An artist’s life in shreds

CAF Review: Jane McCormick exhibition

What do you take from Jane McCormick shredding 50 years worth of her diaries?

It’s just one installation of the Cavan artist’s wonderful exhibition in the Masonic Lodge on Farnham Street as part of the festival. There was also a display of tools and items belonging to the stonemason, Sonny Plunkett, late of Finea, and a hospital bed mounted on stilted legs so high that you couldn’t clamber up to see the patient inside the bed - not that there is one. Scores of spoons of different types hung from the underside of the bed, like some cooky HSE windchime. Look closely enough and you can see your own reflection.

And so what do we make of the drumlin of shredded paper on the wooden floor, and beside it a video screening McCormick relentlessly, and mercilessly shredding? It’s a deeply unsettling sight at first, then through the repetition and sound makes it almost meditative. Is it, the active ridding of memory before old age does it for us? Could it be the untethering of the creative spirit? Or an affirmation of living for now?

Well, after all the work and deliberation that went into those pages, the height of the shredded paper modestly suggests it doesn’t amount to a whole hill of beans in the grand scheme of things anyway.

The wonder of McCormick’s exhibition however would suggest the complete opposite is true. DMC.