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An interview with curator Brenna Horrox about an affecting gem of an exhibition: ‘Each Little Scar’ at Filet Gallery is a crucible for transformative experience and thinking.

Your mum, the artist Patricia Ferguson – known as Trisha to friends and family – grew up in Northern Ireland during The Troubles. What did she tell you about her childhood in Newtownards?

We’d watch Derry Girls together and Trisha would be reminded of what it was like when she was growing up, with the presence of army officers everywhere. But they were young and kind of took the situation for granted, they’d not known any different. For the most part young people were busy focussing on their own lives. I mean, because she was living in a mainly Protestant area, she was somewhat shielded from the worst of it. But she did say there was a 9pm curfew, after which you weren’t allowed out. And huge metal gates were erected at the end of streets, they were locked at night so even if you went out you couldn’t go far.

It was when Trisha was making work later in the 1980s, after she’d left Northern Ireland to study for her Fine Art degree at Portsmouth that she began to reflect deeply on her childhood, what she and others experienced. The atmosphere of oppression, fear and constant surveillance by an occupying power.

02.10.24

Words by Adrian Burnham

Ireland was already a stifling society, suffering decades of recession, unemployment, emigration as well as sectarianism. The church, both Catholic and Protestant still had a fierce grip on society, a huge influence on social behaviours. There was an atmosphere of constant judgment, if you did anything out of the ordinary then you were treated with suspicion. Having said that Trisha was herself religious, faith was always extremely important to her but at the same time she couldn’t abide dogma.

I suppose she’d needed to get away to digest all this, to process it. Trisha didn’t see the point of just exchanging one intransigent ruling power with another. That kind of binary approach always left some people with grievances. Trisha’s approach and understanding of the situation was much more empathic, focussing more on the people who were just trying to get through it. She could see and feel the oppression in its many forms. And I think that’s apparent when you look at the work she produced.

Trisha loved Ireland, she wanted to learn the language, the history and myths, there persisted throughout her a life a strong attachment to the country of her birth. Her feelings about Ireland were, I suppose, akin to the Portuguese term ‘saudade’, a sort of melancholic attachment to a beloved yet absent someone, something or somewhere.

What was your intention presenting Trisha’s work in this show titled ‘Each Little Scar’ at Filet Gallery?

To show the work, obviously, to give it fresh exposure. While curating this exhibition I was able to connect with the work. And the show would give an opportunity for people who knew Trish, as well as those who didn’t, to connect with each other around the drawings, prints and artefacts she made.

Trisha’s work looks outward. It asks how we might best face life’s many trials with grace and harmony. Not to ignore wrongdoing or ignorance, rather to approach it critically but with understanding. One strong impetus behind all the work she made was to share strong voices from her personal history, and Each Little Scar spreads those voices even further.

There’s a view that works of art are things IN the world not just text or commentary ON the world. Trisha seemed to see this as more and more important to her practice, what do you think she was seeking to communicate through this emphasis on materiality…? 

Well, as Dr Fiona Barber mentions in one of the texts accompanying the exhibition inventory, the first works the viewer encounters, displayed in the gallery window are three large printing plates. Increasingly, in addition to the print as an outcome, Trisha was interested in the worked plates themselves. Dry point, aquatint, repoussé, chasing and burnishing… Each worked plate affords an indexical link to Trisha’s touch, her presence, they’re both material witness and precious, uncanny objects worthy of attention. The metal bears its scars differently from paper, yet we know one is born of the other, one’s presence leads to another. There is an intimacy and an absence in this duality. These works explore the hidden and the seen, the terribleness and beauty, damage done, and resistance enacted.

Trisha’s interest in materiality stems, of course, in part from a thorough engagement with her craft, the alchemy of materials, techniques and processes. It comes also from her lifelong fascination with ancient cultures and religious artefacts. Reliquaries, icons, votives: objects charged with atmosphere, portals to forgotten pasts. A structure in the centre of the exhibition displays an array of smaller etched plates, some feature feet and hands, there’s birds, trees, and a kind of everyday sanctitude in the small portraits of family, friends and cherished pets, there’s a box and a miniature book of verse with etched features. Arranged inside the wooden and steel structure are further reliquary-like forms, little house boxes, objects that offer people new opportunities for relating to the work, of making their own sense of what’s on view. I think one of the things Trisha was communicating through these two and three-dimensional objects imbued with love and care is that we are all our own reliquaries, we hold our own potential to heal, or not.

Trisha was anti-dogmatic, constantly inspired by the sublime effect of art, works that refer to a power beyond the possibility of mundane calculation but rather point to wonder, awe and proof of the enduring human spirit. This is specially so in the works that feature redoubtable women. Despite the seemingly incessant trials and obstacles in life, the control and coercion of oppressive structures, it’s the women who have to endure and carry on through.

This is evident in two large works, the charcoal and Conté crayon ‘Callers’ where a woman, dressed only in her night clothes and shielding s child, answers the door to two hooded figures. And in ‘Whatever You Say, Say Nothing’ the title refers to a Seamus Heaney poem condemning the anti-Irish socio-political system at work in Northern Ireland. Again, a woman in the street this time is protective of a child at her side. Her expression is one of fear and suspicion, a tired face riven with the paranoia and enforced self-confinement that The Troubles inflicted on a populace, subject to Unionist, Republican and British military violence. The former’s intransigence is illustrated by graffiti behind the woman’s head, a fragment of the phrase, ‘Ulster Says No’. IRA propaganda is also cited in the work’s title: “Loose talk costs lives. In taxis, on the phone, in clubs and bars, at football matches, at home with friends, anywhere! Whatever you say, say nothing.”

