Catching the sunlight in shady places

At her latest show, Bernadette Madden's work is a vibrant study of colour and light, rendered on her signature batik-worked linen canvases, writes SARA KEATING

LAST SEPTEMBER artist Bernadette Madden was preparing for the busiest weeks of her year. As a judge for the Irish Theatre Awards, she was gearing up to see nearly 60 shows in just over a month, as Dublin’s two major theatre festivals kicked off. Madden served on the awards panel for two years running and although she occasionally misses the intensity of a full-time theatre- viewing schedule, when her tenure finished last December she was relieved to get back to her day-job. Indeed, Madden has been hard at work putting together a new solo show ever since, which opens at Gormley’s Fine Art Gallery on South Fredrick Street this week.

Although Madden’s studio time was limited during her two-year commitment to the theatre awards, it was her experiences travelling around the country that directly inspired the theme of her new exhibition: Sunlight in a Shady Place. “At the start I conceived that the exhibition would be a study of my travels,” she says. Madden always travels with a camera, and she meticulously documented her journeys. Originally, she planned “a series of images of Ireland; all the small towns and cities that I stayed in when I was on the road to see a play. I thought I would concentrate on town centres, city overviews, high buildings; something which I have done before.” But “there was one recurring image from those photographs that just kept coming back to me,” she explains, as she shows me her new paintings. “An image of light in the trees, captured from the window of a fast-moving train or car. Often I would be travelling in the early morning, and there would be this sort of quick-glimpsed image of light illuminating the darkness of the countryside; gradually the trees started to take over.” The resulting 25 pieces are a vibrant study of colour and light, rendered on the batik-worked linen canvases that have become Madden’s signature.

The process of batik painting is a marvel of skill and infinite patience. Madden sketches her vision with paraffin or beeswax on raw linen before submerging the material in a base cold-water dye. Wherever the wax is used, the dye does not penetrate, so a ghostly pre-image of the finished painting begins to emerge. When the linen has dried, Madden peels or irons off the resistant wax wherever she needs it exposed. The linen is then re-dyed and un-waxed, over and over, until the composite drawing appears. After a professional dry-clean, the finished fabric is then stretched on a wooden skeleton and framed.

For Madden’s current exhibition, which uses a palette of verdant greens laced with violets and yellows, each piece of fabric was dyed up to 10 times, and the result is a series of rich, impressionistic and densely layered light-filled canvases. Because she was originally working from photographs, Madden had imagined the work as “fairly realistic recordings of places”; the enormous triptych that provides a focal point for the exhibition, for example, is Kinsale Cove, to which she had travelled to see a play called Red Lola. But the paintings are also studies of an emotional response to a landscape: the feeling of viewing a fleeting, momentary beauty, as well as the landscape itself.

The versatility of working with batik rather than merely oil on canvas is visible throughout Madden’s beautiful Dublin 2 home, a period property that she brought in the 1980s, and which she has slowly renovated over the years to include a garden studio and a bright exhibition space at the back of the house. The couches in her living room are immaculately upholstered in re-purposed hemp sacks that she designed and dyed herself. The exotically tie-dyed curtains and table-cloths in the bedrooms and dining rooms are rendered from old fabric and bed sheets. In the kitchen a tinder basket holds scrolls of scrap waxed linen from her studio, which Madden uses as kindling for the fire.

Meanwhile, in the upstairs exhibition space, where she holds an annual Christmas show, there is further evidence of Madden’s industriousness: her ability to transform the by-products of her artistic enterprises into affordable gifts. Stacks of notebooks covered in off-cuts from her batik work and original screen-printed stationary sit on tables underneath her own art-work.

Madden admits that her entrepreneurial efforts have been forged over the years in order to enable her to spend the majority of her time on her painting. “It didn’t occur to me for a long time that you could actually make a living as an artist,” she says. “So even when I was in college” – she studied at NCAD in the late 1960s – “I was always making things and selling them, so that I could afford to spend the rest of the time making my own work.”

This assiduous spirit has worked incredibly well for Madden, for whom art is a vocation, a way of life, more than a profession: “I have managed to live well without ever having another type of job,” she admits happily. “And that has always been a relief for me, because I never want to give this up.”

Bernadette Madden: Sunlight in a Shady Place Gormley’s Fine Art Gallery, 25 South Frederick St, Dublin 2 until Friday