Understory: A detailed exploration of rural landscape

UNDERSTORY

Highlanes Gallery, Drogheda

Understory is the latest in a series of exhibitions by Helena Gorey that emerge from her relationship with the landscape in which she spent her childhood and now lives and works. It is a very specific landscape in the townland of Burnchurch in Co Kilkenny, but it should be said that, in many respects, it could be anywhere. She is not concerned with documenting a local history or even a personal or family history. Rather, what comes across is a concern with how we, as individuals, engage with the world around us. It's relevant that her environment is very rural, very agricultural, offering a perpetual contact with the wider natural world that it would be difficult, even perverse, to ignore. And Gorey's interest is closely attuned to those natural aspects: to the physical and visual unfolding of daily and seasonal changes in the detailed fabric of the landscape around her.

Through successive bodies of work, she has opted for something other than representation. Most often, that entails a process of applying several layers of colour to arrive at an eventual monochrome, or close to monochromatic surface. What we encounter can be considered as a distillation of the multiple elements involved, or perhaps what Cézanne termed equivalence rather than depiction. We are aware of the underlying layers, which might be layers of colour or just raw canvas - the dense, contextual setting, and the understory of the show’s title? They both form a nutritive ground for the surface hue and suggest its transient, vulnerable character.

To move through a packed landscape is to experience a series of intensities of sensation. That comes across in the exhibition’s centrepiece, a gathering of some 15 individual but closely linked paintings, each given a helpfully indicative title, from specific plants, flowers and berries (Lichen, Bilberry, Woodbine) to slightly broader terms (Bloom, Spinney, Brindled). The chance, casual nature of these encounters is conveyed by the expansive, stacked arrangement of the variously dimensioned canvases and the way the final piece is simply set on the floor, leaning against the wall.

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The dynamic range is considerable from piece to piece, from the heady concentration of Woodbine or Nightshade to the cushioned luxuriance of Bloom or Leaf.

While the paintings are individually beautiful, as a collective installation it’s a superb piece of work, the largest of several very thoughtful groupings that see the artist exploring and extending the boundaries of her approach. Each variation of texture, format and lighting brings exciting new possibilities into view. Mechanically applied as a series of rules, her methodology could, one would think, become increasingly constrained, but she is completely open, intuitive and speculative in her approach rather than mechanical, and the reverse is the case.

In the upstairs gallery, Raphael Hynes has included a piece by Gorey in his fascinating selection of work drawn from the Municipal Collection. That show, with great pieces from Mainie Jellett to Diana Copperwhite, is a reminder of just how strong Drogheda's collection is.

Until June 18th