If the Ground Should Open…
2016 marked the centenary of Ireland’s heroic, if ultimately doomed, Easter Rising, which formed one important event in the country’s path towards independence. In response, there has been more than a fair share of State-initiated, artistic commemoration: so much, indeed, that a sense of fatigue has emerged. Nonetheless, Jaki Irvine’s If the Ground Should Open…, showing at the Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin, is a welcome and vital statement of intent: an artist at her full, considerable, powers, with the ability to approach the theme with real intelligence and clarity. Continuous with Irvine’s long-standing preoccupation with this historical event, it is a necessary contribution to the centenary year; or indeed, any year.
The exhibition runs through a corridor of small rooms on the Museum’s ground floor galleries. Eight clunky television monitors punctuate its meandering space. Over these monitors, a group of female musicians play, each depicting a close-up of a performer, and their instrument: bagpipes, piano, vocals, double bass, drums, cello, and violin. The music successfully envelops the space, nearly object-like, with each vantage point offering a different experience of the work. The musicians play eleven distinct songs, but their boundaries are hazily defined: a symphony, if anything. A series of six small etchings are also hung at intervals around the space, each a segment of text with women’s names circled, and used to formulate musical notation: Aoife de Burca; Miss Christina Caffrey; Eily O’Hanrahan, and many more. Using a traditional Scottish mode of composition, canntaireachd, Irvine has mined these women’s names to create a score; the result of which, seemingly by magic, we can hear all around us. These women, fearlessly instrumental to the Rising, reappear here