The Waterford Gallery of Art presents a mid-career retrospective of the work of Catherine Barron. We're published a hardback book to accompany the exhibition. The introductory essay by Cristín Leach can be read below.
Over the past 15 years, Barron has painted on salvaged metal plates, on 12-inch Bakelite records, old book covers and vintage photographs, incorporating elements of the substrate into the finished paintings. All the while, however, a narrative thread has run through the work, as the artist charts her own, very personal story. The imagery is on the one hand situational - with a series of studio-based self-portraits and work drawing on an archive of family photos dating back to the 1950s - and on the other allegorical, as the artist leads us on a confessional and intensely emotional journey through her life.
For Barron, stories are fluid, with no definitive beginning, middle or end - rather they hang within the scaffolding of our existence. "When we want to say something, we pick out and articulate specific details to communicate an experience or a particular meaning. The stories we tell can relay something that has happened, something that is happening, but also something we imagine or hope for. How we tell the story also conveys how we feel about it, how we understand it."
Born in Carlow, Catherine Barron is a visual artist, writer, arts facilitator and creativity researcher. She has won multiple awards for her work, including the Adams and De Veres awards at the RHA annual exhibition and the inaugural Amelia Earhart prize for an Irish female artist (Derry, 2022). She was shortlisted for the Hennessy portrait prize (now Zurich prize) at the National Gallery of Ireland in 2015. Her work is represented in many public and private collections including the National Portrait Collection (University of Limerick), the EPA, the OPW, Fingal County Council, Bank of Ireland, the Department of Education, Carlow Institute of Technology and the Haverty Trust.
Playing with all your heart
by Cristín Leach
There are poems like mantras to be found in the work of Catherine Barron.
There you are then / Speak to me of love / My heart will awake / Look homeward angel
Those lines come from her LP paintings. The words are remnants of song labels, left visible beneath and between layers of acrylic ink applied as she paints self-portraits onto the surfaces of old Bakelite records. A record of today on a record from the past, a meeting between now and then in an unexpected place. The title of the series refers to the initialism for Long Play (these are twelve-inch discs) and to Lone Play, also the title of a story the artist wrote documenting twenty-three of these works on Bakelite and MDF. The story was published in a book resembling an LP sleeve when the series was first shown at the Molesworth Gallery in Dublin in 2015.
Lone Play is a story that can be read as autofiction. It includes the line, ‘White is the colour of fear’. It’s a metaphorical text, about a desert and an oasis, which Barron uses to describe her experience of the breakup of her marriage and her departure from the family home. The paintings, in which her mirrored image is distorted by reflection and refraction using spoons, are a way to try and look at, and therefore see – another way to try and understand – herself. But also, and perhaps more importantly, these are paintings about feeling, specifically how it felt for her to be in the world then.
At the Waterford Gallery of Art, her potent, mid-career retrospective, You Couldn’t Make It Up, features key paintings from selected major bodies of work: Lone Play, The Colour of Things, Family, Principles of Light, and Windows, as well as recent small works on old book covers which she almost doesn’t count as significant because she makes them on a surface she enjoys, often just for fun. Each of these series has its own internal logic, with theoretical underpinnings that allow the works to operate as a metaphorical device she uses to involve herself, as she puts it, with where she was at in her life at the time. This retrospective spans fifteen years.
The possible poem you can make for yourself hides in a group of seven self-portraits clustered like a flower and joined together to form one artwork called Figure. The words are only visible if you get close enough to really look. In the single self-portrait, Standing on my own two feet, words she has left read, As some day it may happen. The word art can be seen like a t-shirt tagline on her chest as Barron appears with her hand over her mouth in the two-record diptych Self portrayal, pointing to a question about what kind of stories an artist in crisis might allow herself to paint, what kinds of tales might she impart?
