PATRICIA BURNS – HINTERLAND: The Glen Paintings

essays by Thomas McCarthy and Gemma Tipton

ISBN 978 0948037 986    36pp (hardback)      22x24.5cm     19 colour illus

Patricia Burns is a Dublin-born, Cork-based artist. She made The Glen Paintings series in her studio without having an exhibition to work towards or any idea of where it would finally be shown. She made it simply because she was compelled to make it, because her sense of what she wanted, the wintry quality of light in the Glen in Cork city, and the time and space needed to make the work, were all aligned. These beautiful and painterly works, vaguely architectural and finely crafted, are about a part of the city not normally associated with either art or architecture. This book documents this body of work in its entirety, with two thoughtful and lyrical essays by the poet and novelist Thomas McCarthy, and art writer Gemma Tipton. 

EXTRACTS

"Winter trees are emptied in these canvases; the migratory tenants have flown. Only a strange light remains, a light of ghostly winterish presences. But it is an urban illumination. The light here is not the afterglow of gorse burning, but a fading electric blue, a dimming fluorescence. Crossing this landscape by car and on foot over several winters, while both exploring and homecoming, the artist spotted this light above everything else. When she turned off the North Ring Road, slipping down through the bowl of the Glen, she could see an assemblage of paintings in the dimly lit architecture. She knew instinctively that such poured concrete was art, that modular homes with flush windows had a cinematic quality. She knew at once that she’d driven down into a film noir that smelled of oil and prepared canvas. She had found herself in a state of being that seemed nameless, an architecture without ownership. Winter had papered the world with its poverty. A neighbourhood awaited its cinematographer, its own Mike Leigh. It has taken the artist several years to work out the consequence of such insight; these canvases are many years in the making. They are a long and steady gaze at profound material, a home not tied to people, but a loved Glen, not quite city, not quite country. What she has created is a massive act of solidarity with every Irish city, the great unfinished history."

— from the essay by Thomas McCarthy

"Familiar to the artist from her route home, the subject of Hinterland is a local authority housing estate, dating from the 1970s – a period when some architects and planners still believed that a certain kind of design expressed in terraces of boxes, surrounded by wide open spaces, could solve social ills. Particular features – the low pitch of the roofs, windows that are built right into the corners of the façades, and blank gable walls – place the estate architecturally, and in time. Expressed in Hinterland, however, it occupies a more interesting territory than merely being a slice of architectural and social history. Adjacent to the city, but flung further out from the centre, on the edges of the suburbs, Hinterland’s houses anchor the once-beautiful landscape to include the human. Windows shine brave pale light, demonstrating that these are homes. Translating Baudelaire, Gaston Bachelard echoes the mood evoked by Hinterland: “Isn’t it true that a pleasant house makes winter more poetic, and doesn’t winter add to the poetry of a house?” Burns brings an element of this type of poetry to her unlikely subject-matter. These are neither the postcard-pretty cottages, or redbrick terraces, or gingerbread homes of idealised childhood memories. Instead they are the reality of the countless lives that less often become the subjects of poetry and art."

— from the essay by Gemma Tipton