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A Rock can hurt you; A Rock can open a nut

Lexicon Gallery, Dún Laoghaire, Dublin. 2025

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Text: Cliodnha Shaffrey.

 

 

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Vanesa reminded me, when we met a few weeks ago to talk about her plans for this exhibition, that she has lived in Ireland for nearly 20 years.  For a good portion of this time, more than ten years, I have watched with enthusiasm the shape of Vanessa’ practice as it takes hold, and astonishes viewers with memorable break-through solos, such as at the LAB, Dublin City and Limerick City Gallery. This exhibition at the Lexicon Gallery, Dun Laoghaire’s library adds to her litany of impressive achievements for this fantastic, fascinating and dedicated artist.

 

There are underpinnings to Vanessa's work that we can enjoy thinking about.

Soil - earth’s matter - is both her material and her reference point. Soils omnipresent connects us tangibly across all lands.  Made up of living organisms, minerals, liquids, rocks, roots, gas, water, animals, bone, it is the basis of our life, of our food. It carries time within its layers – the hidden strata of past life, the buried remains, beneath us, unknown, mysterious, sometimes conjurable as uncovered or plucked out finds, taking the past into the present as a portal of time, a fragment of truth.  Soil’s versatility is its diversity and its availability everywhere. You can pick it up in pieces like a stone or in a cluster and you can manipulate it with your hands, and fire it in a kiln so it lasts for ever, and you can treat its surfaces with glazes and paint, to decorate and beautify. From it we, humans, began to make vessels, tools, relics for ritual, weapons for war, bricks for our buildings, art as testament of our need to create. And so an account of our histories could be given as the story of our material world and its relationship to our hands and our minds. Our thinking bodies, our making minds – the idea that the world shapes us and we shape the world.  All these big and deep things are omnipresent within this highly diverse life-giving substance. And all these big and deep and elemental ideas simmer within Vanessa’s work, which takes its shape from how she can make sense of the world she inhabits, and the promise of what a handful of clay can offer.

Vanessa’s art is underscored by a dual life lived between Ireland and Spain - Dublin and Barcelona.  Moving back and forth between places opens her sensibilities to what it means to live in transition, slipping from one language into another, one culture to another, one ground to another.  Requiring a practice that is light. Clay is malleable and portable and can be easily carried.  Did she choose it or did it choose her? Her art evolves, not so much as by overcoming obstacles, but rather, embracing the reality she inhabits and innovating from it.  She spoke to me about the earliest forms of communication small clay coins, conceived as an ancient language system earlier than cuneiform - made from earth and used by ancient societies for the sale of animals, food or other valued objects. The start of trade.  Ingeniously pragmatic.

 

This is a practice founded in experimentation and play. In Vanessa’s art, what lies underfoot is fictitiously retrieved. The focus downwards to underground is managed with vibrancy that intuits a sense of lightness and awe.

We think about the forms her work takes, the processes undertaken and the subjects evoked. Small things build into larger assemblages. They hint at archaeological finds, decorative body adornments, jewellery, vessels, spoons, instruments we might play, things we might utilise or wear.  Small particles are beaded together and objects laid out in orderly groupings to form an ensemble floor work that is expansive.  A puzzle – in train. Provisional. A mosaic of finds, what are these things? What vanished community do they belong to?  How might we put them together, Where are the missing pieces?

Then there are the paintings and drawings made in dialogue with her assemblages. She uses marbling techniques, mixing acrylic paint, oil paint, inks and spray paint, creating swirling, stone-like patterns on paper by floating colours on a liquid surface.  Some sit interspersed on the floor work, a couple of small oil paintings and a couple of drawings with colour pencils and acrylic paint.  But here their main feature is as two sizable wall collages.

How the work is displayed, how they are positioned in the gallery, how we are orchestrated to view this exhibition – is utterly contemporary.  The floor work insists on being on the ground. To stop those pesky kids’ hands delighting on it, and yet lure their imagination, she cages it in.  We look in through the net or down over the metal sculpture. It both protects and entices viewing perspectives, mirroring those structures employed in the public realm or to barrier archaeological sites.

Parading us inwards an installation of paintings takes over the two long gallery walls.  Veiled in the lightest of netting, it fuzzes the papery collage and colour sing through as watery swirls of the paint.

A group of rock-like pieces are at the end gallery.  These are hand-crafted sculptures, where Vanessa employed  a 19th century technique called Stucco Marmo (polished plaster) made out of base elements of earth, animal and pigment, It demonstrates her skilfully mastering of a challenging technique.  Manuports is how she refers to them. (A manuport is a natural object that has been deliberately taken from its original environment and relocated without further modification. Typically moved by human hand).  They were commissioned for the River Lee in Cork, a tidal river, so they would only be visible when the tide went out.

 

Oh yes, this is art full of the liminal, the in-between, things unearthed, things veiled – it triggers a desire to piece our own version of a story.

 

A Rock can hurt you, a Rock can open a nut, and a rock can stand still at that point of the turning world.