Gillian Lawler: Edgelands

The former head of collections at IMMA, Catherine Marshall, has written of Lawler's work that it is pervaded by unease. "It hangs like microscopic atoms of pollution in the air, lingers around multiple 'blind' windows, seeks to find a foothold under the high rises, only to collapse into the hollow grid-like like spaces that should be their foundations, and attempts to settle on ground that is subtly curved, billowing or cratered." The work is marked by "strange blooms of faded colour, dusty pinks, yellows and greens that glow uncertainly against almost monochrome ground colours, surprised occasionally by more accentuated patchworks that remind one simultaneously of Colin Middleton and of illustrated children's books."

Yet Marshall also maintains that Lawler's incredibly subtle treatment of colour, texture and scale, "make her work a celebration of everything that is good in painting. The work is uplifting because it is always uplifting to find artists with the courage to address difficult issues. When they do it so subtly and effortlessly, we all benefit. The last words in relation to Lawler's painting are a repetition of those attributed to the great German Modernist Mies Van Der Rohe on good architecture: 'less is more'."

Gillian Lawler is an Irish artist, based in Dublin. She graduated with a BA in Fine Art Painting from the National College of Art and Design, Dublin, in 2000, and has since had 17 solo exhibitions in Ireland, the UK, Croatia, Poland, Spain, Holland, Italy and the US.

She has won numerous awards, including the Hennessy Craig Scholarship and the Whytes Award at the RHA Annual Exhibition in 2007 and the Open Selection Exhibition Award at the Éigse Arts Festival in 2009. Other awards include an Arts Council Bursary Award (2022, 2020, 2009), Kildare Arts Services Award (2015, 2013, 2011, 2009), Culture Ireland grants (2021, 2018, 2017, 2011) and an invited studio residency at the RHA Gallery in 2009. She was shortlisted for the Beers Lambert Contemporary, Thames and Hudson publication, 100 Painters of Tomorrow in 2013, the Celeste International Art Prize in 2012 and won a Merit prize from the Golden Fleece Award in 2013. She also won the Graphic Studio Dublin Print Award in 2019 and the Parenting Residency Award at the Cow House Studios in 2022.

She is co-founder and a member of the artist group, Difference Engine, along with Mark Cullen, Jessica Foley, Wendy Judge and featuring Gordon Cheung. The group stages evolving serial exhibitions and is a model of autonomous artist curation. Each ‘manifestation’ of Difference Engine is based on an ongoing collaboration, a kind of ‘jamming’, between the artists. The results yield engaging experimental exhibitions, combining installation, video, painting, sculpture and writing.

 

We've published a fully-illustrated catalogue to coincide with the show, copies of which are available from the gallery. The introductory essay by Valeria Ceregini can be read below.

 

Edgelands

by Valeria Ceregini

In her latest solo exhibition, Edgelands, Gillian Lawler revisits her interest in liminal space, using it as a prism to explore the tension between an imagined and an actual reality. 

Her primary sources of inspiration are the ‘edgelands’ or wastelands that border and, to some eyes, scar our surroundings. These overlooked and marginalised spaces, often neglected or dismissed in conventional urban narratives, become the focal point of Lawler’s artistic exploration. Through her keen observation and sensitive interpretation, she breathes new life into these forgotten realms, revealing their hidden significance - and their hidden potential.

Lawler’s work resonates with a sense of duality and transformation, capturing the interplay between decay and renewal, the past and the future, the ephemeral and the tangible. Each painting represents shifting landscapes which act as a portal, allowing visitors to traverse the boundaries between worlds and enter the evocative domain of the ‘edgelands’. The artist invites us to contemplate the ambiguities of these territories and their boundaries. Through her artistic lens, she reveals the profound connections between these transitional spaces and our human condition. The exhibition serves as a reminder that this liminal terrain can provide fertile grounds for growth, imagination, and metamorphosis. By shedding light on the intrinsic beauty and potential of these overlooked landscapes, Lawler encourages us to reflect on the transitory nature of our existence.

