Boxing clever

With his intricate boxes and the treasures they contain, Graham Gingles, one of Northern Ireland's finest artists, weaves stories of family, love and desire, loss and pain, the oddness of the everyday, and the intimately personal in these labyrinthine constructions, writes AIDAN DUNNE

THE BOXES came about indirectly. As the Troubles engulfed Northern Ireland in the 1970s, Graham Gingles began to worry about protecting the delicate wooden maquettes that he was making at the time. The simple solution was to tailor-make a box for each one in which to store and transport it. Gradually, he wrote in 1992, he began to realise that he had stumbled upon a form that was “almost ideal for me; I could combine drawings, paintings, sculptures and even occasionally photographs all in one thing”. But then, he notes, “they became more complicated”.

Born in Larne, Co Antrim, Gingles is one of Northern Ireland’s best-known artists and one of the leading Irish artists of his generation. His current exhibition at the Fenderesky Gallery in Belfast is an exceptionally substantial show, especially given that by it nature, Gingles’s work is slow and painstaking in the making. As well as paintings and works on paper, there are more than a dozen sculptures on view, and each sculpture absorbs many months of labour and sometimes more – Gingles points to a particular piece that he has returned to again and again over decades. And he is noticeably reluctant to describe any piece as finished.

He is one of few artists, past and present, whose work predominantly takes the form of boxes. Not that he sets out to makes boxes as such. As with the work of the renowned American artist Joseph Cornell, who died in 1972 and is undoubtedly the historical figure most closely associated with boxes, each one is a miniature, three-dimensional theatre or display case, stocked with evocative images and objects. Cornell’s boxes contain found objects, mementos and keepsakes. They’re quite straightforward in terms of structure, inside and out.

Gingles’s boxes differ from them in several respects. They are more often than not very elaborately constructed – by him – with complex inner features. Although they usually contain many images and objects, these things are, again, mostly made by the artist himself. And as they are miniature in scale, the contained paintings and sculptures are extraordinarily intricate, being made to an exceptional level of detail. They are beautiful things in themselves.

Boxes and contents are fashioned from many kinds of wood, from cut glass, metal, paper, fabric, plaster, liquids, dried natural materials, oil paint, watercolour, graphite and photography.

Gingles’s studio-workshop, adjacent to his home in one of a row of coastguards’ cottages at the edge of Ballygally village on the Antrim coast, is suprisingly small. Although it’s overflowing with workbenches, cabinets of drawers, shelves stacked with books and CDs, an easel, masses of tools and voluminous quantities of materials, it is all the same very functional, with several clear working spaces and an air of industry about it.

Peer into one of his sculptural boxes and it’s as though you’ve stepped into a hall of mirrors. The spaces multiply and disorient. They seem to lead the eye into impossible corridors, rooms and alcoves, into spatial labyrinths that are palpably impossible given the modest dimensions of the exterior enclosures.

Writing about them, the academic David Brett helpfully compared them to theatres – not to individual theatre sets as such but rather to the stage and backstage realm of a theatre, with the multiple possibilities of building, unbuilding and rebuilding worlds of illusion that it offers. In other words, Gingles doesn’t make something like architectural models, he creates more imaginatively complex and psychologically charged spaces than that.

He is like a theatre director, set designer, stage manager and lighting designer all in one, but he is also like a playwright, creating narratives and narrative spaces within each work. He doesn’t make linear, illustrative narratives though. It is true that the imagery and objects he employs stem directly from his own personal history and from the wider historical context but it is as if, rather than fashioning stories, he is trying to capture a sense of how memory works, how things affect us and how we remember and construct narratives in our own heads.

He was born in 1943. His paternal grandfather ran a painting and decorating shop and business in Larne, and Gingles has vivid memories of the imaginative wonderland presented to him in the form of the shop with its fabulous stock of decorative materials, culminating in a mysterious top-floor cabinet filled with supplies of powdered pigment.

Despite the fact that his sculptures are made with amazing precision and skill, and he is clearly a dab hand with a fretsaw, for example, he says that he is not much of a craftsman and doesn’t particularly like, say, woodwork per se. But the shop introduced him in a routine way to a wealth of practical skills such as cutting wood, and glass.

While each piece is layered with personal imagery that bears a specific meaning for him, we can usually identify what is involved in terms of feeling and experience. Fragmentary stories of family, of love and desire, of loss and pain, of the oddness and surreal that are sometimes implicit in the everyday, of the way the intimately personal is woven into the wider fabric of history – all this and more comes across as we enter Gingles’s labyrinthine constructions.

There is a darkness, almost a morbidity to his vision, but also distinct humour and honesty, and a complete lack of pretension. He has made in excess of 100 box sculptures to date. Together they amount to one of the most significant bodies of work produced by any Irish artist in any era, and those in the current exhibition, unsurpassed in their quality, complexity and coherence, are an outstanding achievement in themselves.

Graham Gingles Boxes, paintings and drawings dealing with memory and loss. Fenderesky Gallery, Royal Avenue, Belfast. Until November 26th