Sensing the Sculpture of Kathy Prendergast: A Portrait of the Female Life Cycle

SENSING THE SCULPTURE OF KATHY PRENDERGAST: A PORTRAIT OF THE FEMALE LIFE CYCLE SHEILA DICKINSON when irish artist Kathy Prendergast left the 1995 International Venice Bienalle with the prestigious Premio 2000 Award for best artist under forty years of age, she was already accustomed to accolades. Her future success might have been predicted as early as 1980, when the Hugh Lane Municipal Gallery purchased a selection of her undergraduate artwork from the National College of Art and Design in Dublin. A sample of Prendergast’s recent sculptural work is included in the Irish Museum of Modern Art’s current traveling exhibition, Irish Art Now: From the Poetic to the Political . Exploring a range of media and styles, Prendergast’s art moves with dexterity from plaster to pillows, from chalk to bronze, from tent fabric to cloth, from maps to engineering drafts. As she works with various media, she also provides movement within individual pieces, allowing each medium to metamorphose into something new. “If there is no transformation ,” Prendergast claims, “there is nothing” (qtd. in McBratney 187). In her past work, Prendergast excavated surfaces. Her 1983 Body Map Series maps the female body as an island by creating a mock engineering diagram to explore a body/land image (see figure 5, page 276). Transformation is key to these intricate drawings. As we observe the engineer drilling, pumping, and tunneling through the internal cavities of the body as land— in order to discover water to irrigate the earth—the artist momentarily suspends our perception of her drawing as a woman’s body. Instead she compels us to look beneath the surface of the object itself, to examine our associations with her materials and objects. Prendergast’s work challenges us to question social assumptions as she offers alternative ways of looking at women, their bodies, and their lives. I offer this prelude as a guide to the persistently abstract sculpture Prendergast has produced since the late 1980s—the body of work that is the subSENSING THE SCULPTURE OF KATHY PRENDERGAST 227 ject of this essay. Abstract art denies us directions; instead, we must explore multiple perspectives, aware always that rather than providing a single “correct ” interpretation, each perspective adds layers of meaning. Reviewers of Prendergast’s abstract works often describe them as if they inhabit an imaginative netherworld defying interpretation. For Aidan Dunne, for example , a “work by Prendergast . . . presents itself as a puzzle, and it is usually impervious to definitive interpretation, it preserves a sense of its own mystery” (36). But as the viewer interrogates the contexts of Prendergast’s sculptures, their seemingly elusive meanings begin to reveal themselves. Stack (1989) (plate 7) hovers in a nebulous mystery zone. Multiple layers of cloth are piled into a twelve-foot stack, larger at the base and then tapering off as it rises above the head of the viewer. Its perimeter appears as the shape of a ship, with a flat stern and pointed bow. The frayed and unhemmed cloth is covered with a light coat of a deep indigo paint, with detectable specks of red and white cloth appearing throughout. Stack speaks of the internal made external, for the compressed layers of cloth metamorphose into strata of the earth. The deep blue color expresses wetness, the dampness of dirt. The sculpture appears as a topographical quasi-landformation but simultaneously asserts itself as part of the earth raised above ground—with its depth achieved through a layering that evokes millennia of built-up strata in the earth’s crust. Standing before this tactile form that seems to ooze and drench us in its depth, we do not just view landscape ; we are, rather, transported into the land itself; we feel the damp coolness beneath the ground. In this work, Prendergast invokes the Irish bog, grown wild and ravenous in her imagination, feeding on the exile’s nostalgia. As an artist working in exile, she turns to the national landscape through familiar images such as stone walls and cairns, as well as the sea-stacks on the west coast of Ireland. Viewed in a gallery space, Stack looms monumental. It exudes a marooned sense of isolation, like the sea-stack worn away from the cliff...