DCP (David Cunningham Projects) is pleased to announce “Field Systems”, a solo exhibition of new paintings by Patricia Looby.
Between 1824 and 1846 an immensely important enterprise began in Ireland which was the surveying and mapping, in great detail, of every townland in the country. The first edition Ordnance Survey townland maps (6 inch to the statute mile) comprised over 1,900 sheets created with the intention to fix and measure the boundaries, shapes and names of 62,000 townlands in Ireland.
This mapping project was also intended to be a kind of material and ethnographic survey of the country. The maps were accompanied by memoirs of the physical and human geography of each parish. While these field notebooks exist, this noble and poetic intention most commonly resulted in a printed edition of basic topographical detail.
With this new series of paintings, specially created for David Cunningham Projects, Patricia Looby has produced a body of work that reunites the spirit of a place and its actual cartographical history – a visually manifested memoir of human activity in 70 acres of agricultural land in Tipperary.
Taking one specific townland, the place where she grew up, Patricia Looby has intensely researched all known maps of the area stretching from pre-Famine field systems and dwellings to the present day map image of this townland, which is called Corriconeen. The result is a deeply felt and thorough investigation of the actual landscape and the remembered fields, ditches, rises and hollows of a country childhood; a contemporary artists’ lexicon of the identity of place. Prominent on the maps and in the artist’s own memories and awareness of the landscape surrounding the family dwelling are several 10th century farm settlements and earth works known locally as “king forts”. It is worth noting that the place depicted in these paintings is still very much in existence – it is where where the artist’s family continues to live and work the land, as they have done for generations.
What Looby brings to the subject, in addition to the impressive historical accuracy and depth of her research, is her own unique method of representation – a kind of dreamlike collage of memory, intensively worked surfaces and informed symbolic language. These new paintings contain echoes of her previous major body of work –“Harvester”- which concentrated on the produce and implements of harvest work and the symbolism of the theme, stretching from the Eygptians to present day harvest methods and imagery. The assemblages, paintings and embroidered surfaces of this work became a contemporary meditation on life cycles.
In ‘Field Systems’, she is bringing us futher into this remembered landscape, showing us now the source of the corn seeds, Implements and machines that constituted her previous investigation. The land itself – its shape and slope, its historical re-ordering and some would say invasion by progress – has become the central motif for this series of paintings. The maps depart from their literal function and become a symbolic representation of the psychological experience of land, the lived and learned memory of place, and opens to discussion on how the knowledge and weight of a birthplace impacts on one’s experience of the rest of the world.
Patricia Looby lives and works in Tipperary, Ireland.
Her work has been exhibited widely in both solo and group exhibitions and is included in several important public and private collections including the Crawford Museum in Cork.
Her most recent solo show ‘Harvester’ originated at Temple Bar Gallery and subsequently traveled to several other venues in Ireland. She was invited to contribute to ‘An Leabhair Mor” (the Big Book) – a recent large scale project to create a contemporary illuminated manuscript of recent poetry and art by writers and painters from Celtic countries.
Her work was included in ‘Animal Rites’ a group show at DCP in 2007. This is her first solo exhibition with DCP.
Patricia Looby and DCP would like to thank Austin McQuinn.
Support for this exhibition has been provided by Culture Ireland.
