Cathy Wilkes

An aura of deathly stillness pervades the solo exhibition by Cathy Wilkes (b.1966) at the Hunterian Art Gallery, Glasgow. As a quality that often characterises Wilkes’s sculptural installations, this quietness is not surprising, nor is the atmosphere of something slightly off-kilter or foreboding, but there also seems to be a heightened charge – an unquantifiable anxiety. Lurking among the shadowy objects is that elusive thing: affect. This manifests as a feeling of dread, of a fear that cannot quite be pinpointed but which is all-consuming, almost sickening. It takes a while to creep up, but once the feeling takes hold, it sticks and grows.

In an incisive review of Wilkes’s installation at the Modern Institute, Glasgow, in 2021–22, Neil Clements wrote that ‘there is an impulse to gravitate towards the moment of initial encounter with which Wilkes provides us, setting aside any consideration of other temporal or theoretical axes on which we might locate her practice’.¹ As Clements goes on to observe, it is often the case that ‘to invoke that which is outside the enclosed circuit of meaning these tableaux present would be to break with all their egorical purpose. Even our physical presence becomes an unsolicited intrusion’.² As a Belfast-born, Glasgow-based artist himself, Clements speculates on the personal and political rationale that might lie behind Wilkes’s insistence on approaching ‘speech with caution’, making a compelling case for ‘the subliminal weight that bears down upon residents, current and former, of a place that harbours many names’.³ But in this exhibition, although our physical presence at times undoubtedly feels like an intrusion, it is the artist herself who has broken the hermetically sealed ‘enclosed circuit of meaning’ that has so often typified her practice, resulting in what Adele Patrick considers to be a ‘significant departure’ for the artist.⁴ This has been attained primarily through the inclusion of archival artefacts and objects, which provide a clear context for the works of art.

One of a series of artist commissions initiated by the Imperial War Museums as part of the IWM 14–18 NOW Legacy Fund programme, the show is described as being ‘informed by experiences of violence not usually given expression within official representations of war’, not least Wilkes’s own childhood in Belfast at the height of the Troubles. There is a brutal poignancy elicited by some of the archival material on loan from Belfast’s Linen Hall Library, the London School of Economics Library and the artist’s personal archive. These include a 1973 handmade Christmas card sent from HM Prison Maze (otherwise known as Long Kesh), a pencil drawing of a shamrock titled The Hound of Ulster, a textile work depicting a gun FIG.1, Communist Party pamphlets and other leaflets and ephemera published in Belfast. Other artefacts include literature from the early Central Citizens’ Defence Committee (CCDC), a copy of Socialist Woman magazine and a hand-lettered sign that reads ‘Stop RUC Brutality’. While these materials provide important historical context, those with the closest formal proximity to Wilkes’s original works of art are photographs showing the destruction of the interiors of houses in streets near the Falls Road: ripped up floors, scattered belongings and holes in walls and ceilings FIG.2.

As is typical of Wilkes’s practice, the paintings and sculptures in the exhibition are all untitled and dated to 2024. In one, a wall-mounted blanket pools onto the gallery floor. Pale, textured and slightly discoloured, it echoes the fabric tangled across the door in one of the archival photographs. Elsewhere, other domestic objects – a chair, what appear to be items of clothing on small armatures, a stained bag and blanket slung over a canvas FIG.3 – are scattered around the space. Some works are hung on the wall while others are pushed up against it, suggestive of a sudden intrusion or disruption to domestic order. One area is dimly lit by a wall-mounted lamp, its fluted glass shade of a 1970s or 1980s design FIG.4. The downlit, feeble cast of its light is an apt metaphor for lives carried out in semi-darkness. The theme of illumination, or the lack of it, is echoed in a painting of a candle FIG.5. This recalls Gerhard Richter’s candle paintings made in the early 1980s – the era that Wilkes conjures here – which Richter painted when he was around the same age as Wilkes is now. In broader art-historical terms, the candle as a symbol of vanitas alludes to the mortality and fragility of life across faiths and cultures for both artists. It demonstrates their willingness to deal with complex, fraught and traumatic modern histories, of which they were participant observers.

But it is the central figurative work ­that is the most disturbing – precisely because of its lack of subtlety and its depiction of a specific act of violence. In one of the vitrines there is a disturbing photograph of a woman, Emma Groves, who in 1971 was blinded by a British soldier who fired a rubber bullet at her face at point blank range FIG.6. Her ‘crime’ had been to look out of the living room window as soldiers searched her neighbours’ houses. In Wilkes’s hands, Groves becomes a life-size sculpture of a body thrown backwards by the impact of a bullet, which is shown caught in a Perspex tube, as though in flight FIG.7. Blood is suggested by what appear to be paper fragments of photographs – pink, yellow and red – patched across the figure’s head. But the real devastation is felt most keenly in other details: the middle-aged, weary body and the checked tea-towel strewn across her arm suggesting that she had been interrupted while washing dishes FIG.8. It is a truly upsetting and shocking work.

Wilkes, who is in her late fifties, is part of a generation that is only now beginning to reflect openly on both the physical and psychological effects of living in an occupied country. Many have borne witness to police brutality, state-inflicted violence and all-encompassing sectarian conflict. This exhibition contributes to a growing history of embodied, experiential accounts by women living through the Troubles, showing the long reach of brutality, violence and trauma into the home, the mind and the heart. Here, one might think, for instance, of Pat Murphy’s unparalleled film Maeve (1981), Dervla Murphy’s book A Place Apart (1979), Anna Burns’s novel Milkman (2018) or, more recently, Maria Fusco’s opera-film History of the Present (2023), made in collaboration with Margaret Salmon and Annea Lockwood. Among other questions, these feminist works ask: what happens when crises seem permanent and unending? How does violence become ‘everyday’, even normalised, by traumatised citizens? Why does gender-based violence increase in periods of war, beyond the visible political or religious divides on which such conflicts are centred? And what is the legacy of growing up in a climate of fear?

The Troubles is not an unusual subject in visual art and culture: Rita Donagh’s paintings and drawings of the late 1970s and early 1980s are some of the most compelling. Last year, one of Patsy Mullen’s paintings on the subject was included in the excellent exhibition A Tall Order! Rochdale Art Gallery in the 1980s at Touchstones, Rochdale, which demonstrated an inseparability of the personal and political for many Irish artists. In 2008 Steve McQueen’s film Hunger represented the 1981 hunger strike by Irish Republican prisoners and Declan Long’s book Ghost-Haunted Land (2017) details a range of practices made in response to the period, offering valuable context and analysis. This year’s Glasgow International Festival, of which this exhibition was a part, also demonstrated a concerted interest in war, violence, social justice and state-sanctioned acts of brutality, often in relation to those linked with colonial ideologies.

Marlene Smith’s installation Good Housekeeping I (1985), which is currently on show in Edinburgh as part of the travelling exhibition Women in Revolt!, resonates powerfully with Wilkes’s reimagining of the shooting of Groves, acting as a kind of companion piece.⁵ Smith’s work reimagines another doorstep shooting by British police at the victim’s home, in this case Dorothy ‘Cherry’ Groce, who was paralysed from the chest down during a search for her son. The impact of such acts on families, women and children are powerfully wrought by both artists. In Wilkes’s courageous and difficult exhibition, the artist maintains her distinctive formalism and signature style to generate an atmosphere of fear, where home is not safe, ‘peacekeepers’ cannot be trusted and violence is sadistic.