At Play in the Garden; A review of Amanda Doran’s RHA exhibition (Flora & Fauna 2019)
The Art Explorer visits the RHA Ashford gallery to see Wexford artist Amanda Doran’s recent exhibition, Flora and Fauna* (18 Jan -10 Feb 2019)
“The painted picture … is merely the visible testament to the mad solitary machine that moves around inside artistic activity” — (Cesar Aria — On Contemporary Art)
She looks back at us from her slippy oil paint world of daub and smear. Through the linseed aroma. “You want figures?” she asks “here’s figures,” “you want landscape, here’s landscape.” Grinning and bidding us enter — all rhythm and gesture.
The Ashford gallery is a relatively small exhibition space within the RHA, nestled downstairs at the base of the palatial stairwell, which ascends to the upper hallowed halls, where celebrity artist, Brian Eno’s exhibition is in full swing.
Inside the Ashford I feel corralled, surrounded by a kaleidoscope of strange energetic images, vibrating colours emanate from all four walls. Of the 13 oil paintings on display, three are portraits. In one, a group of young girls loll about on a couch, in another they sunbath on a beach, and the third, shows a young girl posing alone with her fluffy pet dog.
Other paintings are more abstracted and fantastical, displaying a variety of Pre-Christian religious symbolism, deities, sacred places and mysterious hybrid creatures. The figures are mostly female but gender is often ill defined and ambiguous. The work abounds with anthropomorphic sexualised and procreative symbolism, including a mountainous volcanic eruption, generously spewing love hearts. Relations between human, animal and environment are portrayed as fluid amorphous and sensuous. As stated in the gallery blurb, this is — “An exploration of primal sensuous energy, within a creatively free, Utopian landscape”- all this dramatically acted out within the Fauna and Flora of the title theme.
My first response is that all too familiar resistance; a simple reluctance to open-up emotionally to what is in front of me — to the unknown. My own expectations getting in the way here of course. In other words that all too familiar and perennial challenge posed by Contemporary Art. But it isn’t long before a more hopeful response emerges, like ticker tape issuing from my brain, it says:
“Something of integrity is happening here, there is an artist at work, intent, fully engaged, and passionate. The forms and style are already evoking in me a strong emotional reaction. I may feel challenged, but I am in no danger of being bored”
So although usually skeptical of gallery/artist statements, which too often feel like marketing speak, I read the gallery sheet, where the artist clearly states her intention;
“To examine new approaches to female self-image….to create a new vision of … ideal woman through the re-imagining of old myths…”
Many of the symbols used here are familiar, known to us from those highly crafted cultural artifacts of ethnic or primitive art. Those bronze and stone statues of Hindu Gods, or the carefully painted images of the ‘Tree of Life’, created perhaps over many hours, by disciplined humming monks. But here in Doran’s paintings we do not find formally crafted images. In her “re-imagining”, they are rendered not in traditional reverential manner, but crudely, almost a cursory shorthand, childlike, with playful disregard for traditional drawing. Any need for identifiable forms is appeased with minimal detail, dots for eyes, limbs crudely outlined. Some figures are patterned so densely as to be barely distinguishable from their vegetative background. Here it seems, Flora and Fauna are in a mutually defining dance.
Doran’s approach could be compared to the primitivist style of many early 20th century European artists. Painters and sculptors who drew inspiration from ‘primitive’ or ethnic art, while adapting it to their own personal and typically European quest for individual expression. The paradox here, is that these ethnic native forms, in their original context, were part of a highly ritualized process, both in how they were produced, and used in religious ceremonies. The aim of which was to negate and transcend that same individualism, so valued by western artists.
Artists are like explorers, continually trying to extend the range of their own awareness; continually aiming for liberation, while also needing to remain grounded. They use and create rituals to support them in this deeply personal activity. In this way, ritual acts as servant to the soul.
Through her irreverent re-imagining of these ritualistic forms, Doran is trying to break through what she perceives as old outdated stories and perspectives. By personalizing and re-energizing them, she seeks to make them more accessible, and to forge a new more empowering relationship with them. Yet throughout all of this, her primary commitment as an artist is, and must be, to the creative process itself, rather than to any particular ideology. It is a quest for personal liberation through emotional and aesthetic immersion in her chosen medium.
Every inch of these canvases seems covered with dense generous daubs and smears of flavoursome coloured paint, applied like a soothing cream, or a child pastry-chef decorating a cake. The Work oozes fresh spontaneous energy. The gesture and rhythm of delivery is everything. The movement is urgent, preoccupied with personal exploration and expression, whether dreamy smooth, or fierce and warlike.
Mood and emotion ride on the self-hypnotic rhythm, in caressing sweeps, and staccato textile patterning. A mix of free form dance, children’s play and rebellious graffiti. The thick oily wetness is both playful and sensual.
The paintings hang in sharp contrast to the white sanitized gallery walls, as if cut straight out of the artists paint splattered studio. From somewhere deep within the walls, comes an incoherent rumbling from the exhibition upstairs. Unperturbed, I swivel on my heels to take all this in, wishing there was a couch, so I could loll awhile amidst the succulent colour
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Footnotes:
1* Flora and Fauna: (Definition) plants and animals of a particular area. Latin: Flora: princess of flowers. Fauna: Roman goddess of earth and fertility. Technically distinguished by Fauna’s ability to generate nourishment directly from sun, whereas fauna cannot.
2 *Primitivism, The term first emerged within Fine Art during the late 19th-century. Used to describe any art characterized by imagery and motifs associated with such primitive art.
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The Art Explorer is a pseudonym for the artist and writer Daniel Cullen. Daniel’s writing draws on considerable and wide ranging experience within the Arts (over 30 yrs). This includes a successful career as a Public Sculptor, completing several percent for art commissions and extensive work as a Community Artist, working with hundreds of participants from all sections of the community. Daniel was a member of the Irish Museum of Modern Art’s ‘Artist Team’ where he worked for 5 years facilitating public engagement with their collection. His background also includes an earlier career as a Probation Welfare Officer, where he facilitated creative therapeutic programs with offenders. He was responsible for establishing the first Art Therapy Program for prisoners within Mountjoy Prison.
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CHECK OUT PREVIOUS REVIEWS
🔸 Bian Maguire -Review of Exhibition
🔸 Maria McKinney -Review of Exhibition
🔸 Joanna Kidney -Review of Exhibition
🔸 Riin Kaljurand — Review of Exhibition
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RHA Gallery Gorey School of Art Amanda Doran Artist
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