Some of the work was made a while back, the texts by Dr Fionna Barber and Prof. Sarah Edge attest their power and relevance as a response to issues prevailing in the 1980s and 90s but exhibitions are made from the vantage point of the moment in which it finds itself. How do you expect a twenty-first century audience to ‘read’ or react to Trisha’s artworks?  

The work is context specific, born of a particular era and place. But much of it also speaks more broadly, across time and cultures to address contemporary concerns. ‘The Immigrant’ is obviously both a poignant and powerful example. The whole idea of a ‘new land’ is, of course, a lie. Trisha abhorred racism, the anti-immigrant riots in the north and south of Ireland today are people forgetting their own histories. She would say it’s important to remember history but essential to question whose histories come to the fore? It can’t just be those in positions of power who determine the narrative of so many and various lives lived through such troubled times. Perhaps never more so than today, the world is beset by ecological crises causing displacement, that’s on top of refugees fleeing from violent conflicts across the earth. Immigrants need a voice because, as it says in the print, scratched either side of the ‘everyman’ figure with a long, hard road ahead, in the margins we read, “Eager to reassure their own hearts of a past not forgotten, Made orphan by the powerful who knew nothing of love and bonds of blood, A bygone one.” But obviously, the suffering refugee is not bygone. They traverse the globe, and some arrive on our shores.

The work and the atmospheres evoked resonate with conflicts happening now across the world. Things haven’t changed much. Colonialism’s extractive and violent project continues. The powerful continue to pit working class people against each other, sucking the soul out of life to maintain their profits and authority. But still people don’t give up, they continue to bear witness and carry on fighting, resilience is the heart that keeps beating.

In an age where intersectionality is on the rise, what do you think about feminist art as a canon?

When Trish had children she moved away from London to live in the East Midlands and so she couldn’t visit London often, you could say she forfeited an opportunity to be part of the art scene. But you could argue this as a positive step, a feminist position that she took in choosing not to engage with the patriarchal art world, as it was then and to an extent still is. Did you realise the recent Marina Abramovic show at the Royal Academy of Arts is the first female solo retrospective show ever? The RA was founded more than two hundred and fifty years ago!

Of course, there are valid criticisms of the cis-gender ‘superiority’ mode adopted by some feminists. But feminism as a lens – rather than the women who have curtailed the feminist perspective into something that does not appear very feminist to me – is still useful. It is a critical frame through which many people begin to understand their oppression and exploitation, and all the systemic ills that are interwoven with this: patriarchy, domestication, borders, the construction of gender, the West’s shaming of cultures without gender binaries… It’s all connected.

So, we can’t just jettison feminism, but I think Trisha’s work is more to do with transcending binaries. As I said, for Trisha it wasn’t just about being Catholic or Protestant, it’s about people who wield power. Trish was empathic to her core, throughout her work there’s a profound need to understand rather than to judge. But Trish would fight if need be, she’d stand up for her convictions about how we might make the world a better place for all.

At the show we talked a bit about the term “troubling canons” in art, that a healthy canon of feminist art history, say, isn’t to do with fixing – defining, including or excluding entities once and for all – but should be about building bodies of knowledge that grow, evolve and are constantly tested through time. Do you see part of your role in curating as addressing, perhaps subverting existing art history?

Well, not so much with this show but I do try and work with artists who have, shall we say a less conventional background to their thinking and practice. Maybe they haven’t come through a standard college or university route to arrive at what they do. I would say that the shows I curate tend not to play by the rules. Conventional art history is important to know but maybe so you can speak against it, to challenge tired but still prevailing points of view.

Researching for the public program of artists’ events that runs parallel with Each Little Scar show I made a number of visits to Ireland, north and south, to seek out what you might call more political artists, or rather individuals and collectives whose work is rooted in real life concerns. Who demonstrate social convictions in their art practice. Political with a small ‘p’. Not people seeking to promote one party line over another but artists who are questioning structures.

For example, two artists in the public program, Emma Campbell and Clodagh Lavelle belong to the Array Collective. Array is a group of multi-disciplinary Belfast based artists and activists who create collaborative actions – protests, rallies, workshops, exhibitions and events – in response to pressing socio-political issues including abortion, mental health, racism, homophobia… In short, they’ll hitch their anger, their concerns, to the many and varied disenfranchised groups and work with them to promote awareness and change, to challenge the ambivalence shown by those in power to people who are vulnerable.

For Each Little Scar’s public program, I wanted to show, and work with artists from the broad cross section of people who make up Irish society. Aideen Barry is a visual artist working across disciplines and subjects including domestic labour, classism, environmental changes and more through film, performance, sculpture, text and experimental lens-based media. Alice Rekab takes her own mixed-race Irish-Sierra Leonean identity as a starting point to explore the idea of the body, the family and the nation as reflections of one another. Born and bred in Dublin her work offers a unique perspective on what it means to be Irish today. I think it’s important work, to use the public program as a way to identify and break, or at least interrupt, isolated experiences of oppression. To promote more understanding, inclusion, to offer help and hope. I think Trisha would’ve done that herself if she were still here.

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