This retrospective brings together discrete bodies of work, made in response to particular times and events in Barron’s life: history held tight in one space. It’s an artist’s job to make art in the present, which becomes a record of the past, which will be looked at again in the future, where it will be encountered in what has once again become the present. There is a sense of the artist time-travelling here, having been changed by the work and her life, while still remaining resolutely herself. In the 2023 self-portrait, Address, she is looking at you looking at her. But in order to make this work she has had to look at herself first, and that includes looking at where she’s come from.
The family photo paintings were first shown together in the exhibition We Were Here at the Molesworth Gallery in 2011, dedicated to her mother Nora. Barron’s 2013 show, It’s Hard to Tell, continued the theme and included a catalogue publication which opens with the quote: ‘My mother always said, ‘If there’s a fire, save the photographs’. She keeps them by her chair.’ Barron’s mother owned a camera that she held down by her waist, a childhood memory the adult artist can put logic on. Her mother was the photo-taker and also the photo-keeper. These acrylic ink paintings on salvaged metal plates draw on images dating back to the 1950s and to Carlow where Barron was born. They speak of the mother-lines as the guardians and shapers of records of family history, and of memory formed through the making, curation and keeping of images captured at times both mundane and profound.
Beginning with a desire to understand and document the before and after of family life following the death of her sister Mary G in 1972, when Barron was six, these delicate, intimate, hard-edged works are as open to outside interpretation as they are closed to certain accepted meanings when it comes to family lore. Barron allows the patina, the used marks and the rusting of the metal plates to speak to the filmic double takes, the corrosion, deletion, deterioration, disintegration and preservation of photographic prints, which operates as a visual metaphor for her sister disappearing, and for feelings and facts held unspoken. In Everyone pretend to be normal; Fading away; Let go; The communion dress; and Just when it was all going well, it started to go wrong, she paints the shared and hand-me-down clothes, the family group-shots, the crying kids, the put-upon parents, the laughter, the hardship and the fun.
People often appear, subtly, more than once in the rearranged lineups of Barron’s photo-paintings. Life’s Funny, her exhibition held at Painter and Hall in London in 2014, connected diary entries and snippets of memory with individual works: ‘I have my nana’s hands.’ ‘Cancer got Shirley and Mary G.’ ‘Red. The most direct of colours.’ ‘Just because someone wasn’t in the photograph doesn’t mean they weren’t there.’ These paintings unearth the fiction of the family album, while excavating it as a sometimes unintentional record of unobserved truths.
When she made Ghost story, a communion photo painting on the cover of a vintage New Testament, Barron noted that the surfaces of these old, linen-wrapped hardbacks ‘eat the paint’. Vitrine displays of her individual book cover works anchor this retrospective and allow the themes that run through it to float. The still-perishing surfaces of the book covers speak of ephemerality, legacy, documentation, value, worth, ambition, hope; of how nothing stays the same and everything does. Barron is interested in how we respond to light, colour, triggers for memory, and in the complications of our relationships with perception.
On the covers of Kidnapped by RL Stevenson, Ride a Rhino by Michaela Denis, Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations, George Sava’s The Healing Knife, The Snake in the Grass by James Wellard and How to Make Money (anon); on worn, foxed and occasionally damp-stained surfaces, she paints personal archive images: of kids at play on Christmas day under the red-green-blue twinkle of fairy lights; the blue swirl of a pleated dinner dance dress; people posed and snapped unawares, on the beach, in a chair, wading through a flood near a mobile home, on a sun lounger, in bed. They are moments casual and mundane, special and planned, important because they have endured, captured because of the sky, the view, the visitors, the friends, the wedding, the dress, the hobbies, the loves, the babies, the beach: captured on the days a camera came out.
