. A lot of artwork is cut down or recycled for lack of storage. When asked about the current whereabouts of a particularly powerful installation, And Yes, Yes, Yes, (Molly Bloom’s Room), shown at the Butler Gallery in 1983, she remarked, matter- of -factly, ‘oh it’s gone now, it was eaten by goats.’ But disasters such as this and storage and transportation problems for sculpture, may have prompted her to make her shrine-like, protective cases, designed to be seen from directly in front or above, for a series of extraordinary, three-dimensional torn paper works, loosely based on natural forms, such as shells, snails and insects. Ultimately this road also led to her use of encaustic and to make paintings that are really sculptures in paint. The Nineteen is the epitome of this work.
The boxes led to a series of Planetary Boxes in which different qualities of key planets in Steiner’s analysis are developed. That body of work and Earth, Air, Fire and Water at the Model Arts Centre in Sligo in 1991 proved prophetic for the current paintings, showing her deep interest in the Greek and Medieval accounts of the cosmos and the four elements necessary for terrestrial life and her desire to penetrate layers of matter and history to find absolutes. This was followed throughout the 1990s and in recent decades by paintings that use wax to create strong textural elements in mimicry of cosmic upheaval. Here the overtly feminist statements of her early work merge naturally into a concern for mythology, the planet and the movements of the earth and the stars. After her early critical acclaim, she stepped back from the public arena to found and run an arts school in her native Kilkenny, to work with great dedication with artists who went on to become the backbone of KCAT in Callan and to explore areas of interest to her in residencies and teaching programmes abroad, notably in Greece and Cyprus. In 2019, along with artist friends Patricia Hurl and Therry Rudin she became a founder member of Na Cailleacha, a collective of eight women artists who explore issues of aging, creativity, visibility and sustainability in their work,
Using encaustic, Comerford builds up layers and strata reminiscent of the geological strata of the earth itself, enfolding time and its own history into each layer of the paintings. In the first layer, paint is forcibly pushed into unsized canvas (very coarse linen) until it is held and retained by the canvas. Then additional layers of pigment and encaustic are added, and dried, using a heat gun after each application to provide texture. Encaustic forms tiny mounds on the paint surface, which can be used to great effect, especially when colour is added. To do this, Comerford says, you have to brush pigment very lightly and rapidly over the ‘balled’ area (not done individually). Lightness of touch and agility with the brush are vital for this, and the heat gun is essential for melding the layers together. ‘It is a great technique for getting you out of your head and into your body’, she remarks and continues, ‘I think that what I try to do is translate thought into feeling. To do so I peel off numerous versions until I reach some sort of core. If I do this, then I usually have some sort of physical reaction.
Modernism’s urge towards abstraction, or more precisely, non-figurative representation was, of course, a reaction against traditionalist hierarchies in which the visual arts were seen as secondary to literature and narrative, while within the visual arts, history or subject painting was still perceived as more significant than other disciplines, such as portraiture or landscape. Comerford’s reaction to Modernism took her a step further; inspired by Eva Hesse, she was one of the first artists in Ireland, to use abstraction as a strategy for social comment, in the process, challenging the empty formalism of patriarchal models. Pointing to the female allusions in Comerford’s hemispherical shapes and her proclivity for working in series, Dorothy Walker noted a ‘strong balance between an abstract numerical idea [and] a seemingly soft natural form’.3 Already by the late 1970s and early 1980s Comerford’s feminist, non-representational and numerical concerns were well established..
The mill origin story is of some importance, since Helen Comerford grew up in the precincts of her family’s bakery, virtually on the banks of the Nore river, where she spent much of her early years contemplating the energy and flow of the water and the accumulations of time on the stones of the bridge that spanned it. Fascinated by both movement and materials, and the daily experience of grinding, kneading, stirring, rising, shaping and baking that was the ubiquitous life of the bakery, it is not surprising that she opted for sculpture as her discipline of choice at NCAD, and later at art college in Belfast and Utrecht. Seriously underwhelmed by art education in Ireland in the 1960s, she was particularly drawn to Eva Hesse’s experiments with materials, pre-existing objects and previously derided practices associated with women’s work, such as knitting and cutting. When she returned to Ireland and struggled to combine child care with art practice, the feminist activism of Judy Chicago and Mary Beth Edelson offered further decisive alternatives to the kind of art produced by the male orientated artworld there in the 1970s.
