Look At Us, We’re Here. Catherine Marshall discusses the work of Pat Curran.

IRELAND IS A funny place. Often, we celebrate people who come to art-making late in their lives, usually ‘discovered’ and introduced to the mainstream by an establishment fi gure, so long as they come from islands off the coast, preferably if they speak Irish and are thought to represent a particularly ‘Irish’ culture. Of course, the work of the Tory Islanders is important but the artworld needs to embrace other, less picturesque pockets of Irish society too. Inner city communities have also been cut off from the mainstream but in more challenging, less romantic ways. Th eir artists have to work even harder to gain admission to the canon of Irish art. Th anks to Common Ground and Pallas Projects , one of those artists, Pat Curran, has recently had his fi rst solo show, in a pivotal artist-led space, right at the centre of his familiar community, yet recognised within the artworld.

Pat called his show ‘Home’ and fi lled it with paintings, emanating directly from his experiences of inner-city life, poverty, homelessness, unemployment, substance abuse, as well as the community spirit and neighbourliness that enabled people to survive the hardships of such places. Pat has two audiences in mind: those in the artworld in which his work will have to fi nd a place; and the people of his community with whom the artworld has not bothered much in the past. To quote the artist: “Our people were not welcome in galleries unless they were in the paintings.”

Pat’s local audience – the people from Rialto, Fatima Mansions and Saint Michael’s Estate – who are represented in his paintings are not interested in the fancy footwork of the artworld, and they have been so inadequately represented by it in the past that they won’t settle for anything less than complete honesty from one of their own. Pat knows this. He paints them as he knows them, on the balconies of the fl ats, hanging out washing in the yard, loitering on street corners, skinny dipping in the canal, dancing brazenly on car-bonnets. To press his point home, he paints, not on canvases, but on discarded wood panels, old book covers and other recycled materials, all of which carry a history related to the narratives in his work, while forming part of a strategy to subvert the preciousness of art history.

“My paintings… refl ect on the wider conversation of social justice and cultural expression”, Pat says, and he hopes “this work will contribute to and expand a social archive through paintings of life in Dublin city, particularly the loss of social housing and fl at life”. Despite its poverty, fl at life was a good one for him growing up. It spelled sharing and friendship, where his mother and another woman on the same balcony shared a washing machine and their kids happily pushed it from one fl at to the other as required. He is determined to show all aspects of it, the innate decency of the people alongside the diffi culties of their lives and to document it because that history has been eradicated by urban re-development, the erasure of the fl ats and scattering of the families who once enlivened them. He wants his paintings to say, “Look at us, we’re here”, even as their history is being wiped off the slate.

Some kids survive the harshness of life on the streets by somehow making it into music or the performing arts or football. However, it has been a perennial problem for visual art under capitalism that we can look at social problems from the outside but we haven’t, until now, enabled those who have lived through the unemployment, the drugs, or the street fi ghting to paint their direct experience of it. Th at is what makes Pat’s exhibition at Pallas so signifi cant.

Pat grew up in Dolphin’s Barn and went to Ballyfermot Senior College and NCAD, graduating with an MFA in 2014. He participated in the Citizen Artist award 2016-18 with Common Ground at Kilmainham Court House and is currently Artist-in-Residence at Common Ground in Th e Lodge, Goldenbridge Cemetery, Dublin 8.

Catherine Marshall is a curator and art writer, former head of collections at IMMA and co-editor of Art and Architecture of Ireland, Twentieth Century (2014).