Here is the second extract from Jack Welsh’s text:
Irish-born photographer Tadhg Devlin’s recent work is engaged with immigration in relation to the Liverpool-Irish diaspora. The title, 12 Miles Out, references the location of Devlin’s photographs: 12 nautical miles from the costal baseline of Ireland sailing to Liverpool and vice versa. 12 miles is also the internationally recognised distance of state jurisdiction at sea. Read within this context, each fleeting moment captured in Devlin’s photographs at sea embodies a personal limbo between two lands.
As John Belchem notes in his comprehensive study of the Liverpool-Irish, the vast numbers of Irish who arrived into Liverpool entered ”a diaspora space”, a contact zone between different ethnic groups with differing needs and intentions as transients, sojourners or settlers.’[i] Factors such as religious perspectives and economic cycles could enflame both hostility and immigration levels. Ireland’s current economic instability demonstrates this.
The influx bred incredibly harsh attitudes towards Irish immigrants in Liverpool. However when returning home to Ireland, the Liverpool Irish often found themselves marginalised for leaving. Informed by his own relationship with Ireland since leaving in 1993, those portrayed in Devlin’s images have the potential to trigger countless memories for a particular generation of Liverpool Irish. By using Portfolio NW as an opportunity to initiate an archive of those who emigrated to Liverpool in the 1950s, Devlin’s project can elucidate and possibly reveal untold stories of this time.
To those unwilling to look beyond the surface, Dave Evans’ sculptures may appear to be assembled hastily. Working with accessible materials such as wood, paper and thread, his work radiates a refreshing simplicity that might, at first, be misread. However it is the modularity of these elements that activates his work and encourages a deeper reading.
As a science-fiction aficionado, Evans delights in props produced for 1960s Star Trek TV series, B-movies and low budget films. These simplistic creations are gloriously optimistic. It is worth remembering that back in the 1960s, a desktop computer (even if clearly constructed out of moulded plastic and button lights) was a pretty advanced proposition. The history of sci-fi is full of brazen optimism and speculation surrounding the future; the hand controlled gestural interface computers – as featured in Spielberg’s film Minority Report (2002), based on Phillip K. Dick’s 1956 short story – are already tantalisingly close.
Inevitably, predicting the future is an impossible task. Cautious to avoid the obsessive sci-fi ‘fanboy’ paradigm, Evans distances himself, instead investigating how these objects accentuate perceptions of time through their sculptural language. The paper columns, twisting toward the ceiling, are carefully constructed, each crease a deliberate and crafted decision. Joined together, these forms are in a state of flux; one aptly summarised by the philosopher Husserl’s Bergsonian statement: ‘This continuity forms an inseparable unity, inseparable into extended sections that could exist by themselves, into points of the continuity.’[ii] If we look carefully again, are Evans’ sculptures greater than the sum of their parts?
The female figures depicted in Hannah Wooll’s drawings and paintings are, at first glance, familiar. On closer inspection their features are drawn out and often exaggerated or underdeveloped. Noses are jagged. Eyes mismatched in size. There is a naive and natural beauty inherent in these portraits. Often located in forests or imagined landscapes, and sometimes accompanied by tiny creatures, the figures appear vulnerable. There is a sense of contradiction as we meet their piercing gaze.
The manipulated iconography employed by Wooll defies our, perhaps unconscious, desire to witness unblemished flesh; a yearning forged out of overexposure to tabloid culture. Wooll’s works clearly, and playfully, interrogate the representation of the female form in historical painting. In the male dominated practice of painting starting with the Renaissance, women were often perceived as objects in high society portraiture or cast as Biblical figures – in stark opposition to their domesticated status. Wooll subverts traditional iconography, and injects a delicate measurement of kitsch to create mesmerising works that potentially summon a range of often contrasting emotions.
[i] John Belchem, Irish, Catholic and Scouse: The History of the Liverpool Irish, 1800-1939. (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2007), p.2.
[ii] Edmund G. Husserl, On the Phenomenology of the Consciousness of Internal Time 1893-1917 (London: Springer, 1991) p.29.
