"Art was the only thing to bring us together other than funerals"

In the centre of the Townhall Cavan is a lifesize replica of a tractor.

Don’t let the Monaghan reg fool you, it was owned by a north Longford man, the late Pat ‘The Major’ Mulligan.

A lifesize cube shaped print of the Massey takes centrestage in 74 Summers, an exhibition by Biddy Mulligan at Townhall Arts Centre, Cavan. While tractors left behind by fathers will be commonly felt as a reminder of loved ones by farm families across the midlands, this hollow box looms as a curious monument.

Despite the painstaking, detailed work involved in creating the enormous cyanotype prints, it is obviously a reproduction. There’s no mistaking this for the real thing; that was parked out the front for Saturday’s exhibition launch.

Underlying the exhibition is the artist’s response to grief, and her attempts to process it. Biddy’s brother Sean lost his life in a motorcycle accident when he was only 21.

“I was 16. That was a huge loss when you are so young. It was very traumatic, so that gave me an interest in this theme,” she recalls during a break from installing the exhibition in the main theatre space last week.

Along with Sean’s friends in the Freebirds Motorcycle Club she set about making sense of his passing through art.

“We created a film and a whole body of work based on the loss of three of our club members - my brother Sean, our friend Kevin Mulligan and Noel Sheridan. We lost Sean and Kevin 11 weeks apart in 2002.”

This was when she explored the use of cyanotype, which she describes as “the original blueprint”, which makes sense when you see the fine detailed blue lines achieved.

“I found it a really nice material to talk about the language of loss, and things that are hard to talk about,” says Biddy.

She embraces the very technical and labour intensive demands of the process.

“My work is process based, so it initially starts with me working through something and the process is very important rather than the final outcome.”

Of the final prints she emphasises, “There is a huge laborious thing that has gone on behind the scenes.”

Biddy first employed the technique in the 2022 series called ‘A Portrait of a Life Through Belongings’ which reproduced 21 of her brother’s possessions “from the size of a wrist watch up to a motorcycle”.

“For over 20 years, after we lost our friends and my brother, nobody talked about our effects of loss until I interviewed the boys [members of the Freebirds MCC] and we talked about it on film - but then we were touring that project nationally all over Ireland and every time we showed it, somebody else died - whether we lost more friends on the road in the meantime or others - so there was always this thing of: art was the only thing to bring us together other than funerals.”

When her father passed away she revisited cyanotype prints for ‘74 Summers’ which included the lifesize tractor composed from 39 individual negatives.

“I was thinking about things he left behind, like the legacy and memory and stuff like that. So it was important that I photographed his tractor from each side, from my perspective – so it’s from my height, and it’s from the same distance.”

The first tractor she ‘built’ in this fashion she brought her family together to perform a ritual burning of the artwork and celebrate Pat’s life at the home farm in Crott Hill near Moyne.

“We built it on the field he left me – so it’s my inheritance, its my heritage. It’s where he was born,” she explains.

“That was months of work, and then we destroyed it - lit a match to it and burnt it – so that was a really important part to it too.”

The communal aspect is central for Biddy.

“The idea behind it was to create a ritual where we could come together and could remember our parents – because since my father passed my mother passed two and a half years later.”

She guides the Celt around to the back wall of the exhibition space to see a sign in neon light which reads: ‘I adore you’.

“It’s one of the last things she said to me,” of her mother. “It was kind of like: ‘OK, you’re not ready to talk about this, but I’m here.”

Of the exhibition Biddy reflects: “It’s all mixed up with things that you leave behind that people then can’t let go of because it might be the last thing somebody wore.”

The Celt wonders that when the grief behind the work is so personal, if the exhibition translates to the viewers.

“I know it can,” she says referring to it’s first show in Galway. “People come in and they see the show, and they read the tiny bit of text about it and then they come up and are laden with tears, and they are telling you about the person they have lost. Somebody who was at the show in Galway, their Dad had died in a Massey Ferguson accident – what are the chances of that? When you walk into that space, that’s going to have a huge impact. I see it happening with art.”

'74 Summers' runs at townhall Arts Centre Cavan.