Caught in an attempt to escape

Caroline McCarthy has a talent for turning ordinary things into the extraordinary. She talks to Aidan Dunne, Art Critic, about her latest exhibition and her constant question, 'what's this all about?'

Things don't get much more ordinary or workaday than the materials that go into Caroline McCarthy's art: lots and lots of toilet paper, lengths of standard builders' 2 x 4, and a miscellaneous clutch of domestic objects that she bought in various shops. The ordinariness of it all is important because her work emerges, as she puts it, "from my fascination with my very ordinary life". Even more important, though, is that we go to the gallery, encounter something that is "totally normal" and find that it has somehow been pushed into strangeness.

So that, at her exhibition Port Sunlight in the Temple Bar Gallery, (the proposals for which won her the inaugural AIB Art Prize last year), we see a series of photographic still lifes on the walls featuring fruits and other foods. There is an almost parodic sense of profusion and excess in the images. Despite, or perhaps because of, their exaggerated formality - the way they reverentially pastiche still life conventions - they verge on kitsch. There is an additional oddness to them, which has to do with the pulpy surface texture of the objects in them.

In fact, everything in the images is made primarily from toilet paper. "What I was trying to get was that you look at the image and you know there's something wrong, something odd, but you can't quite pin it down, so you look again." As Mark Hutchinson puts it in the publication accompanying the show, what is ultimately wrong is that "the fruit is haunted by the associations of the toilet paper in its previous existence". It is this collision of associations that engenders a frisson in the viewer, a contemporary twist on the still life convention by which ripeness and profusion uneasily anticipates death and decay.

The other main component of the show is an installation, Escape, for which a room has been built in the gallery. Or rather, the outline of a room, for the internal space is defined by the skeleton of a stud wall to which the plasterboard has not been attached. The result is a bit like looking into a cage, within which the bedsit-like interior is furnished and accessorised with - again - completely ordinary things. This time, the twist in the ordinariness is that virtually everything in the room has a leopard skin pattern.

Characteristically of McCarthy's work, Escape is very approachable, quite funny and generates several layers of interpretive possibility. The yearning for escape, manifested in the obsessive accumulation of the symbolically wild, exotic leopard skin pattern, suggests someone who is ultimately imprisoned by his or her own desire. The excess is counterproductive. The more tokens of escape that are crowded into the room, the more evident it is that the inhabitant is trapped there. "It's as if it almost makes it, the space almost becomes wild, but in the end it doesn't quite." There is also a reference to kinds of obsessive behaviour. "I seem to have moved into this consumerist area recently, and this notion of the obsessive accumulation of objects has to do with that."

The show's title refers to the famous workers' town built near Liverpool by Lever Brothers, an expression of the utopian dreams of paternalistic capitalism, remote from the harsh realities of the global market. Escape is a way of dramatising the consumerist imperative in the image of a domestic interior stocked with ordinary things that become collectively, by virtue of one common attribute, extraordinary. McCarthy is keen to point out that for her the leopard skin obsession is exemplary and not at all personal.

"The thing about it for me was that these are things I came upon by chance." It began 18 months ago in the Netherlands. In a hardware store she happened to see a bristle doormat in a leopard skin pattern and was struck by the incongruity of decoration and function. She began to notice, and acquire, leopard skin-printed objects. "I didn't go looking for them, it was more that I suddenly had this eye for leopard skin. Now the funny thing is that a lot of people have come to me and told me about other leopard-skin objects that I just have to get. But that's not what it's about, I actually haven't developed this great passion to acquire every example of leopard skin, I just bought them when I happened to come across them, I didn't have to search." But then that interested response is partly what the work is about.

MCCARTHY'S own interest in the ordinary extends back to her time as an art student. She was brought up in Dundalk, and studied at NCAD in Dublin. "You know when you go to college, you're young, you have all these ideals and expectations. They are unrealistic, of course, and then it all goes pear-shaped and you're left wondering: What's this all about?" Her tutor, David Godbold, encouraged her to go with these doubts, to follow her own instincts, and it is that idea, of wondering what this is all about, that has informed her approach since.

Her graduation work queried the expectations of her as a painting student, for example. She stretched plastic carrier bags so that they became abstract compositions (including some that resembled Sean Scully stripe paintings), albeit imbued with everyday connotations, so that any inclination to read them formally was undermined by their utilitarian origins. And besides, as she remarks, "I really like plastic bags."

One of her most popular, frequently exhibited works to date, Greetings, is a video. The static camera frames a mountainous landscape, representative of both a style of painting and perhaps a mythologised view of Ireland, while the artist's head periodically intrudes into this frame, jumping up and down. Like the American artist Janine Antoni chewing a minimalist block of chocolate, you could describe it as a way of literally putting yourself in the picture, subverting a tradition from which you feel excluded.

McCarthy made Greetings about a year after finishing at NCAD, when she was living and working in Dublin. Based most of the time in the city centre, she drifted into a congenial life of making work. "It was strange. After college I didn't really know what else to do, it was like having a kind of immunity to other aspects of life." While it was pleasant, the downside was a certain complacency.

All that changed when she went to London to do a one-year MA course at Goldsmiths College, the cradle of the Young British Artists.

"The contrast between Dublin and London could not be greater. You don't have to try so hard in Dublin because it is a smaller place, everyone knows everyone. London is a massive metropolis crammed with artists from everywhere. It's much tougher, you've got to be focused, to organise yourself. Often it's the practical details that determine your studio practice."

Goldsmiths was stimulating, although "one year is not enough. There is so much going on you want to pay attention to it, but the more you attend to everything else the less you deal with your own body of work. You have to find a balance, which is what I tried to do." One lesson she learned was the importance of developing a reliable network of peers.

"You meet people and you stick with them, you need them, you help each other. That doesn't necessarily happen in a smaller city."

To some extent Goldsmiths was "sink or swim. It's a very critical environment and you're forced to take a position. You can't get away with much when everything is questioned, questioned, questioned all the time. You have to give a lot more." To some extent you could say that McCarthy's post-MA work, with its layers of irony and its agreeably conceptual-lite elements, is typical of Goldsmiths, except that it is entirely consistent with what she has been doing since NCAD, it is really her.

Perhaps what has changed is the scale and rigour of her approach. For her it has always been "about how I see things. I try to make connections between things, but I don't force it in a particular direction, I've allowed it to evolve." And at the moment it's evolving very well.

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