The other day I went to a concert in Dublin, at which Brìghde Chaimbeul was one of the main performers. From Skye, Chaimbeul plays the Scottish smallpipes, softer and less strident than the better-known bagpipes, and on her debut album, ‘The Reeling’, they envelope the listener with complex and drifting melodies, kept intense and trancelike by incessant drones. It is very beautiful music, recorded live in a small Scottish highlands church.
During the interval - it was a long evening, with three other acts taking to the stage, including the wonderful Lisa O’Neill, who played at the DHG in Dublin shortly before I left the gallery - I happened to have a conversation with a friend who had just returned from a trip to Scotland, where he had visited a substantial number of museums, galleries, and exhibitions. He seemed particularly taken by a display of small photographs by Francesca Woodman which he had seen at the National Gallery in Edinburgh, set in the context of work by two other American photographers, Diane Arbus and Robert Mapplethorpe. Like Brìghde Chaimbeul, Francesca Woodman was very young when she first came to prominence, and they have overlapping sensibilities. There is something especially feminine and dreamlike about their work, as well as a quality that is simultaneously archetypal and evanescent.
Woodman had already passed away when I worked on an exhibition of her work in 2001 at the Douglas Hyde Gallery, but her ardent spirit still seemed very much alive in the photographs. Many of them showed women, often herself and frequently naked, blurred or merging with their surroundings. They were monochrome, almost always modest in scale, commonly shot indoors in abandoned or deserted places. Following the example of the critic Rosalind Krauss, who wrote about her in the 1980s, it is often said that her work focuses on issues of gender, self, how her body relates to the world, and that it ‘attempts to resist the male gaze’. Although possibly true, this reading strikes me as overly conceptual and reductive of the mood of the images, which I found oneiric, mysterious, almost ethereal, as if they had been fashioned by someone only half in this world.
Her mother’s recollections of Francesca were simpler and more straight-forward. In an interview in ‘The Guardian’, Betty Woodman once remarked that her daughter wasn’t a ‘deeply serious intellectual’ and probably wouldn’t have recognised the feminist claims that are now made for her work. ‘She had a good time, her life wasn’t full of miseries. She was fun to be with. It’s a basic fallacy that her death is what she was all about, and people read that into the photographs. They psychoanalyse them. Young people in particular feel that she’s talking about them, somehow. They see the photographs as very personal. But that’s not the way I approach them. They’re often funny’.
A close friend and contemporary took yet another perspective, quoted in the same article. ‘She was kooky, and at first I didn’t want to be anywhere near her’, said Betsy Berne, a writer and journalist. ‘She seemed to be born in the wrong century - she was totally outside pop culture; she never watched TV; she couldn’t care less about music. But if she wanted something, she was going to get it, and when we moved to New York, I sublet the place she lived in and that’s when we became close. She was very loyal and intense. She was the kind of person you either loved or hated’.
The late George and Betty Woodman came to the installation and opening of the Dublin exhibition, and their presence added much to the occasion. They were keen to talk about their own work as well as that of their daughter’s; George painted and took photographs that had been influenced, at least to my eye, by Francesca; Betty was a ceramicist, well known for her vibrant and colourful baroque forms. I particularly remember something about which we all seemed to agree, and that was the feeling that Francesca had managed to fill her brief life with extraordinary intensity and accomplishment, as if she knew that she would not be here for long. My memories of the show are of momentary glimpses of her flighty inner being and passing hints of a dimension beyond those in which we customarily live, as though their subject were a changeling. There are music traditions in Ireland, and in Scotland too, that have much to do with the ‘other world’, and this is what I sense in the reels of Brìghde Chaimbeul and Francesca Woodman’s uncanny images.
https://www.brichaimbeul.com/
https://www.victoria-miro.com/artists/7-francesca-woodman/
https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2014/aug/31/searching-for-the-real-francesca-woodman