Her ‘edgelands’ evoke mountainous terrains, elevated from a floating ground and gravitating towards a foggy sky, suggesting a constant state of flux. She masterfully reduces and simplifies elements within these landscapes, creating a redacted nature that is reconstructed as a series of indefinite structures. Her ‘edgelands’ serve as enigmatic portals, blurring the boundaries between the physical and the conceptual. They evoke a sense of the sublime, inviting contemplation of our place within the natural world and the intangible forces that shape our experiences. The mountain-like forms, elevated and detached from the earthly plane, act as signifiers of the thresholds we encounter on our journey through life.

The artist’s deliberate reduction and simplification of elements within her landscapes serves to distil the essence of nature itself. By stripping away extraneous details, Lawler allows viewers to focus on the core features of these conceptual visions. These truncated worlds she depicts not only enhance the aesthetic appeal of the work, but also prompts deeper reflections on the nature of reality and our perception of it.

 Lawler’s placement of ephemeral structures within the ‘edgelands’ evokes a sense of transience and impermanence. These ethereal landscapes become metaphors for the fluidity of existence, where boundaries and definitions become malleable. The artist’s intentional manipulation of space and form challenges viewers to immerse themselves in her evocative landscapes, transporting them to a realm where time is suspended and traditional notions of space are re-imagined. In this state of ambiguity, the artist invites contemplation of the interconnectedness of all things, of the vastness of the universe that extends beyond our comprehension.

 By creating landscapes that are simultaneously familiar and otherworldly, the artist compels us to engage with the profound mysteries that lie at the edge of our perception. She reconstitutes nature into conceptual visions inviting us to question our pre-conceived notions, challenging conventional boundaries and embracing the infinite possibilities that lie within the realms of the unknown. Stepping into the awe-inspiring world of these ‘edgelands’, she reveals the transformative power of art to expand our perspectives and illuminate the hidden wonders that surround us.

The theme of a portal allowing travel across dimensions has been extensively explored through literary and philosophical lenses but the allure of Lawler’s paintings is the attainment of knowledge by the act of looking. She burrows into a subconscious steeped in the memory and experience of what she has seen in the past. In the modern age, we are too used to relying on the rational mind, on a corporeal existence that excludes everything inexplicable and rejects the possibilities of a freer existence. Lawler’s oeuvre seamlessly and effortlessly weaves together the worlds of art, a constrictive social structure, and things we can only touch upon with an open heart and mind. Indeed, her work evokes a sense of otherworldliness which is also characteristic of the surrealist movement: confined spaces, achieving a sense of isolation.

The geometric patterns in the work are rooted in the study of nature and serve as navigation aids from one plane of consciousness to another. They are analogous to the concept of the holy mountain that has recurred throughout human history, across many cultures, where the proximity of the mountain’s summit to the heavens made it a staging post for the elevation of the human spirit.

There are many examples of historically-important mountains across the world, from Mount Olympus in the mythology of ancient Greece to Mount Ararat, the final resting place of Noah’s Ark in the Book of Genesis. These mountains became a destination for pilgrims who literally sought to elevate their spirits in order to achieve spiritual bliss. In the more recent past, the slopes of Mount Monescia in the Swiss Alps became home to a community of artists, anarchists, philosophers and thinkers, with Carl Gustav Jung its most famous denizen. This community, which later renamed the mountain Monte Verità, explored mulitiple facets of psychology and personal alchemy, advocating an introspective journey into ourselves, liberating us from the strictures of our claustrophobic and technology-driven lives to reveal a more vivid and fuller existence.

Gillian Lawler encourages us to embrace the transformative power of transition, illuminating the profound beauty that lies within the borders of the unknown, stepping across the threshold of these ‘edgelands’ and embarking on a journey that challenges pre-conceived notions, expands horizons, and invites us to see the world with fresh eyes. She makes visible in her paintings that which is invisible by revealing a threshold we are invited to cross to a place where the material becomes pure thought, a quiet and safe space without the chaotic distractions of our lives. Once there, we can experience an existential inner world, not unlike the ascent of a mountain where, as the alchemist declares in Alejandro Jodorowsky’s 1973 film, The Holy Mountain, ‘real life awaits us’.