9. eleanor mccaughey at the ashford gallery dublin (2024)
I visited the Eleanor McCaughey exhibition at the Ashford Gallery Dublin after giving a class on the psychoanalytic transitional object. The transitional object is an object that infants use when they move from the lifeworld of the mother into the external world of reality and others. It creates a space for play, experimentation, and the potential for completion or wholeness, encouraging the child to venture a little further into the darkness of reality, away from the light of the mother. This is a definition of the transitional object, provided by Donald Winnicott, as something healthy, developmental, and essential for navigating the world—from the protective parent to the dangerous exterior world, especially for children.
The artist Mike Kelley was theoretically aware of transitional objects in his essay writing and art making in the use of readymade teddybears in uncanny and abject ways. He explicitly discussed how these objects were often dirty, tormented by filth, with obligatory popped eyes hanging from threads. However, in Mike Kelley’s case beyond the thralldom of childhood, when the infant develops and overcomes the separation from the mother, can we call what the artist was expressing through the trademark objects of transitional process (teddy bears), a real need or return to attach and express something via an object, or just a theoretical representation of that childhood need?
This is where the artist comes in, and the question as to what needs or repressions artists are reenacting in the cultural production of objects. Are artists caught in a loop of lifelong transitional objects? This has been inferred in the paintings and prints of Edvard Munch in his repeated representations of The Sick Child (the artist’s mother and sister died in their sick beds before Edvard was a teenager). Is art making merely a process of separation and repair, revisiting and reinhabiting the trauma of separation until some form of cultural production or activity is activated? We must question whether the transitional object remains a transitional object in adulthood, or if it morphs into a fetish. Mike Kelly found it difficult to discern between the two, transitional versus fetish objects, seeing them as quite similar in their use-value. Yet looking at Mike Kelley’s work and its predilection for the darker register of the lifeworld, among the two objects, the transitional is viewed as good, the festish, bad.
In my view, Eleanor McCaughey's work has changed significantly over the last few years. Initially, I connected it with technology, exhibiting a graphic and animated sensibility that felt like an expression of a digital space—objectively detached, exploring the relationship between the human and the digital world. The use of colour, fragmentation, and collage created a sense of something both spatially and mentally fragmented, a residue of a mental space fractured by the digital world we inhabit. It seemed aggressive, reflecting a detached theory of fragmentation rather than the sense of embodiment that it now possesses and exorcises through a “phenomenology of woman” through silhouettes, curves and cuts.
The Ashford Gallery represents the commercial arm of the RHA; a red dot indicates the sale of one of McCaughey's framed gouache paintings on paper. There’s a plinth, or garden-height wall, made of ungrouted tiles where sculptural objects rest. One white wall of the gallery has been invaded by colour, collage, cuts, contours and curtains in a bricolage of materials that veil and layer and block the fantasy of a space beyond the white and framed table service of gallery etiquette.
This includes a chiffon blind, transparent and pearlescent, recycled from a previous exhibition at Complex Dublin. This layering of history and materials creates a cover story, culminating in the most uncanny cover story exhibited here: the curious carpet. There is no way to discern whether the carpet was conceived by the artist as an exhibition foil, or by the RHA as a solution to a swept-under-the-carpet issue with the original polished concrete underneath. Obviously, there is something out of place about the carpet, invoking an office space in its dark grey complexion and tiled composition, ugly yet cushioning the soles of the feet, unlike the polished concrete floor before it.
The carpet serves a purpose that is outside of aesthetics as such, that is neutral but not neutral at all in its associations. It affects the work greatly, much like the chiffon curtain affected McCaughey's work at the Complex. Without that curtain, the exhibition at the Complex would have become a space of scattershot art objects dispensed here and there, without the delineating corridors that helped to frame and navigate us in what were moments within an experiential whole.
What I'm left with is the carpet over everything else. If I imagine the Ashford Gallery with its usual polished concrete floor, this exhibition transforms into something you might see in a gallery off St. Mark's Square in Venice—high colour paintings with curvilinear sculptures set on plinths, bright lights, with a piano pinging in the loud heat and myth of the Mediterranean.
Commercial associations exist anyway in the Ashford. In a sense, this work resists the commercial via the very presence of the carpet whether intentionally installed or not. Like the students who attended with me, their first time in the gallery, they came to the space and the work with a gestalt view. Conversely I was waiting for the tablecloth to be wrenched clean from the table, so everything sits pretty, unadulterated by the workaday.
Adrift in the torrent of descriptions (Susan Sontag would be proud) I came to describe the carpet and realised that I just conveyed to the students that McCaughey is an emerging artist, like 99.9% Irish artists. I spoke of the shift in sensibility I perceived or misread in the first place. A perception related to technology, the fragmentation of self with a graphic sensibility that, in art history, reaches back into cubism or something similar from the fin de sceile, when cultural formalism and fears were spiking in an industrial and technological age of cameras and trains and the femme fatale. I thought to myself how McCaughey’s work relates to being an artist in this new world of social media and technology. This explicit emergence of the phenomenology of woman is just part of that whole fragmentation of self—splitting off to emerge anew. Effloresce.
Then I correct myself after remembering (after expecting artists who are unrepresented to exhibit in the Ashford) that McCaughey is represented by a gallery in Dublin. I wonder about the Ashford’s policy in this regard, one in which affords unrepresented artists to experience the commercial side of art: collectors and curators and red dot stickers. Yet McCaughey only just had her first solo exhibition at the commercial gallery in question in 2023, so the timeline between being selected to show at the Ashford may have run concurrently with gallery representation.
That aside, for me, it feels like McCaughey has taken a new direction, A Sea Change, one that is much more attuned to the body, much more visceral in its use of materials—the pasting, the cutting, even the use of paper. I do wish—based on context, of course—that I could experience art here without frames and glass, where this space offers an opportunity to really play, to explore in an exhibition space that is incubated within the RHA, but seems separate from it. That separation is really on display here in McCaughey’s work because of the carpet. It sets a different mood, and I’m intrigued to know, but not know, whether the carpet—my experiential transitional object that I can’t let go of—was intentional or merely a temporary solution to some unknown practical issue.
