There is a profound sense of something amorphous yet intensely felt in the work of Blawnin Clancy.
Her new show at the Custom House Studios and Gallery in Westport was originally called The Shipwreck before she updated the title to Portals and Pilgrims, filling the quayside exhibition space with softly glowing, shadowy figures in cold, exotic landscapes.
Inspired by ideas about voyages and discovery, but with a lurking edge of discomfort, not least around the legacy of colonisation, her thoughts coalesced during a residency in Iceland and a studio stay at Lismore Castle Arts in Waterford in 2022. The painted, sanded and reworked layers and silhouette forms that populate this show have been completed in the two and a half years since.
Clancy moved between the USA and Ring near Dungarvan as a child, with summers in Ireland and term-time in America, a pattern that left her feeling "mid-Atlantic" as she puts it, in terms of identity. Her dad Tom, actor and founding member of Irish folk group The Clancy Brothers, travelled constantly for work. She remembers landing for refueling in Iceland aged twelve, a first encounter with a landscape that has influenced these paintings. Clancy is curious still about the relationship between the coastline and the sea. Much of the terrain in this show emerges from memory, "the coastline of Ireland, Iceland or any place really", but also from her own experience as a sea-swimmer looking back at the land: "being in the sea, as opposed to looking at the sea." To her, the land holds "layers of time, and layers of people".
Five inky drawings on paper share the title Time and Memory. Shadow figures in shades of green and blue are paired with giant grey pebble shapes speckled with starbursts of white dots. The technique she uses here is the same used to achieve the dappled effect in the oil paintings: an adapted resistance method with its origins in batik fabric dying, which she used to teach. These silhouetted figures are trudging, looming, balancing, flying. They are on the move through memory space.
Clancy works with photographs "taken or found", moving to sketchbooks to explore composition and colour in drawings which then travel transformed by painting, layering, sanding, peeling and more onto the surface of birch ply boards which range from twenty to one hundred centimetres across. The landscapes that emerge are not real locations, but they contain deeply felt echoes of reality. The people are not specific individuals, she sees them more as "traces, or remnants of energy" in the landscape. The work offers a feeling: that we might have been there, seen someone else go there, maybe dreamt of this place, or remembered a blurred photo of someone once busy in a landscape like this.
Three figures manoeuvre a shadowy currach in the water in We Might Have Been Alone on Earth. There’s an echo of Aran Island life, a shoreside rescue, or adventurers getting ready to land or depart. Clancy is aiming for ambiguity. There is no neat narrative, no clear-cut anecdote or set of facts to attach to each work. These are not history paintings. The figures are walking, fishing, hunting, keeping a lookout, enacting basic human behaviours in a dwelling-free, nomadic land. She thinks of the figures as "disrupting the reality" of the landscape. Her use of glue as a resist is deliberate and precise. Added drop by drop, painted over and then peeled off to form the stippled dots of white revealed beneath like starbursts, snow, a virus magnified, or an echo of the visual auras sparked by the silent migraines she occasionally experiences. Migraine auras produce visual disturbances and shifts in perception of depth, a type of unreality visited on the present. The figures in her paintings appear as archetypes lodged in our collective memory, ghosts perhaps. Asked if any of them are her, she replies, "probably".
The people in her paintings are searching, exploring, probing.
Mostly they are not aware of being observed, or if they are they don’t care. They are not posing for us. We are onlookers, peering back through time; they are protagonists. The bulky pink explorer in Landing may be walking towards the viewer, but he doesn’t know we are there. In Bury the Remains a looming spirit in loosely human form hovers near someone at work on the shore with unseen shovel. A corpse shape lies in line with the lapping water. It’s the only black painting in the show.
Surfaces scraped away and repainted chime with the idea of layers of human presence in the land. Conjuring might depict ice-hole fishing, its title pointing to some kind of magical, communal, understanding needed for survival. A blue figure with a stick surveys the icy terrain in Cusp of Snow. While in Iceland Clancy was struck by the legal right to roam and the freedom that gives from the notion and consequences of trespassing. On one walk, she found The Well of the Irish and wondered how long it had been there. From there she discovered the story of Irish women kidnapped and brought to Iceland by Vikings in the 9th century, resulting in Irish maternal DNA persisting in the population to this day. "There was a real unfamiliar but familiar feel." That is what her paintings do too. They speak of odysseys and sagas, the urge to seek other shores, roaming desires, and the human eye always looking to the land, the sea, and the horizon.
Pilgrims and Portals includes some small, three-dimensional, wall-mounted works painted on rag-based watercolour paper. Like reliquaries or totems, these fantasy landmarks are unexpectedly jewel-like, featuring more intensely coloured layers of carefully cut and shaped board. They seem to offer further mythical or undiscovered destinations, unpopulated as yet. The colours in her paintings are more nebulous. Glowing luminous green, pink, and blue, they are otherworldly. Her landscapes look like they might glow in the dark, which makes them strange, and she is interested in that feeling of uncertainty. There is something alien here, underwater, nuclear, bioluminescent - a beacon of enticement and a warning.
The people in her paintings are searching, exploring, probing. "Some of them are doing work, or on a journey, or looking out to see if people are coming back, or maybe they’re going to go," says Clancy. The world of this show is a land where humans have been doing these things for millennia. Inhabitants or visitors passing through, their presence points to the idea of home as a place of ever-shifting longing, both to be present and to depart. To Dream Again offers a window onto a world of possibility, its soft, pale minty light like a summons to enter the unknown. It's a call repeated in the solid stance of the warmly wrapped figure in To Unpathed Waters and Undreamed Shores. Here is a patiently waiting guide inviting us to step into a familiar unfamiliar place.
Portals and Pilgrims is at the Custom House Studios and Gallery in Westport from 5th April – 28th April 2024 - find out more here.
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