Hyphenation as a critical model for contemporary Irish painting practice

: Feminist Strategies from the Borderlands

Abstract

Through an examination of painting’s modernist discourses and its gendered implications, my research explores the female subject and her articulations through psychoanalysis and abstract painting in particular.

I suggest that the hyphen is useful in mapping a critical framework for Irish contemporary painters who are women. By deconstructing established sets of historical concepts that legitimise Abstract Expressionism, hyphenation becomes a way to explore cultural paradoxes, affective adjustments and improvisation within my own painting strategies. It also frames a discussion about how my varied painting approaches connect with my expanded practice, a crossover from the tradition of painting (touch, mirror) to video (digital surface) and back.

The canvas is both gateway and barrier - one of the many dichotomies that alternate in my ambivalence to painting. I develop a response to the double-field, how female abstract painters have been positioned by incorporating Amy Sillman’s use of Kitsch, humour and Camp to recast the psychoanalytic terms of masquerade and hysteria. I contemplate aspects of life along the Irish border through fictional characters such as the smuggler and the transitory hitchhiker. Themes of smuggling and surveillance provide insights into the visibility and invisibility of the feminine subject in this particular site of contestation. These figurations help form an effective distance to the more reactionary concerns over the ramifications of Brexit. Brexit wrangling persists as a kind of cultural-political stasis or temporal stutter. I offer another process in painting as an internalization of the notion of borders, where the concept of a divided subject caught in the rails of metonymic abstraction incurs a hyphenated identity, constantly pivoted and ‘hysterically’ engaged. I recast masquerade and hysteria to fill an absence of life stories of women who are rarely represented politically. Finally, I equate the hyphen with the stutter working in the gap where symptoms bounce around in fear of overcorrection. Improvised permeations in painting are like stutters, stacked onto, mixed in with what I call shape-fussing.

Date of Award	Jun 2022
Original language	English
Supervisor	Louise Wallace (Supervisor) & Cherie Driver (Supervisor)