RETURNING / HERITAGE
The exhibition features new paintings, charcoal drawings, found-object works and a video piece. Through her work, McCarthy explores her mother’s family story, from their roots in County Down to her grandparents’ move from Kilmainham to Sandycove in the 1930s. She revisits gardens, houses, and familiar paths from the past. Some are still standing, others have changed or disappeared. The exhibition invites visitors to think about what is passed down through generations and how memories continue to live on even after physical places change. It is a gentle and thoughtful look at identity, belonging, and the power of letting go.
Returning / Heritage is the result of a dlr Visual Art Commission, which was awarded to Maeve McCarthy. The commission gives artists the opportunity to create a new body of work that is responsive to Dún Laoghaire-Rathdown. It is funded by the Arts Council and supported by Dún Laoghaire-Rathdown County Council.
Alongside the exhibition, dlr Arts Office will run a programme of accompanying talks, workshops and events. This offers many opportunities for people of all ages to interact with the gallery in different ways, learning about and trying out different art-making techniques. For further details, visit the website: www.dlrcoco.ie/arts
Maeve McCarthy is a Dún Laoghaire-born, Dublin-based artist whose work explores memory, place, and the passage of time. She mainly works in painting and drawing. She is known for her small-scale rural landscapes and narrative scenes inspired by personal and family history. Recently, she has started making larger paintings of gardens from memory, based on earlier charcoal sketches. These new works explore mood, atmosphere, and sensory memory.
McCarthy graduated from the National College of Art and Design in 1987 and has exhibited in Ireland and internationally. Her work is held in public and private collections, including the National Gallery of Ireland. She is a member of the RHA (Royal Hibernian Academy) and is represented by the Molesworth Gallery, Dublin.
Below is an essay by Aidan Dunne from the book we published to accompany the exhibition.
‘The past is a foreign country,’ L P Hartley famously wrote. ‘They do things differently there.’ Thus begins The
Go-Between, his novel about one man’s recollection of a life-changing childhood summer during which, he came to realise, unseen, dangerous currents ran beneath the apparently calm, orderly surface of life. That life, within Britain’s rigid social hierarchy prior to the First World War, seemed exceptionally insulated from disruption, but the narrator, a guest of his more well-to-do schoolfriend, is himself an uneasy observer, something of an outsider who doesn’t quite fit in, and of course a century of disruption was waiting in the wings.
The artist is, almost by definition, an outsider. Not usually in any grand, romantic sense of a troubled, rebellious genius. More by virtue of a quiet, telling apartness. There is an autobiographical element to The Go-Between, and it is the novelist’s equivocal involvement with a world he wants to belong to but, even unconsciously, doesn’t actually endorse and may fundamentally disagree with, that gives the story its edge.
Maeve McCarthy’s work has consistently embodied the position of the observer who is simultaneously at one remove from her subject matter even while intimately involved in it. That involvement extends to most of her work as an artist, the notable exception perhaps being her considerable experience as a portrait painter, though even here, like many artists, she has made some searching self-portraits. Apart from portraiture, it is striking that, while her paintings and drawings centre on domestic interiors and exteriors, gardens, pathways and roads, the individuals who might inhabit these variously well worn, well tended spaces are not to be seen. Somehow the very texture of the paintings heightens a sense of their absence, but absent they are. A short, stop-motion film that forms part of Returning/Heritage might be considered another exception. Passersby fleetingly appear - but as quickly disappear - in this brisk record of a descent along The Metals, from Dalkey quarry to the seafront at Dún Laoghaire harbour.
A commission from Dún Laoghaire-Rathdown County Council, to create a body of work responsive to the area, dovetailed with the autobiographical core of her work. She grew up in Glenageary, where her parents had bought quite a large old house, relatively cheaply, as she recalls. It required a great deal of work, and for her and her siblings it was something of an adventure playground. First
viewing offers a daunting, child’s-eye view of a vertiginous corner of the building, with a curious chute extending from a window. The drawing, as she explains it, is based on her false memory of first seeing the house as a four-year-old and being impressed with the wire chute installed there to allow monkeys access to an external cage. Incredibly enough, that arrangement was there in the Victorian era, but was gone by the time she actually saw the house. It was so striking, however, that it lodged in her imagination as something seen.
Her father, an engineer with the ESB, applied himself to much of the practical work. He also had an interest in sculpture. In fact both her parents were receptive to creative pursuits and encouraged the children in that direction. From early on, McCarthy recalled, she was a natural introvert who found in art a means of creating a space apart for herself.
Her family involvement with the locality extends back further, to the 1930s, when her maternal grandparents settled in Sandycove. The commission prompted her to revisit the traces of the past, that foreign country, as filtered through her own memories, early and more recent. This continued a process that was, looking back on her work, already in train, and incorporates her developing awareness of the currents, historical and personal, that swirled beneath surface appearances, to do with religion and class, patriarchy and entitlement, aspirations and doubts.
Following her mother’s death some years ago she began spending time back in the family home in Glenageary, and looking after the garden there.
