WHITE: lest we forget to link present to past

by Rose Rushe

‘WHITE: lest we forget’ is a major show opening on September 25 in Limerick City Gallery of Art (LCGA). It is comprised of works by three widely differing artists, curated to connect present with past in the arena of conflict and its rip through generations.
“While it is a group exhibition, the title ‘white’ has a number of readings, a number of applications,” notes curator/ director Helen Carey at LCGA. War and peace, specifically in the wake of World War I commemorations, is an informing theme.
“Think of red blood on white snow, or the shell shock of implosion. It’s the colour of mercy and compassion. Then we have the American White House and politics…but as it happens, there is an element of white to each of the works”.
“These artists remind us that war impacts for a long time on individual lives and on society”.
Lida Abdul from Afghanistan has created ‘The White House’, series of images. Its landscapes and what people wear in her homeland are intensely white, evocative, the effect spiritual in expression.
Iraqi Jamal Penjweng’s post-war works are bannered ‘SADDAM IS HERE’ and done on white A4 paper.
Juxtaposing their art and explorations, Carey observes through Penjweng’s filter “how the scars carry forward, the influence of Saddam Hussein has evolved and is still here”..
The other artist in show is Rita Duffy from Belfast. Her paintings on cloth with a white handkerchief are forever mindful of Fr Edward Daly’s bid to have paratroopers down arms as a bleeding 17 year-old was carried off the streets on Bloody Sunday. He died with a dozen other, Derry, 1972.
As architect of ‘White’ as coherent whole, Helen Carey posits that “since WWI we are in a continuum. The key around [the exhibition] is that ordinary people get hurt and get hurt in a big way. Very consciously it is about the onus being on us, the contemporary, to pay homage to the past”.
As did last year’s display cases, posters, art and community clinics in Pery Square for Larkin’s lock out centenary.

Upstairs at the municipal gallery, Elaine Byrne’s ‘Raumplan’ installation of architectural and spatial constructs prompts us to examine how living and being are informed by our ability to dwell within a habitat, as opposed to mere built environment.
Closing the interview, director Helen Carey looks ahead to City of Culture activity at this Pery Square venue. There is Tom Fitzgerald’s illustrated book and visual works, and towards the end of the year, “a sort of homecoming, the last clutch of shows from November 27 being all about Limerick”.
John Shinnors, Gillian Kenny, Andrew Kearney, all looped through Limerick School of Art and Design and central over years to visual arts in the city, will feature.