‘The Road Is Paved With Good Intentions’ Droichead Arts Centre, Drogheda 15th Jan – 28th Feb 2015
There are coincidences at play in my encounter with Thomas Brezing's exhibition at the Droichead Arts Centre. The central topic is roadkill, and both this and its location have personal resonance. In 2007, when my father was in his final weeks, I decamped to nearby Duleek, driving in and out of the hospital in Drogheda. Returning to base one evening, the headlights fell on the aftermath of an encounter between a car and a dog, the flattened remains serving each subsequent day to portend impending loss.
I take the familiar route to Drogheda, braving the associations. As it happens, any apprehension about the exhibition is misplaced. Instead of a weighty treatise on the dangers of driving too quickly, what unveils itself is altogether quirkier, and, in its union of art, craft and social conscience, life affirming. The gallery seems smaller and more intimate than it did on my last encounter. In it, Brezing has created a world made of recycled materials fashioned into building blocks from which to materialise his vision. There are 10 individual entities, some with outlying elements that help to forge a cohesive whole. Like a family, each is distinct, yet they share genetic features.
The main focus is The Road. Fabricated from recycled, compressed newspaper bricks, it traverses the floor towards the incoming visitor, widening to accentuate perspective and double as a stage stetting for a scattering of bizarre artifacts. These include three composite creatures representing animals striving to evolve fast enough to respond to the revved-up pace of the humans around them. A 'stag', with mannequin hands for feet, cowers, awaiting annihilation; a comic 'sheep' teeters on splayed legs that terminate in toddler shoes, while a suspended figure with a bird's beak nose evokes the sacrificial. Bouquets of weathered synthetic flowers in baskets, pots and randomly strewn, forge connections to graveyard paraphernalia, while crushed fragments of cuddly toys - mainly bunny ears and faces – bear testament to a consequence of our speedy lifestyles.
Brezing invests time in an idea, whether expressed in layers through paint, as in the diptych Breathing My Father In, or by a growing variety of other means. The Road had its inception on a family holiday in 2010 during which a stretch of tarmac brought multiple encounters with the remains of rabbits killed trying to cross. They are captured in grizzly photographs on the artist's website, but are not part of this exhibition. Instead he has mounted a response that hints at its message rather than rams it home. (There is a possible example of roadkill in The Blind Rush Of Time: a disheveled blackbird encased in resin alongside a mobile phone. The victim of a preoccupied driver perhaps?)
The Road also features mini versions of Brezing's alter ego Carpet Man, a creation inspired by the experience of sleeping rolled up in carpet in his studio; a sort of 'anti-hero' response to boom-time extravagance. Donning a carpet tube, head in, limbs out, carrying a battered suitcase, he takes art to rundown, abandoned places, fostering an aesthetic influenced by the writer Cormac McCarthy. On opening night, he contributed a performance piece, issuing forth hundreds of bottle tops that now form a coloured mound alongside the other exhibits. Mini Carpet Men also appear in At Night I Sleep, During The Day I Dream, with its sepia patchwork painstakingly constructed from hundreds of used square teabags, the varied washes of tea-stain conspiring to beauty. Round teabags are assembled into forms reminiscent of sea urchins, the totality embodying, for Brezing, all of the conversations whetted by the drinking of tea.
In her Loneliness Begins To Cry Out, newspaper brickwork is fringed with birds' nests crafted from a palette of fishing-net fragments and populated by golf-ball 'eggs'. In their midst a painted mannequin sprouts twigs adorned with nesting birds, while a dead seagull lies prostrate, its belly and mouth stuffed with colourful debris – a comment on the cost to wildlife of discarded plastic. These disparate elements are linked by a book attached low to the wall, falling open on passage about the wound caused by fathers who fail to validate their sons. This is responsibility as another road paved with good intentions, but falling short with devastating results.
This latest offering by Thomas Brezing is an earnest and lovingly wrought showing from an artist with a strong and established aesthetic and an admirable lightness of touch. It reaffirms the importance of the act of making and the validity of personal vision. Trained in metalwork and self-taught in the visual arts, his work oozes freedom. Long may it last.
