Glasgow
Cathy Wilkes’s current exhibition of new sculpture and painting (on view through September 29, 2024) draws on her experience of growing up in Belfast, Northern Ireland, during The Troubles. Realized through the IWM 14-18 NOW Legacy Fund, a program of artist commissions led by the Imperial War Museums, Wilkes’s work looks beyond official validations of war, beyond the monumental and heroic. Instead, she scrutinizes the painful effects of sustained disorder and violent terror on ordinary, everyday lives.
British troops were sent to Northern Ireland as peacekeepers in 1969, and they stayed there until 2007. A small archival display in the center of the exhibition acts as an anchor, pointing to just how deeply this incursion affected people. For instance, a Catholic holy card made into a Christmas greeting conveys blessings accompanied by a depiction of barbed wire and mention of Long Kesh, which together reference HM Maze Prison where IRA prisoners were held. Nearby, a candlewick blanket, normally associated with comfort and rest, tumbles in gentle folds from the wall onto the floor, gesturing to the hunger strikes that took place there and the notorious death of Bobby Sands. Other documents give voice to Belfast youth, the victims of Bloody Sunday, and more. A series of small paintings hung at irregular intervals around the gallery lend an air of reverence and create a space of quiet commemoration.
The economical approach to curation in the show imbues individual objects with particular intensity. In opposite corners of the gallery, two domestic wall sconces made from brass and fluted glass adorned with floral decoration cast harsh light in an otherwise dim space. A single wooden chair sits beside a wall, with soiled, discarded clothes nearby. Items of damaged women’s clothing—a vest top and a shirt—are hand-draped from a board on one wall, a metonym for the body they once covered, or perhaps a contemporary take on memento mori paintings of the 17th century. The spatial qualities of the clothing, however, create a more direct relationship with viewers, encouraging empathy and drawing us into the situations that Wilkes presents or implies.
That empathic response reaches a zenith when viewers confront a life-size female figure. Bare feet on the floor, she leans backward, as if recoiling from a terrible impact. A tubular structure protrudes from the wall in front of her head. The figure’s mouth and nose, and the crown of her head, are saturated with a spray of pinks and reds. It’s an appalling sight—suggesting a bullet through the head—and despite the stylized nature of the figure, the violence is visceral. In this sculptural space, Wilkes’s gendered bodies, isolated objects, and discarded clothing and bedding take an understanding of violence off the streets and shift it into a more personal interior, whether domestic space or prison cell. The message is that the follies of war and violence must be remembered, not valorized, and they must be remembered in their entirety, beyond the monument and the hero, to include the lives of everyone who suffered. Wilkes’s work instantiates the kind of radical empathy that has the potential to bring change.
The exhibition travels to St Aloysius Parish Hall, Springburn in Glasgow later in the fall.