Her first solo exhibition at the Taylor Galleries in 1980, The Bag Pieces, attracted the attention of Dorothy Walker for their evocations of gestation, seams and wounds. For this body of work she had begun to use translucent bags, to bring light into her work and to allude to the female form. Instead of carving, casting and chiselling she turned to tearing, gluing, and stitching, and used muslin, torn paper, resin, straw and other ubiquitous materials to make her sculptural wall hangings and installations. Circle of Women an installation made up of 8 female figures, some without backs, some frontless, and installed in the landscape was made in response to the nuclear explosion at Chernobyl. It was made from papier maché, a natural extension of her work with torn paper, and a sculptural material that retains a sense of lightness and softness. Critical attention was unwaveringly positive, earning her GPA awards and a place in Lucy Lippard’s prestigious touring exhibition Crossroads, Divisions, Turns of Mind (1985), which was designed to inform American audiences about what avant-garde Irish artists were doing at the height of the Troubles.
Maintaining a sculptural practice, especially if you use unusual materials, brings its own challenges. Through all of this, her dogged pursuit of her vision and her practicality ring through. A lot of artwork is cut down or recycled for lack of storage. When asked about the current whereabouts of a particularly powerful installation, And Yes, Yes, Yes, (Molly Bloom’s Room), shown at the Butler Gallery in 1983, she remarked, matter- of -factly, ‘oh it’s gone now, it was eaten by goats.’ But disasters such as this and storage and transportation problems for sculpture, may have prompted her to make her shrine-like, protective cases, designed to be seen from directly in front or above, for a series of extraordinary, three-dimensional torn paper works, loosely based on natural forms, such as shells, snails and insects. Ultimately this road also led to her use of encaustic and to make paintings that are really sculptures in paint. The Nineteen is the epitome of this work.
The boxes led to a series of Planetary Boxes in which different qualities of key planets in Steiner’s analysis are developed. That body of work and Earth, Air, Fire and Water at the Model Arts Centre in Sligo in 1991 proved prophetic for the current paintings, showing her deep interest in the Greek and Medieval accounts of the cosmos and the four elements necessary for terrestrial life and her desire to penetrate layers of matter and history to find absolutes. This was followed throughout the 1990s and in recent decades by paintings that use wax to create strong textural elements in mimicry of cosmic upheaval. Here the overtly feminist statements of her early work merge naturally into a concern for mythology, the planet and the movements of the earth and the stars. After her early critical acclaim, she stepped back from the public arena to found and run an arts school in her native Kilkenny, to work with great dedication with artists who went on to become the backbone of KCAT in Callan and to explore areas of interest to her in residencies and teaching programmes abroad, notably in Greece and Cyprus. In 2019, along with artist friends Patricia Hurl and Therry Rudin she became a founder member of Na Cailleacha, a collective of eight women artists who explore issues of aging, creativity, visibility and sustainability in their work,
Using encaustic, Comerford builds up layers and strata reminiscent of the geological strata of the earth itself, enfolding time and its own history into each layer of the paintings. In the first layer, paint is forcibly pushed into unsized canvas (very coarse linen) until it is held and retained by the canvas. Then additional layers of pigment and encaustic are added, and dried, using a heat gun after each application to provide texture. Encaustic forms tiny mounds on the paint surface, which can be used to great effect, especially when colour is added. To do this, Comerford says, you have to brush pigment very lightly and rapidly over the ‘balled’ area (not done individually). Lightness of touch and agility with the brush are vital for this, and the heat gun is essential for melding the layers together. ‘It is a great technique for getting you out of your head and into your body’, she remarks and continues, ‘I think that what I try to do is translate thought into feeling. To do so I peel off numerous versions until I reach some sort of core. If I do this, then I usually have some sort of physical reaction.
That combination of the mental and physical is key to an appreciation of The Nineteen.
As suggested above, the order of the paintings is non-negotiable. It charts stages along a transformative, developmental journey into knowledge and understanding of the earth and mankind’s place within it. Although the language employed throughout the entire series is abstract, there is considerable use of figurative markers, in the form of numbers and geometric shapes – the square of the canvases, the repeated introduction of spheres and hemi-spheres, seen in relation to one another or distinctly. Sometimes these forms almost disappear into the canvas ground, sometimes they are thrust forward, sometimes broken up by a further geometric element such as a cone, or a cylindrical form, suggestive both of a portal and a container, and all the while connected to their place in the sequence and the group as a whole. Thus 10 seems pivotal as two forms intersect. Occasionally the forms are subordinated to colour, whether used almost monochromatically so that you have to really look to experience them, for example in numbers 2 and 3, and sparingly but dramatically as in 8 or wildly extravagantly as in 16. Before and after pairings of paintings also reveal themselves, as in 9 and 11. Whatever the movement and mood of each part, we are always aware of the bigger journey. We may find ourselves stuck at one point, reluctant to progress out of it, or pulled out of our comfort zone to the next staging post. Helen Comerford’s particular journey through this realm of consciousness was informed by Steiner’s worldview and her own experience, but to repeat Kant’s position, the rest of us don’t need that intellectual grounding to enjoy the tug between the paintings’ mute realities and our own awareness.
