Though some of them are very large indeed, you have to look closely at Deirdre O'Mahony's paintings. From the distance they may look like big, heroic, gestural works, but from a foot or two away you can see that their broad swathes are circumscribed by intricate masses of tiny non-gestural brush-strokes. Their surfaces might almost be embroidered rather than painted. Similarly, although their starting points are - on the face of it - extremely robust subjects, in the form of glacial erratics in the Burren in Co Clare, the paintings emphasise not mass and toughness but the underlying fragility of the environment.
Wrap, a major exhibition of O'Mahony's work at the Galway Arts Centre, spans her output since she moved to Kilnaboy in Clare eight years ago. She didn't settle there with the intention of making work about the Burren, and she confesses to being a little surprised that she was drawn to do so. Born in Limerick, she studied at Galway RTC (where, in its current guise as the Galway and Mayo Institute of Technology, she now teaches), before going to St Martin's School of Art in London. After graduation she became involved in the music scene. which had been energised and opened up by the advent of punk. With Shane McGowan and the Pogues going strong, it was, she recalls, a tremendously exciting time, when it became okay to be Irish in London.
With her partner she travelled, visiting India. "Strangely enough, aspects of India reminded me of Ireland. Eventually we had to ask ourselves why we were travelling around trying to find places that reminded us of Ireland." Partly motivated, as well, by parenthood, they decided to move back here. It was a fairly dramatic leap, from a high-rise in one of the world's biggest cities to a village in one of Europe's least populated rural regions. But they have settled very happily.
In the first half of the 1990s, O'Mahony's work shows a concern with organic processes, from enclosed, bodily spaces as in DNA, to the teeming masses of Fuchsia. In 1993, an ambitious site-specific installation, Traces of Origin, close to the Ailwee Caves, consisted of big banner-like paintings unfurled against the stone, inscribed with the patterns of the limestone pavement and fossils from the rock.
It was there for a month and it was, she recalls wryly, an exceptionally wet, windy month. She was uneasy not only about the practical difficulties but also about imposing work directly on the landscape in that way. Blood- streams, from 1995, very effectively combines a sense of bodily processes with landscape. It is a way of literally embodying the environment, of "giving a body to the landscape" as she puts it. Ribbons of rust-coloured blood blend with a porous limestone surface, developing the idea of the landscape as a vulnerable skin.
Being awarded the Pollock/Krasner Bursary in 1996 made an incredible difference to her. "It was like being given a present of a year in which to work." Her first major series based on the Burren, Erratics, stemmed directly from the bursary and was, she reckons, the real breakthrough for her. The erratics are outsiders; boulders carried in by the advancing ice sheets and deposited when they retreated. In this they echoed O'Mahony's own position as an outsider in the Burren, someone transplanted from city to country. To that extent, they are a self-exploration.
Like much of her work, the Erratics begin in the landscape itself, where she laid out canvas and outlined in charcoal the shadows cast by the boulders. Back in the studio, the outlines guided the development of the paintings and their densely patterned surfaces find a rapport with the Burren's eroded limestone. Their pervasive feeling of flow relates to the role of water in shaping the soluble limestone, recalling Barrie Cooke's Burren paintings and sculptures, particularly his Woman in the Burren, with its suggestion of an energising feminine presence percolating through the inert stone. O'Mahony's latest series, Wrap, engages even more directly with the land. She wrapped canvas around the boulders and recorded the imprint of their forms and textures, working soil or paint into the fabric with her bare hands (a lot of scraped and chafed skin). Unfolded and outlined, the images can resemble outsize, exotic blooms.
Again, the fragility of the environment is a concern. Some of the canvases are left relatively raw, others exceptionally worked, some are stretched, others left unstretched. She thinks of them as variously "mediated and unmediated" in their relationship to their sources. Her method counterpoints a battery of free and more controlled techniques; the "accidents" of pouring, syringing and staining are then "edited", sometimes comprehensively edited, with the brush. "I like the idea of using a small sable brush on a huge scale." The process slows down immeasurably and becomes meditative, assuming quite a different rhythm to the urgency of being out on the land, engaged with wind and rain. But her priority is always to stay open to "the found element."
In making these works she was thinking of the way the landscape of the West has been commodified, packaged and marketed in various ways; each painting is, in a way, like a skin stretched and preserved. She doesn't have simplistic views on preservation, though; it is more a question of exploring different levels of our relationship to the land. As someone based in the Burren, she is aware of the day-to-day realities of rural life. "I'm absolutely conscious of the fact that the small farmers in the area need local jobs, so that the land isn't depopulated by the need to move into the cities." As it happens, her next project will take a city as its starting point. This year she hopes to tackle a number of works from the vantage point of the city walls in Derry.
