Abhainn Gallery Enniscrone Co. Sligo is pleased to present “Polyphonic summer”. An exhibition of paintings and prints by Mike Absolum spanning two decades, curated by Ann Conmy. The Exhibition opens 6th June and runs until the 19th July. Wine Reception on Friday the 6th June at 6pm, all are welcome.
Born in 1940, Mike Absalom remembers a Messerschmitt 109 strafing the seafront at Torquay during World War II. That image of airborne menace would later echo in his theatrical performances, where he detonated stage pyrotechnics while performing as a folk singer across Ireland and the UK in the 1970s. At Trinity College Dublin, he recalls the old ceiling shaking loose into clouds of black dust—a literal crumbling of order that delighted him.
A scholar of Arabic at Oxford, a folk singer-songwriter, harpist, poet, puppeteer, and painter, Absalom has long moved between worlds.
It wasn’t until later in life, after relocating from British Columbia to Mayo, that he discovered through genealogical research that he was half Irish. His relationship to place, home and becoming are central themes in this body of work.
Absalom’s painted compositions are vibrant, rhythmic, and full of motion -where things are made and unmade with absurdist logic. The paintings use non naturalistic hues to communicate and extract character and emotion. The panoptic view, often spinning, invites the audience into a visual polyphony, where stories of connection and disconnection reveal and critique the hero’s journey.
The nude portraits reveal much about the characters of the female sitters and their relationships to the artist through expressions of both indifference and vulnerability. The male and female gaze meet each other in “Blue woman” and neither one relents.
A parade of cow’s buttocks displayed centrally to the viewer is hallmark Absolom. Sheets blowing furiously on the clothesline, an artist who has a reverence for ordinary details however unflattering.
His lino cuts and dry point etchings present scenes balancing somewhere between the chaotic and mythic divine. Carved lines are strong imposing gestures seamless and fluid in the way they deal with image making. The ontology of the haunted is present often; in the two characters staring out towards Whitby pier seemingly forever. In the collision of animals mythic and real,with humans. There is a clawing back of the undergrowth, a return to the pre-verbal: a visionary clash with the shadow as it is acknowledged.
The scene of Dugort, Achill, Mayo with rolling waves and the black overbearing summit to Slievemore, captures a quality of animus in this etched depiction. As with much of his work, everything pulses with life, memory and motion.
At the centre of Polyphonic Summer is a meditation:
Are memories central to identity?
Images come together of land and body, stories are gleaned through these paintings and etchings. the past and present can exist in both places which acts as a totem of belonging.
Mike has shown his work extensively in Ireland England, Wales, Northern Ireland, also in China.
Words by Ann Conmy
