Gabhann Dunne at the launch of his exhibition Crossing the Salt in Townhall Cavan. Photo: Adrian Donohoe.

Flights of fancy

Birds of a feather flock together, it’s often said, but not so in the Townhall Cavan gallery. About sixty paintings of varying sizes each depict individual birds, and each of different species. The cumulative effect is a delightful confusion of feather, beak, muscle and claw, all seemingly clamouring for attention. I stood in the room’s centre and turned slowly to take in the whole swish and sway of the commotion. But there’s an alternative way to enjoy the exhibition:

“It’s an installation, it really is,” explains Gabhann Dunne, who is the artist behind the exhibition titled ‘Crossing the Salt’. “They are not separate to each other – they were never broken up or anything like that.

“When you look, there are a system of triangles or Vs moving you around the exhibition, and you will see a beak or a wing points in a particular way. They are constructed so one feeds into another, so I would paint a section of it, and like a scroll, I would move it over and paint the next section.

“I wanted to do an installation that wasn’t just one painting separate to another. I wanted to do a single piece and to see if I could do it with 100 paintings or so.”

The 100 paintings were first compiled for an exhibition in Limerick, but it’s somewhat scaled back to adapt to the Townhall gallery’s modest proportions.

“They are all migratory birds, they are all birds which come to a place and leave it, and there is joint responsibility and ownership over the landscape that they come from,” explains Gabhann, who was born in Cavan, to a Breffni mother. He recalls childhood adventures being taken by his grandfather, Dermot Smith to explore the standing stones known as Finn MacCool’s Fingers up Shantemon in search of insects, birds or plants.

“Even somewhere like Cavan, from 40 years ago, it’s very different – I notice a lot of different peoples here, it’s a very positive and warm thing. It’s the same as the birds, it brings a freshness when they come into other places, and they can both reside here and somewhere else at the same time.

“It’s extraordinary that a thing weighing but a few grammes can makes it way from Norway over to Ireland – a thing the weight of cotton buds could do that,” he marvels. “Its strength, its power and its ability is extraordinary. I just wanted to celebrate that.

“I don’t actually know half the names of these birds,” he admitted to much amusement at the launch.

A great tit shows its dexterity.

While Gabhann may not be an authority in ornithology, the passion for his subject is unmissable.

“That moment between a bird that’s still and a bird that’s in flight that is an impossible thing, and it’s something that you can’t really know. It’s just extraordinary. It becomes something magical and wonderful and it’s that empathy that nature creates for us that is so valuable and so much a part of being a human being that I find is something to celebrate in paint.”

Accepting the impossibility to convincingly paint a bird in flight, he sources photos from which to work.

“You don’t want them too pure – you were very happy with really bad photographs because the moment it becomes too clean, it weighs down the bird and you lose that sense of flight. You are looking for these little ‘Phffupps!’ These little powder bursts of a bird. That’s really what I wanted to get because they are in flight.”

On gazing closer at the works, dashes of paint skited from the brush tip are detectable; elsewhere the surface is scratched to reveal a warm yellow undercoat. Such embellishments add texture, energy and most importantly movement. Such moments of exuberance don’t always work out however, and Gabhann estimates he had about a 50% strike rate when it came to wrecking canvases in this way. One work where the technique is beautifully executed however is that of the corncrake, which has sadly become a byword for endangered species in Ireland.

A Corncrake in flight.

“That’s why it’s there,” he says of the corncrake’s most prominent position in the installation. “It was constructed for there.”

Gabhann alludes to the Irish curse: Nár fheice tú an chuach ná traonach arís; May you never see the cuckoo or corncrake again.

“It meant that it was so ubiquitous, and so common there was no way you would never see one. But now you would be thinking: would I ever see a corncrake again? There’s something really tragic that the language is actually telling you that something has changed hugely.

“That’s a very sad note, but that’s what you weave into these things.”

Maybe it was an aesthetic decision to display a number of birdless canvases depicting only a vivid blue sky. Such pieces do add a rhythmic silence, visual grace notes, to the display. However, it’s equally possible that it’s Gabhann’s warning of the fate of the corncrake and others if we continue to neglect our shared responsibilities.

Crossing the Salt runs until June 18 at the Townhall Cavan.