Susan Campbell is a PhD candidate in history of art at Trinity College Dublin, the University of Dublin
(article first published in Visual Artist's Ireland News Sheet, issue 2 March - April 2015)
There are coincidences at play in my encounter with Thomas Brezing's exhibition at the Droichead Arts Centre. The central topic is roadkill, and both this and its location have personal resonance. In 2007, when my father was in his final weeks, I decamped to nearby Duleek, driving in and out of the hospital in Drogheda. Returning to base one evening, the headlights fell on the aftermath of an encounter between a car and a dog, the flattened remains serving each subsequent day to portend impending loss.
I take the familiar route to Drogheda, braving the associations. As it happens, any apprehension about the exhibition is misplaced. Instead of a weighty treatise on the dangers of driving too quickly, what unveils itself is altogether quirkier, and, in its union of art, craft and social conscience, life affirming. The gallery seems smaller and more intimate than it did on my last encounter. In it, Brezing has created a world made of recycled materials fashioned into building blocks from which to materialise his vision. There are 10 individual entities, some with outlying elements that help to forge a cohesive whole. Like a family, each is distinct, yet they share genetic features.
The main focus is The Road. Fabricated from recycled, compressed newspaper bricks, it traverses the floor towards the incoming visitor, widening to accentuate perspective and double as a stage stetting for a scattering of bizarre artifacts. These include three composite creatures representing animals striving to evolve fast enough to respond to the revved-up pace of the humans around them. A 'stag', with mannequin hands for feet, cowers, awaiting annihilation; a comic 'sheep' teeters on splayed legs that terminate in toddler shoes, while a suspended figure with a bird's beak nose evokes the sacrificial. Bouquets of weathered synthetic flowers in baskets, pots and randomly strewn, forge connections to graveyard paraphernalia, while crushed fragments of cuddly toys - mainly bunny ears and faces – bear testament to a consequence of our speedy lifestyles.
Brezing invests time in an idea, whether expressed in layers through paint, as in the diptych Breathing My Father In, or by a growing variety of other means. The Road had its inception on a family holiday in 2010 during which a stretch of tarmac brought multiple encounters with the remains of rabbits killed trying to cross. They are captured in grizzly photographs on the artist's website, but are not part of this exhibition. Instead he has mounted a response that hints at its message rather than rams it home. (There is a possible example of roadkill in The Blind Rush Of Time: a disheveled blackbird encased in resin alongside a mobile phone. The victim of a preoccupied driver perhaps?)
The Road also features mini versions of Brezing's alter ego Carpet Man, a creation inspired by the experience of sleeping rolled up in carpet in his studio; a sort of 'anti-hero' response to boom-time extravagance. Donning a carpet tube, head in, limbs out, carrying a battered suitcase, he takes art to rundown, abandoned places, fostering an aesthetic influenced by the writer Cormac McCarthy. On opening night, he contributed a performance piece, issuing forth hundreds of bottle tops that now form a coloured mound alongside the other exhibits. Mini Carpet Men also appear in At Night I Sleep, During The Day I Dream, with its sepia patchwork painstakingly constructed from hundreds of used square teabags, the varied washes of tea-stain conspiring to beauty. Round teabags are assembled into forms reminiscent of sea urchins, the totality embodying, for Brezing, all of the conversations whetted by the drinking of tea.
In her Loneliness Begins To Cry Out, newspaper brickwork is fringed with birds' nests crafted from a palette of fishing-net fragments and populated by golf-ball 'eggs'. In their midst a painted mannequin sprouts twigs adorned with nesting birds, while a dead seagull lies prostrate, its belly and mouth stuffed with colourful debris – a comment on the cost to wildlife of discarded plastic. These disparate elements are linked by a book attached low to the wall, falling open on passage about the wound caused by fathers who fail to validate their sons. This is responsibility as another road paved with good intentions, but falling short with devastating results.
This latest offering by Thomas Brezing is an earnest and lovingly wrought showing from an artist with a strong and established aesthetic and an admirable lightness of touch. It reaffirms the importance of the act of making and the validity of personal vision. Trained in metalwork and self-taught in the visual arts, his work oozes freedom. Long may it last.
Susan Campbell is a PhD candidate in history of art at Trinity College Dublin, the University of Dublin
(article first published in Visual Artist's Ireland News Sheet, issue 2 March - April 2015)