Doris Lessing’s words in the preface to her 1971 edition of The Golden Notebook spell out the importance of the relation between the viewer and this body of work better than any words of mine;
‘…the book is alive and potent and fructifying and able to promote thought and discussion only when its plan and shape and intention are not understood, because the moment of seeing the shape and plan and intention is also the moment when there isn’t anything more to be got out of it.4
After years of re-reading, I haven’t yet arrived at that point with The Golden Notebook and I don’t see it happening with The Nineteen anytime soon. Each individual painting encompasses too many long, deep investigations into the unknown for that and they are different for all of us.
Catherine Marshall
2021
1 T.J. Clark, quoted in Terry Atkinson, 1, first edition, 2020, con-fine edizioni d’Arte & Cultura, Monghidoro, 2020. P.7.
2 All comments by the artist are taken from conversations during the months of May and June 2021, unless otherwise indicated.
3 Dorothy Walker, Helen Comerford, 2, exh. cat. Taylor Galleries (Dublin, 1980).
4 Doris Lessing, The Golden Notebook, preface to the 1971 Edition, Harper Perennial, London, p. 21.vTo mark the recent death of our beloved fellow Cailleach, Helen Comerford, we are reproducing here an essay about her, published on the occasion of her solo exhibition at the Kilkenny Arts Festival in 2021.
As suggested above, the order of the paintings is non-negotiable. It charts stages along a transformative, developmental journey into knowledge and understanding of the earth and mankind’s place within it. Although the language employed throughout the entire series is abstract, there is considerable use of figurative markers, in the form of numbers and geometric shapes – the square of the canvases, the repeated introduction of spheres and hemi-spheres, seen in relation to one another or distinctly. Sometimes these forms almost disappear into the canvas ground, sometimes they are thrust forward, sometimes broken up by a further geometric element such as a cone, or a cylindrical form, suggestive both of a portal and a container, and all the while connected to their place in the sequence and the group as a whole. Thus 10 seems pivotal as two forms intersect. Occasionally the forms are subordinated to colour, whether used almost monochromatically so that you have to really look to experience them, for example in numbers 2 and 3, and sparingly but dramatically as in 8 or wildly extravagantly as in 16. Before and after pairings of paintings also reveal themselves, as in 9 and 11. Whatever the movement and mood of each part, we are always aware of the bigger journey. We may find ourselves stuck at one point, reluctant to progress out of it, or pulled out of our comfort zone to the next staging post. Helen Comerford’s particular journey through this realm of consciousness was informed by Steiner’s worldview and her own experience, but to repeat Kant’s position, the rest of us don’t need that intellectual grounding to enjoy the tug between the paintings’ mute realities and our own awareness.
Doris Lessing’s words in the preface to her 1971 edition of The Golden Notebook spell out the importance of the relation between the viewer and this body of work better than any words of mine;
‘…the book is alive and potent and fructifying and able to promote thought and discussion only when its plan and shape and intention are not understood, because the moment of seeing the shape and plan and intention is also the moment when there isn’t anything more to be got out of it.4
After years of re-reading, I haven’t yet arrived at that point with The Golden Notebook and I don’t see it happening with The Nineteen anytime soon. Each individual painting encompasses too many long, deep investigations into the unknown for that and they are different for all of us.
Catherine Marshall
2021
1 T.J. Clark, quoted in Terry Atkinson, 1, first edition, 2020, con-fine edizioni d’Arte & Cultura, Monghidoro, 2020. P.7.
2 All comments by the artist are taken from conversations during the months of May and June 2021, unless otherwise indicated.
3 Dorothy Walker, Helen Comerford, 2, exh. cat. Taylor Galleries (Dublin, 1980).
4 Doris Lessing, The Golden Notebook, preface to the 1971 Edition, Harper Perennial, London, p. 21.vTo mark the recent death of our beloved fellow Cailleach, Helen Comerford, we are reproducing here an essay about her, published on the occasion of her solo exhibition at the Kilkenny Arts Festival in 2021.