Helen O’Leary / Safe House #6 / 2018 / egg, oil emulsion on constructed wood, linen, wood / 17 x 18 x 6 inches

Music: On the Banks of the Don, performed in 1961 by O.J. Abbott (1872 – 1962). Abbott emigrated to Canada as a young man where he worked on several farms in an Irish community in the Ottawa Valley and in lumber camps in northern Ontario and Quebec. Most of his recordings of Irish folk songs were learned in the 1880s and 1890s from Irish farm families and shantyboys (lumberjacks). The song in this video speaks of the Don Jail in Toronto, constructed in the mid-1800’s and decommissioned in the late 1970’s. Executions were carried out in a converted bathroom turned gallows, in this once model jail turned infamous. Canada abolished capital punishment in 1962, since the last double execution at Don Jail.

By way of context, “Work like a Turk”, derived from “Torc” (Wild Boar), a derogatory expression describing an unmanageable Gaelic wild boar.

Produced by Patricia Sweetow

In Response: Helen O’Leary talks about her thoughts as she’s sheltering in place.

Being self-sufficient has been a theme in my life as early as I can remember. When I first started to dismantle painting as a student back in the late eighties, I began unpacking systems that didn’t work for me, going through the grab bag of history/ certainty and re-purposing it. Things come apart, meaning shifts and then, a new logic presents itself. I have to learn a new patience that logic will indeed present and prevail.

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Helen O’Leary’s artwork defies traditional structures. As she constructs her paintings, she wants to pin a fragment of her own personal story to a bigger, more epic tale. This video traces her time working as a Visual Arts Fellow at the American Academy in Rome. She describes her intricate process and delights in the sensuality of her materials, her passion for the luminosity of egg tempera and pigment, the insistence of the joinery, and the gender of her painting. She observes, “It’s all about experimenting with things I don’t even know about yet”.

Directed by Gael Towey
Cinematography by Joe Tomcho & Jeff Tomcho
Edited by Maria Juranic
Titles by Doyle Partners

Artist Helen O’Leary talks about her work ‘Refusal and The Problem with Adjectives’ which was selected for the 2018 Hennessy Art Fund for IMMA Collection. You can see this work at IMMA, alongside that of the three other artists selected for the 2018 Fund, until 16 September 2018.

Helen O’Leary – Refusal – Wexford Arts Centre

Filmed and Edited by James Bell. www.twitter.com/jdb33 Refusal runs from October 20th to December 24th 2013 in Wexford Arts Centre, Cornmarket, Ferrybank South, Wexford, Ireland

Helen O’Leary: The Shelf Life of Facts 5 Feb 2016 – 24 Apr 2016 This exhibition takes the form of a new site-specific commission for our Upper Gallery by New York-based artist Helen O’Leary. O’Leary’s work in painting draws on her Irish background, and explores with deftness, rigor and craft, the idea of origin, of how everything we subsequently become has been framed by the visual, cultural, moral and emotional lines of definition that are drawn around our formative childhood worlds. Contained within the gallery space is a series of large scale “history” paintings made from thwarted joinery, armatures, insets and shelves that both display all of their components and continually rebuild and reframe their own structure and meaning. The artist’s painterly explorations are located between moments of material and emotional certainty. They both laugh at and question the structural prosthesis of conventions that are established through economic, cultural and gender constraints. This new work concerns itself with the uncertainty present in any economic downturn or change, between youth and middle age, and in the rupture between external and internal life.

In conjunction with the opening weekend of the IMMA Collection: Then and Now exhibition, artist Janet Mullarney discusses key developments of her longstanding career and the influence of her time spent in Italy. Mullarney is highly regarded as one of Ireland’s most significant artists working today, recognized for making distinctive small fragile sculptures juxtaposed with theatrical backdrops, lighting schemes and drawings in which to reveal the power and imagination of the artists’ mind. Fellow Collection artist Helen O’Leary, moderates this discussion, reflecting on shared artistic experiences and interests that span Mullarney’s practice.

About Artists
Irish artist Janet Mullarney (born 1952) studied at the Accademia di Belle Arti and Scuola Professionale di Intaglio in Florence. Incorporating an extensive range of materials including bronze, wood, plaster, foam, cloth, glass and wax, her dynamic sculptural works reference religious iconography, art history and human relationships. Mullarney’s work is represented in many public collections including that of the Arts Council, the OPW, and Dublin City Gallery The Hugh Lane. She divides her time between studios in Ireland and Italy.

Helen O’Leary attended the National College of Art and Design, Dublin (BA) and the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (BFA, MFA). She has been honoured with la Prix de Rome, American Academy in Rome, John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship; two Pollock Krasner awards; and the Joan Mitchell Award for painting and sculpture. Solo exhibitions include Lesley Heller Gallery, New York; The MAC, Belfast; Limerick City Gallery of Art. She lives in Jersey City, New Jersey and Leitrim.

This talk took place on 16 Feb 2019 at IMMA.

Image credit: Janet Mullareny,“Lenience (Paesaggio di compassione)” – 1987-2017, 120x 80×115 cm