There are no words

What do you make of someone cleaning a plate with a cat’s tail?

At times the Celt was lost for words at first seeing Emily McGardle’s joyously playful exhibition at the Townhall Art Centre, Cavan.

Many of the pieces are on small pieces of paper, almost apologetically presented, yet the colours are bold and beautiful. Others are painted with photo-realism results, while Emily’s sculptural pieces almost demand to be touched. Humour is at the heart of all Emily’s work, from mice raving with glow sticks to a rather unsettling disembodied tongue and eyes. Despite the light-heartedness on view, McGardle’s serious talent underpins the exhibition. An accomplished artist across a range of techniques, screen printing is the Corduff woman’s go-to craft.

The Irish language is central to ‘Lig dom scéal a insint daoibh’/’Let me tell you a story’, the exhibition which opened at Townhall Arts Centre in Cavan Town last Saturday. While taking a Masters in print -making at the Royal College of Art in London her latent interest in Irish was piqued. Like many, her grasp of Irish had dipped in the years since her Leaving Cert.

“I was over in London and getting a wee bit homesick, and with so many international students that could speak their own language and English, it was putting me to shame a wee bit,” recalls Emily.

When the Covid pandemic arrived she returned home to Monaghan and used this unexpected free time to reacquaint herself with her native tongue. However, when she tried to discuss her interests and professional work she discovered, the language was silent.

“I couldn’t even speak about my own work in Irish,” Emily begins. “I’m a screen printer and when I went to see how do I talk about screen printing in Irish there were no words to describe the whole practice.”

With the help of tearma.ie - the national terminological database for Irish Emily began a project to address this shortfall.

“They translated about 60 words for me to do with screen-printing and then I made a wee book about it. That was my main project and everything I’ve done since that has built on it.”

Incidentally ‘priontaí scáileáin’ is the term the linguists coined for screenprinting. It’s an amazing turn around from having limited Irish to Emily inspiring experts to expand the language.

“I have moved on, finding where there’s gaps in the language and trying to build it up. Now I’m trying to move into different types of art making and finding: what can I not talk about in Irish?

‘Lig dom sceal a insint daoibh’ is inspired by the Irish Folklore Commission’s Schools’ Collection - a wellspring of everyday beliefs, cures, superstitions, local histories, and seasonal customs gathered by school children from their neighbours and elderly relatives in the nascent Irish Free State.

All those amazing handwritten records were digitised for the Dúchas website in the last decade. During Lockdown, Emily volunteered to type up the folklore gleaned all those years ago by children in her local schools.

“That got me into reading about cures and superstitions and the proverbs and sayings, and a lot of them tied into the work I was doing - a lot of weird, surreal, absurd, funny kind of stuff. And a lot of stuff to do with animals - the vast majority of Irish proverbs are to do with either animals or humans looking at animals.”

Emily modestly describes this process as “lazy in a way”. Giving the example of the seanfhocail, she explains: ‘There’s ears on the ditches’. “You just draw a picture with ears and ditches - it kind of does the work for you.”

Emily volunteers there is often humour in her work.

“Usually I’m trying to make myself laugh. It’s very hard to make other people laugh, so that’s usually the aim for me - if someone walks by it and either laughs to themselves or out loud that’s the best compliment that I could get.

“I think it’s very disarming. In an art gallery people are expecting really serious, dour work but I think if I was trying to be serious it wouldn’t be genuine. So generally the humour is the only way I can be genuine with people.”

One of the stand-out prints is of someone wiping a dinner plate with the cat’s tail – the Celt guessed it was a gentle dig at someone who doesn’t like to let anything go to waste? Or else just an eegit?

She found the saying in a book of proverbs by Garbiel Rosenstock – “He’s like the daddy of Irish translation”, she admires. However she still felt free to edit the beginning of the saying.

“It was kind of making fun of lazy women in the household - you know that she’s so lazy she’ll just reach over and lift up the cat’s tail to wipe the plate. I think he called the woman in the proverb something like a sloitheán, so I cut that bit out and it was a nondescript person wiping the plate.”

The print, ‘Ag Ghlanadh An Phlata Le Heireaball An Chait’ was hand drawn from a photo she took of her real life cat and muse, Bean. Crisp, confident and flawless, all the screen prints are fabulous works of graphic art. There’s a comic book feel about some of them. Then in contrast there’s other works which are exquisitely painted, and finally there are some unnervingly realistic pieces in silicone, life-casts of different parts of Emily - her hand, her mouth, tongue and even eyes.

“In a lot of ways I was getting bored with screen printing and then I moved on to drawing, and then when I couldn’t get the results I wanted through drawing I moved on to the life casting and silicone sculptures - so if I can’t get what I want out of one medium I tend to move on to something else.”

The largest piece in the exhibition was commissioned last year for Dublin literary and arts journal ‘Profiles’ to create a piece based on the saying, ‘Diosadh Si An Gharbhach’/ ‘She would eat the Goose Grass’.

“It’s about someone who’s incredibly greedy - so greedy that they would eat something that technically you can eat, but it’s not very tasty.”

In painting a self portrait of sorts, Emily delighted in her very literal interpretation of the proverb. Maybe just a fifth of her face is visible from beneath a mesh of goose grass, all described in glorious painterly detail.

This straight depiction only goes to accentuate the surreal dimension of the seanfhocail and colloquial sayings.

“One of them is ‘eye-bitten’, it’s kind of a piseóg - a superstition about and people who were able to ‘blink’ cows. So if a cow gave bad milk, or butter wouldn’t churn, they said that the cows either eye-bitten or ‘blinked’.

“It’s the whole thing that people have certain powers to ‘blink’ cows and pigs and whatever. There was a whole thing in the schools collection about how they knew who was ‘blinking’ the cows so if you seen this particular man or woman coming down the road you would shoo them off because they’d be ‘blinking’ at animals. It is a mad thing - it seems to be mostly in Ulster but particularly in Cavan and Monaghan area.”

With the tooth marks indented in the eyeball, the result in silicone both gross and memorable in equal measure.

The Celt wonders what Emily takes from portraying old proverbs in a modern context?

“It shows the links between people and nature was so close. The fact that the language is so tied to nature and maybe to remind people how important it is to be close to nature – not in a hippy dippy or a ‘woo woo’ type way, but just acknowledge how important animals, plants and the environment are.”

‘Lig dom scéal a insint daoibh’ by Emily McGardle will run until February 20 at the Town Hall Arts Centre in Cavan.