Maeve McCarthy RHA

Home

Aidan Dunne, The Irish Times, May 12th, 2010

MAEVE MCCARTHY’S Molesworth Gallery exhibition Home stems from a year spent living in a rented house in a west Kerry townland at the foot of mount Brandon. The two-storey farmhouse reminded her of her grandmother’s ancestral home in Co Down, and set her thinking about the links and overlaps between house and home. That is the basic idea underlying her work. In other words, she didn’t opt to hunt out the picturesque in the natural landscape, as one might expect of a painter visiting Kerry, but concentrated on the homesteads people have made within the landscape.
We don’t see people, and we don’t get to see inside the houses, but the pictures are all about habitation. There is a tremendous sense that the various buildings we see, including the one McCarthy lived in, are preserved with great effort from the depredations of time and the elements. They are islands of comfort, order and clarity.
Sometimes, especially in the more formally composed images, they are quite like sculptures, poised geometric abstractions.
It’s tempting to see these depictions of usually isolated houses, with a strong sense of inner and outer life, personal and public, as symbolic of the individual psyche, and indeed McCarthy acknowledges that in her note detailing the genesis of the show. She is a skilled naturalistic painter, and also a fine portraitist. Her forte is quiet, understated but meticulous observation, delivered with increasingly impressive technique. She simply doesn’t do stylistic flourishes, but give the work time and you will find it absorbing and beautifully made.

Aidan Dunne, The Irish Times, May 12th,  2010

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