In her introduction to Life’s Funny, Barron wrote, ‘I have learned the things I have always known.’ This is an important observation because the act of making art in this way is not a discovery of but a return to self. By the time she came to show the Principles of Light works in 2021 at the Molesworth Gallery she had already written The (O)Map, a book which proposes a remarkable, teachable, learnable, theory of creativity, published in 2022. For Barron, art and research are inseparable. She takes a deeply scientific approach to her painting. She has studied cognitive neuroscience, and developed her own theories to describe how the brain perceives and creates reality, and the effect of this on behaviour. She is an artist-researcher/researcher-artist. She draws theoretical and literal connections between light and consciousness. She tallies relationships between intuition, patterns and wisdom, and speaks of spectrums of both illumination and insight: ‘If we know that something has a spectrum, and if any part of it exists, then all of it does.’
The blue Principles of Light paintings included in this retrospective are a reminder of what happens when she paints light and, as if a reminder were needed, of what an incredible painter she is when she does. Water sparkles in Resonance and See, the sun glows in Bright spark, clouds self-actualise into focus in Stars, and a glimpse of a coloured spectrum appears in Lady luck. It seems that Barron paints not only what the brain tells the eye (or what the eye tells the brain) it sees, but what the eye and the brain together know: that clues about life are there for the noticing, that physics informs it all, and that the science of light is inseparable from theories of perception and creativity.
The Colour of Things paintings, which include the large works Hot seat, Orange chair, and the diptych Blue lucky are part of her most recent body of work. They use perception of colour as a metaphor for perception of reality. These stand-out neon-framed compositions are another record of a time of change in Barron’s life, offering a way to encounter and examine ideas of home and place by looking at spaces where she had felt she belonged and was safe, but then had to vacate.
Barron’s personal writing is often exquisite. There is a short flash of diary-style text that goes with these paintings which begins, ‘I have been given notice…’ It ends with the words, ‘…capturing what cannot be kept, when I go.’ It speaks of the sunlight that scans the rooms where she made a temporary home as a single parent for six years. These works are part of a process of absorption, acceptance and release. In the smaller paintings Trash and Red curtain, colour registers and de-registers as if reality is slipping, like a memory being re-calibrated, or a temporal glitch. The colour in these joyfully intense, rich, beautiful, present paintings is felt as much or perhaps even more than it is seen. They are a reminder that what is gained and what is lost in the decisions that accompany big life events might be almost unspeakable, but it can be captured and expressed: in paint, words, light.
It might be surprising to know that she prefers to work from visual references and sources that are black and white. The colour in her paintings emerges from memory parsed through experience, via her understanding and knowledge about vision, seeing, and her theories on it all. Barron talks about resonance when she speaks about her work and she draws a delineation between resonance and rationale. Rationale is about what we think, resonance is about what is true to us, and therefore offers a deeper way of knowing and understanding. She seeks resonance over rationale in her work. Her art is rooted in experience. There is no artifice here.
At times it seems she can paint even better than the eye can see. Look at how the putty crumbles and the rain-weathered edges of the wooden frames collapse in her Windows works, painted on playing cards and metal sheets. See how the paint peels on the windowsills, the net curtains tear in sun-cracked lines, and tree branches reflect stark in the glass. Notice how she allows the surface of the metal plate to become part of the painting so that its untouched rusted patina is the surface of the wall. It is as though you have been there and looked at that window too. She puts you in front of it. This incredible near-photorealism reveals her own delight in the pleasures of looking closely at things. Windows are metaphors for eyes in her work.
When Catherine Barron paints, she brings all of her being to the task. She pays such dedicated attention that her art demands yours too, cultivating a sense of presence that makes space for resonance, connection, revelation, truth. Her work is open, experimental, curious, passionate, new. Everywhere she looks for synergies from which she extracts theories in order to arrive at some kind of understanding or wisdom. She wants to be awed, which is to be made feel somehow human and supra-human at once, in the presence of all a mind and an eye can behold. She is meeting herself on the surface of a metal plate, on a wooden panel, on the cover of a hardback book, on a record, in a painting-filled room. She is seeing if you will meet her there too.
Cristín Leach, April, 2025