Blossoming hydrangeas became and have remained a focus of her interest as subject matter. They continue to feature prominently in her current work, usually by night, when the dome-shaped shrub, with its dramatic circular clusters of flowers, soft-edged pools of colour, has a ghostly, mysterious appearance, materialising out of the darkness, a cross between an apparition and a memorial. These associations are reinforced by a small sculptural installation, Les Feuilles
Mortes, consisting of a scattering of dried leaves, a rake and a garden urn - the same urn that is included in her drawing, In my mother’s
garden. McCarthy often refers specifically to “My mother’s garden” in her titles. Her mother was, incidentally, also a capable pianist. The installation’s title is taken from the 1940s French song, usually translated and best known as Autumn Leaves, in which the singer laments a lost love. It became and remains a jazz standard, with many classic instrumental recordings. The composer was Hungarian emigré Joseph Kosma, and Jacque Prévert’s fine original lyrics include the lines:
‘You see I didn’t forget
The song you used to sing to me…’
Her mother’s garden was, in a sense, her mother’s place apart, and it led the artist on to her grandmother’s childhood garden near Newry in Co Down, on the family farm looking onto the Mourne Mountains. That was prior to her move south of the border to Dublin in the early 1920s and eventually, because she missed the sea, to Sandycove. McCarthy’s short, elegiac film The Return, made with her brother Peter, stems from their visit to the abandoned farmhouse, the scene of many summer holidays.
An inside-outside duality runs through her paintings and drawings, crystallised in two key pieces, Outside looking in, and the extraordinary Transition, which is a view outwards through a large sash cord window overlooking the sea at Monkstown. Both alternatives have long preoccupied her pictorially and seem to articulate the artist’s insider-outsider conundrum. Each painting is exceptionally spare in form and composition, to the point of semi-abstraction, and both are aglow with light in different ways. In the former, predictably enough, a nocturnal exterior frames an empty interior suffused with the warm, inviting, yellow of artificial light, and is apparently empty. The latter, much larger composition looks out from a shaded interior to the limitless, radiant expanse of sea and sky, stretching far away with a barely defined horizon line. It is, in a sense, full of invitation and possibility, a beckoning world, though it is also anchored in the reassuring framework of the carpentered interior, the snugly folded back shutters like a promise of comfort and security.
Another interior looking out, the drawing Sleepwalking is like a dream of escape: the moon shines through an opened window as a lace curtain billows in the breeze. It is based on a recollection of a childhood illness when the artist was later informed, she came close to sleepwalking out through a high window. In Upstairs,
Downstairs, the elegant turn in the stair rail does a remarkable amount of pictorial work in a skilful composition that excels in its management of light and space. It is complex while managing to look simple, and it is layered with thoughtful implications including, say, the idea of different levels, levels of priority, of feelings, of awareness and of understanding.
In mood, and technical precision, all of these paintings and drawings recall the grave serenity, and a certain metaphysical quality, of interiors by painters from Johannes Vermeer to Vilhelm Hammershøi and Gwen John. Several other works present houses viewed from further away, illumination showing from one or more windows. It is intriguing that obstacles, practical but also symbolic, can often feature in these views, such as the rail lines in The other side of the
tracks, or the high foreground wall in Nestled in a leafy
suburb, or the unbroken line of spiked railings in Near my grandmother’s house. Indeed, even the seafront expanse - in itself open and inviting - is guarded by a toothed rail in Barrier.
There are views of the illuminated exteriors of two cinemas, in apparent darkness and twilight, respectively. They are both firmly in the past. Neither is still in existence, though the name of one, the Adelphi, survives in apartment blocks and other buildings in present-day Dún Laoghaire. In McCarthy’s painting the Adelphi, which closed in 1971, is showing The Jungle Book (the film she saw there on her first ever visit to the cinema). The Forum, originally built in 1940 as the Astoria (it was relaunched as the Forum in 1971 and remained open just into the present century) is showing Jaws (which it did, historically, though she did not see the film there). Although the buildings are illuminated, no cinema goers or staff are visible: they might all be inside, engrossed in the screenings.
While she is in many respects a traditionalist, a representational painter who is painstaking in her approach and carefully respectful of her materials, the artist’s links with film and photography are more direct than you might expect. She uses a camera extensively in preparatory work, often drawing on many photographs for a single painting. Some time after finishing art school she worked for a time in a film animation studio and she acknowledges that film in general and her animation experience have a bearing on her work and, more, were relevant to her inclination towards the motif of the lighted window in the darkness. The illuminated windows, and for that matter the illuminated cinema entrances, are distinctly screen-like, possessing the hypnotic fascination explored by Hiroshi Sugimoto in his photographs of old film theatres or drive-in cinema screens: each of his images contains an entire film screening, cumulatively amounting to a glowing rectangle of light.
Of all the current body of work, in subject matter and tone her cinema paintings perhaps come closest to the work of Edward Hopper, always a relevant artist for McCarthy. They recall his paintings of urban alienation and isolation, with the significant difference being that McCarthy does not include the figures so central to his compositions. Yet her paintings are charged with a sense of personal meaning. Think of the views of houses in the night, the lighted windows: not unlike the cinemas. But the cinemas advertise the stories screened inside, we know what to expect, whereas the stories unfolding inside the houses remain unknown - though they are written in light.
Aidan Dunne, July, 2025
