Reliquary of Beasts

Reliquary of Beasts

MEADHBH MCNUTT DISCUSSES THE GROUP SHOW ‘RELIQUARY OF BEASTS’, AT THE 126 ARTIST-RUN GALLERY IN GALWAY.

‘Reliquary of Beasts’, installation view, 126 Artist-Run Gallery, September 2021; image courtesy the artists and 126 Artist-Run Gallery.

‘Reliquary of Beasts’, installation view, 126 Artist-Run Gallery, September 2021; image courtesy the artists and 126 Artist-Run Gallery.

I’M EATING A ham sandwich in the 126 Artist-Run Gallery. There is a menu of discussion points on the table in front of me. Under appetizers, I read “COW by Sarah Lundy, Irish Wolfhound: would you taxidermy your pet?” The Creative Café is a regular event in which viewers can snack on cakes and sandwiches while chatting about topics relevant to surrounding artworks. The current exhibition, ‘Reliquary of Beasts’ poses some particularly challenging questions about value, reverence and the human-animal distinction.

The 126 Artist-Run Gallery’s contribution to Galway International Arts Festival 2021, ‘Reliquary of Beasts’ is curated by Simon Fennessy Corcoran and presents work by Sarah Lundy, Jo Kimmins, Rose Robson and Christie Brown. While the animal-human power dynamic is a universal issue, the space creates a distinctly Irish fusion of myth, religious martyrdom, and agriculture. The exhibition title comes across as a contradiction in terms. A reliquary houses the remains of a saint or some revered person who overcomes carnal reality towards a noble purpose, while ‘beast’ implies a failure to transcend the physical.

In the corner, a suspended hide of one of Ireland’s most revered animals, the Irish Wolfhound, is an eye-catching point of friction. Sarah Lundy found the remains for COW in her father’s taxidermy workshop. Having completed the hide under request from the owner, the taxidermist never heard from the mourning client again. Years later, the abandoned hide appears here in the gallery, strung up by a bull ring and fitted with golden bones and shards of jagged mirror. Underneath the hound’s paws, shattered golden eggs litter the floor. An incredible creature, hung by the nostrils like butchered meat. The spectacle is unsettling, though I’m aware of my hypocrisy as a regular(ish) meat eater.

Wolfhounds are a staple of Irish mythology. In the story of Cúchulainn, a blacksmith by the name of Culann releases his wolfhound to guard the castle during a feast with the King of Ulster, unaware that the young Setanta is yet to arrive. When Setanta turns up, he is left to fight for his life and kills the dog with a camán and sliotar. Seeing Culann’s distress at the loss of his companion, he offers to guard the grounds himself until another dog is reared – hence, the name Cú Chulainn (Hound of Culann). Culann’s affection towards the wolfhound shows up the cracks in our tidy human-animal distinction.

The story of St Guinefort takes it a step further. According to tales of the French folk saint, a knight leaves his infant

in the care of Guinefort the dog, returning later to find an overturned cot and the dog bloodied around the mouth. The knight slays the hound in revenge, before finding the infant safe under the cot, with a ravaged viper by his side. Locals claim the martyred dog a saint and his grave the site of miracles, despite repeated bans from the Catholic Church. The opportunity of redemption through dignified suffering is not one ordinarily extended to animals. Yet COW frames slaughter through this lens of martyrdom. Still, the work causes a stir at the Creative Café. A woman complains to the curator and decides to leave. A frank, refreshing conversation opens up at the table. It takes me a while to realise that I am sitting beside the artist. She hasn’t touched the ham sandwiches. When I ask about the difference between an animal product and an animal-art-commodity, she tells me that the hide is not for sale. Lundy, a vegan, does not sell any works containing animal remains.

In a corner at the back of the room, shattered eggs appear again with tiny arms emerging from them. The accompanying text briefly mentions this work in reference to the Tuam Mother and Baby Home. Elsewhere throughout the space, Christie Brown’s mixed-media sculptures are an uncanny patchwork of human and animal forms, elevated on plinths. Dreamlike and unsettling, they bring up a range of connotations, from subculture to myth and antiquity. Etruscan Man is monstrous, while referencing enduring artefacts of ancient civilisations.

The work of Jo Kimmins and Rose Robson is less gruesome in appearance. Robson repurposes the traditional craft of taxidermy in abstract sculptures. I am enamoured with her snakelike construction of copper and fish leather. I don’t know where to situate this pleasure, or my feelings about decay in general. I am reluctant to romanticise but I also want a relationship to death beyond solemnity. I get lost too, in Kimmins’ photographs of decaying beached whales. Life and death mingle fluidly in these abstracted images. In Suspended, it’s difficult to tell where crumbling flesh ends, and water begins.

‘Reliquary of Beasts’ reimagines the gallery as a semi-sacred space of materiality. Getting to the root of the concept, the exhibition proposes the question: when we claim transcendence, who or what remains? Meadhbh McNutt is an Irish writer whose work traverses criticism, creative writing and critical theory.

‘Reliquary of Beasts’, installation view, 126 Artist-Run Gallery, September 2021; image courtesy the artists and 126 Artist-Run Gallery.