CULTURE Raising the roof

‘The Shambles: Ballaghaderreen II’ (detail), oil on board, by Pauline Garavan.

Raising the roof


Ciara Moynihan

‘Rusting Roofs’, an exhibition of painting, drawing and sculpture by Mayo artist Pauline Garavan, was officially opened in the gallery of The Clew Bay Hotel, Westport, on Friday last, April 12, by Marie Farrell, Director of the Linenhall Arts Centre. A celebration of beauty in the ordinary, it is a captivating study of texture, colour and shape.
At the heart of Garavan’s work are the rusted galvanised roofs of sheds and long-abandoned dwellings that are so familiar in landscape of the west: The reds, purples, oranges and browns that change hue depending on light, weather and time of year, often perched atop rough walls bejewelled with brightly coloured moss and lichen.  
Garavan’s arresting exhibition – based on a detailed photographic study of rusting roofs over a number of years – is a close-up examination of these elements, encouraging the viewer to pause and appreciate the beauty of something often overlooked, even dismissed, as decay. Texture and colour interplay gently, as nature slowly settles in on and reclaims what is man-made.
‘Rusting Roofs’ is made up of eight works – six oil paintings; one ‘rust-dust on paper’, entitled ‘Cunnagher’; and a small-scale sculpture, ‘Blazing Roof’, made with aluminium, wire and thread. Detail marks out each of the pieces, with as much attention paid to the individual fronds of a fern as to the interplay of light and dark along the undulating irregular edge of a roof.
In a recent interview with GrΡinne O’Reilly and Breda Burns on the Arts Show on Westport Radio, WRFM, Garavan described the painstaking process of gathering the rust dust for ‘Cunnagher’, and how the process of applying the fine but abbrasive powder wore away the skin on her fingers so much that she could only work on the piece at intervals. The process involved in creating the ‘Blazing Roof’ sculpture was equally painstaking, though perhaps not as painful…    
Pauline Garavan has a degree in Art & Design from GMIT and in Fine Art from Sligo IT. She has shown her work in the RHA Annual Show on a number of occasions, and in Belfast’s Royal Ulster Academy Annual Exhibition.  
Her work featured in the 2008 TaispeΡntas Ealaíne an Oireachtais in Cork, and to coincide with the Volvo Ocean Race in 2009, a selection of her ‘Sea’ works was exhibited in a group show in The Kenny Gallery, Galway. While exhibiting widely in group shows, this is Garavan’s third solo exhibition. She is a listed Gallery Artist with the Leinster Gallery, Dublin. Her work is found in private collections in both the US and Ireland.

‘Rusting Roofs’, an exhibition of work by Pauline Garavan, continues in the Clew Bay Gallery until mid May.