FRANCES HEGARTY — Selected Works 1970-2004

essays by Sharon Kivland and Monica Ross

ISBN 978 0948037 085     48pp (pb)    25 x 21 cm    36 illus (incl 33 col) 

This monograph on one of Ireland’s leading contemporary artists, who works mainly in the fields of video and installation, was published to coincide with a major exhibition at the Model & Niland Gallery in Sligo. Among several topics she explores is the displacement that occurs when people are removed from their original landscape and language, the sense of loss and confusion that arises when geographic and cultural surroundings change. This is a visually stimulating and mentally challenging book that looks at a body of work in totality, therefore gaining insight into the continuity and evolution of an artist’s investigations.

EXTRACT

"There are three autoportraits. The first is silent, a single image subjected over time to manipulations, flashes and distortions. The second is the same as the first, but this time there is a voice-over. In fact, it is rather a voice-apart, separated from the image that is projected, though the woman in the image is assumed to be speaking or thinking what one hears. It is a voice that comes from elsewhere; I hear the voice behind me as I look at the mutable image that does not hold its form. The artist tells her life in three minutes. I have to believe that it is her life. It could be mine, if the voice is internalised, if I absorb its words. It is a matter of forgetting as much as of remembering. It is as though she has undertaken a wild analysis, without the safety of the presence of the analyst, to whom one promises to say everything. She tries to say everything, but time is pressing. The repression of material constantly exerts pressure to find expression, what cannot be said, for it is not known or has been denied struggles to find representation. If the artist is taken for the subject of the work, the artist will have to be reinvented according to the rules imposed by the work-as-symptom. The work itself, interpreted as a symptom, is both an object that can be experienced directly (though the veil of fantasy, which is denied) and as a signifier of underlying depths (inferred only by fact of its very existence). There can be no universal meaning in this case, for a symptom is produced only by the particular history of the artist, and that history is told. As she speaks, the image struggles, flicking faster, back and forth, breaking up, as though it cannot withstand what is said. There is a disjuncture between image and words."

— from the essay by Sharon Kivland

"I am looking at Turas as if at a painting, a painting of a genre whose concerns are the domestic, the incidents of the interior. Light is carefully controlled and the composition is structured according to the gaze of a technical device, a lens that is unseen. If a painting, we observe two women sealed into a timeless moment of enigma. Actors or models, their presence is revealed to us, but of their transaction, its time or substance, we know nothing. When did it begin? Is it over? But we have sound and this is video. We are in our own era. The image moves, as if, untied from the limitation of depicting one instant as eternal, it will be released into a narrative whose sequence will explain the time and substance of what is taking place. Can we say now, this is what happened? Here is the beginning, here is the end?
          The two women are the artist Frances Hegarty, and her mother Sarah. The title of this work, Turas (1991-95) meaning journey, is both metaphor and description for an exchange between them. Taking place over time, this journey is one in which leaving inherently implies a return. Time and again, the cycle of Turas returns us to the image of a rite of passage. Time and again, the camera takes us in close and then away. Time and again, from beyond the waters of both virtual and real distance, the ritual image resurfaces."

— from the essay by Monica Ross