In the Tall Gallery at The MAC, there is a Lambeg drum as you’ve never seen it before: yes, it’s big and bold, but with unusual decoration, including yellow chicken nuggets being eaten by a seagull.
It’s part of the ‘someone decides, hawk or dove’ show by mixed media Dublin artist Niamh McCann (52) exploring the border since partition.
“I’ve been working on and off for a few years now on bordering landscapes,” she says. McCann admits she hasn’t always wanted to recognise the line across the map in her country: “A border on a tiny island, I didn’t initially acknowledge it, maybe because it is divided.” And contested; the nuggets matter because they’re part of a reimagining.
“The Lambeg drum is a symbol and I wanted to play with the idea,” notes McCann. “A seagull with nuggets in its mouth is as worthy of elevation as an imperial crest.”
She adds that anybody can play this drum and people queue at the exhibition to do so.
Another revised symbol is the series of silver bricks displayed on the wall behind the drum. Titled Confetti, these are attractive items but also represent part of a threatening past during the Troubles.
“They’re silver plated and it’s a ridiculous thing to do with a brick,” comments McCann. “They celebrate union, as in confetti, but there might also be a person underneath it or throwing it.”
Apparently, when the show went to Washington DC, a couple originally from Northern Ireland viewed the work and the man said while he’d associated bricks with riots, “I knew I needed this brick”. McCann adds: “They’re domestic bricks, part of terraces here and in Dublin.”
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The show’s title comes from a line of poetry by Ciaran Carson in Hairline Crack which deals with a random killing. Someone decides what happens to a woman lighting a cigarette in a car, and McCann says later we should also be involved: “At some point, you decide, there is personal responsibility.”
McCann talks about considering the “contentious landscapes, that are contested at a personal and political level” yet the atmosphere is welcoming. While it deals with division, McCann’s installation is about inclusion.
It’s seductive, and in the top gallery, there are benches to sit on. I want this to be not a political way but a gentle way of allowing the unfolding of conversations
— Niamh McCann
In the top gallery, a gate or fence is threaded with both reddish orange and green flex with equal space for both. As the artist points out, “red and green are complementary colours”.
She says artists have a duty to create a space for reflection. The show is deliberately attractive, appealing visually. “It’s seductive, and in the top gallery, there are benches to sit on. I want this to be not a political way but a gentle way of allowing the unfolding of conversations.” Plus there’s music by Grammy-nominated Iarla O’Lionaird of The Gloaming.
There is a pygmy hippo at the entrance to the top gallery. It’s a mutant sculpture, spliced with a root, called Child God or Ru Ta, and is based on a real creature. McCann explains: “It was in the Natural History Museum in Dublin, with a card beside it. The animal which was female was taken from Sierra Leone, transported to London and put up in a hotel. Shortly afterwards, it died.” She adds that it would have had its own name in her native country, not be named by outsiders. This is a sad tale of exploitation, and McCann refers to the “hubristic urge” to control and displace animals, and people. The pygmy hippo reappears on the floor below, intact, next to a seagull, and has in a way been resurrected through art.
Colonial questions are important to McCann who has produced other work relating to Northern Ireland.
Dislocated is a piece McCann produced about the statue of Queen Victoria next to Belfast City Hall. “Yes, she is unamused. It’s based on a series of lights which brighten as you get nearer, dim as you get further away. The right place is in the middle.” She describes it as a visual oxymoron, with the queen there for certain people, yet “excluding other people”.
When researching her installation, McCann walked the length of the border with a friend: “I wanted to see it, the boglands and landscape.” She visited the late Seamus Mallon, who was living with his family in Markethill, a nationalist family in a unionist village: “It was funny, there was a sign but you knew where you were because of the flags.”
McCann came to professional art relatively late, although she always drew. “My mother was a teacher, my father an accountant. I didn’t know art was an option until later. In fact, I didn’t go to an art gallery until I was an adult. But I was always drawing, I drew my sister, Ciara, all the time.”
She studied fine art in Dublin and at Chelsea College of Art but says that what she does is “make and do”.
When not working, McCann likes to run, watch movies (“Poor Relations by King Vidor was brilliant”) and travel, enthusing about a trip to an island off the Cork coast. She was in her local park when she met the owners of a dog - now blind - and noticed he was investigating trees. Colin is the blueprint of a key figure in the show’s bestiary. He witnesses different landscapes, green and orange, has passionate fire burning from his eyes and is a kind of blind seer: “He goes on a journey in a film in the Sunken Gallery like a mythological figure.”
