Back in May I started writing a column for the Sunday Times, which has been such a creatively satisfying thing to do each week. The remit is writing about the arts, mostly the Irish arts, and I wanted to make sure from the get-go that it was a useful read for people.
It’s in Culture magazine, so I knew that readers would be expecting a certain level of analysis and opinion. But I also felt that it was a chance to dig into topics that I feel passionate about, and fuse my news and arts backgrounds together to inject plenty of research and some interviews into the columns.
Writing a column can become an exercise in ‘here’s my opinion about XYZ’, but I want to at least try and steer away from solipsism and more into sharing information. I’m trying to take things which are happening now and zoom out to give them more context, nudging the reader into finding out more about the topic themselves.
Unfortunately the columns aren’t put online, which is a pity - but because of that I feel it’s OK to share some extracts from a column I wrote back in early June, about the Hilary Heron retrospective at IMMA. It was such a joy getting to see her work - which I wasn’t familiar with - and find out more about her. It closes on 28 October and I really do recommend a visit. (I’d also recommend picking up the exhibition catalogue at IMMA while you’re there - it’s fab.)
Hilary Heron
Hilary Heron was an Irish modernist sculptor who died in 1977, and who during her (relatively short) lifetime inspired many articles about her work. Even though she’s not a household name today, she is and was important to Irish modernism - so in the column I wanted to explore how she could end up to a large extent forgotten about.
As I noted, she had quite the life:
She lived the sort of life young men enjoy in mid-century novels, winning art awards (including the Mainie Jellett Travelling Scholarship in 1948 - Jellett being a pioneering Irish modernist painter), zooming around Italy and France on a motorbike, hanging out with Samuel Beckett. Only, as a woman doing these things in the 1940s and 1950s, she was breaking a lot of societal rules created to keep women like her in their place.
You can sense immediately that Heron wasn’t one for caring about rules. She worked with different materials, including stone, wood and copper. She taught herself how to weld. She took inspiration from the surrealists, from Greek myths and Irish heritage. She carved wooden figures of headless male torsos, and called one brass and stone sculpture Hairy Molly (1963), slang for a vagina.
The press was really interested in her, because of the aforementioned fascinating life. There are loads of examples of articles in the exhibition, and one of the people who wrote about her was Edna O’Brien, who sadly died a few weeks ago.
Heron was obviously quite a precocious talent. She was chosen alongside painter Louis le Brocquy to represent Ireland at the 1956 Venice Biennale, a huge thing for an artist of her age at the time. All of the articles in the exhibition mused about how a young woman like her could be so talented at sculpture, and at such a young age (see image above).
Here’s a photo from inside the exhibition:
Heron had quite an accomplished career, but died aged just 54. After that, she started to slip off the map of Irish art. But one thing about the retrospective of her work that I absolutely love is the story of the people who’ve been determined that her career be remembered:
The retrospective is an attempt by IMMA (as part of its Modern Masters series, curated by Seán Kissane) to restore her reputation and examine why she became overlooked. One impetus behind the exhibition is the work of Dr Billy Shortall of Trinity College Dublin. He left the tech world in his fifties to study Irish art history, and wrote an MPhil thesis on Heron, helping pave the way for the recovery of her work.
I described seeing the exhibition as “thrilling”, and it really was. Part of that was because the first room had images of the young Heron blown up on the walls. This meant she went from a 2D figure to very much a full-bodied, 3D person - you could see her as she was, and you could even look at some of the tools she used, and notebooks. You could witness the fact this was a woman, a young woman, entering an arena where she was in a minority, and then putting her stamp on it.
I left the exhibition with a copy of IMMA’s catalogue on Heron in hand, feeling invigorated by the Barbara Hepworth-esque curves of Caesar (1949) and the way she made the metal sculpture Bird Barking (1959) look like… a strange bird barking. But there was a feeling of sadness too, over how the appreciation of her achievements and talent could be allowed to drift away to a whisper after her death.
Yes, things started off feeling invigorating, and seeing examples of her work as her style evolved showed just how much talent and promise she had. But by the end I was thinking - how could she just disappear? How come she isn’t well known outside of certain circles?
I thought about a talk I went to last year about the artist Una Watters, whose stunning painting Girl Going by Trinity in the Rain (1959) is now part of the National Gallery’s collection. Watters has a champion too in the form of writer Mary Morrissy, who has done sterling work in trying to track down Watters’ paintings and restore her reputation in Ireland.
There are lots of reasons why artists like Watters and Heron became less well-known. Sometimes this is just the passing of time, and changing attitudes towards sculpture and modernism. Neither women’s work was bought in large volume by public collections. Both died young. Both were women working in male-dominated fields.
To survive beyond death as an artist of any stripe you need to be championed; your work needs to be archived properly and bought or stored. You need to be talked about, You need some way for people to remember you.
In her classic 1971 essay ‘Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?’, Linda Nochlin deftly deals with the spurious but persistent notion of ‘male genius’.
She also asks the question: What if Picasso had been born a girl? This is very much a 1971 question (we wouldn’t necessarily be so binary about it today, and yet… it still stands). In my column I wrote:
So, what if Hilary Heron had been born a boy? Would ‘Harry’ Heron’s work have been allowed to disappear? I’m not sure we can definitively say yes or no, but we can presume that Harry wouldn’t have been described in articles as ‘alluring’ or been asked to feature in an ad for Ponds beauty products.
I don’t think we can necessarily (though an expert like Billy Shortall can certainly explain more on this than I can!) put all of what happened regarding Hilary Heron’s ‘disappearance’ down to gender, but we can certainly say gender played a big role in it.
By being a sculptor she was involved in what was chiefly seen during her time as a ‘male pursuit’ - never mind the fact she was a master welder. In the private photos of her shared in the exhibition, she’s in jeans and jumper, smoking. But her public persona traded on her looks - she even featured in a beauty advertisement.
Presumptions and stereotypes about Heron’s ability based on her gender and appearance were something she naturally would have had to deal with during her time. She must have known this. That it was the soup she swam in.
All of this undoubtedly fed into her slide out of public memory, and the lack of resistance to it. As I wrote:
Often there is no one standing at the velvet rope telling artists they are no longer allowed into the room of greatness. It can be instead a subtle yet devastating pivot towards the people who matter ‘more’, dictated by a variety of subjective reasons: whatever is in vogue, whoever’s work is worth the most money, whoever seems most exciting. And the more you focus on the people who seem to matter without interrogating why they matter so much, the more others are pushed out.
It’s this that is the saddest thing for me; how easy it is just to be forgotten. Or to be pushed into a side room, waiting for someone to recover you. It’s incredible seeing artists like Heron and Watters being recovered, but it makes me think - who else is out there?
No doubt there are Art students fervently researching this, and papers being written on women who we’ll find out more about in the coming years. We’re lucky in that sense, that we live in an era of recovery.
But I can’t not think of those who won’t be recovered, for one reason or another, and who’ll stay in that dusty side room forever.
A reminder that the column is in Culture magazine in the Sunday Times every week - I’ve had some great feedback on recent columns, so it’s great to know there are regular readers already.