Iarlaith Ni Fheorais
File Note VIII 2024 - Commissioned by Fire Station Artists Studios 2024
Having recently moved to an inner suburb of North East London, I became aware of the abundance of Easter Lilies in the small patch of lawn at the front of many of the late Victorian and Edwardian terraced homes in the area. Whole swathes of streets feature mature, verdant flower beds of Easter Lilies, unlike anywhere else in London. With the flowers’ connections to Irish Republicanism, it was quite a surprise to find them in such numbers in the heart of the imperial beast. As most of the city’s architectural landscape is made of these near identical two-story terraced brick homes, the Easter Lily beds act as a significant distinction to yet another monotonous inner London suburb. I cannot find any information on the reason for their proclivity, but can only speculate on some long forgotten fad saved from gentrification more intensely ravaging other parts of the city, a once thriving republican community or some local flower mania at some point in the last 150 years.
The Dublin based Casey Walshe has a long-standing engagement with flowers. Their delicate paintings often feature small bunches of one type of flower, moving between abstracted orb-like forms to more literal interpretations of recognisable flowers, largely using blues, reds, creams and black hues. Sometimes framed by a simple monotone background, others are accompanied by abstracted shapes. The flower serves a certain role in art history, adopted as memento mori, or as a symbol of love, sensuality and fragility. They allude to a certain sexuality, either as metaphor for the sexual acts, of pleasure and courtships and the simple substitute for autonomy. In the context of queer history, the flower operates within a parallel yet distinct symbolic order. For example, the green carnations were infamously popularised by Oscar Wilde as botanic queer wink and nod for gay men in Victorian London as an early proto-hanky code or the violet symbolising sapphic love for over 2,000 years.
It is in this queer lineage that Walshe’s floral work feels most at home within, working with flowers as a means of marking a personal queer history of romance, friendship and sensuality. The flowers may be literal depictions of flowers they’ve received from lovers and friends as gifts, memorialising those moments of connection. Speaking with Walshe, the flowers that make up their painterly garden are not all literal depictions, and can be a pictorial means of trying to hold onto a memory, feeling or event that is difficult to grasp; too pellucid for one physical flower to capture. As with the lily - regarded as a symbol of everything from peace, republicanism and of death - flowers hold a twin meaning of both connection, love and pleasure, and conversely as they wither, of the enviable loss, heartbreak and death. Walshe’s paintings are also resistant to easy reading, holding space in their softness for poetic affect; from queer love, longing to loss, and the longing for companionship.
During their time at Fire Station Artists’ Studios (FSAS), Walshe work is evolving from this floral bedrock, towards more sculptural, and even theatrical environs. Beginning with designing custom benches for their RHA exhibitions TENDER, Walshe wanted to slow audiences down and create a more intimate connection with their work, inviting visitors to rest. A bench is obviously a piece of exhibition design, but also serves the purpose of an access device, whose importance is often sorely overlooked by artists and curators. In this instance Walshe gained a new appreciation for the sculptural form of the bench, especially the way objects can affect audiences and create space. This sculptural spur has evolved into a new body of work which Walshe is producing using the technical capabilities available at FSAS.
These include suspended circular sculptures, draped in fabrics, intended to divide a room, partitioning viewers from each other, partially visible through semi-opaque fabric. Theatrical in nature, acting almost as a set, viewers separated from each other, try to catch a glimpse, playing with the erotics of being seen, and not seen. Of orbiting around each other, checking each other out, cruising and coming in and out of view behind the chiffon fabric. In contrast to this sensual sensibility, the sculptures will be 8 - 10 ft high, framed by a metal circular frame, creating an extra-human stature, of the sense of being overwhelmed, of being enveloped; of a new cacophonous sensual register. In a continuum with the benches, Walshe’s fresh interest in how sculptural forms can influence viewers’ behaviour act as mirrors of a newly confident gendered subjectivity, and a material sensitivity to how queer socialities function within space.
In many ways, Walshe’s work already exists in relation to a wider set of artistic and social intimacies. Throughout their practice, Walshe has commissioned writers to respond to their work. These texts are written by friends, collaborators and co-conspirators and range in style, including art writing, personal essays and poetry. Reflecting largely on the flower paintings, they point to a wider set of intimacies, both real and fictionalised. These texts give flesh to the sociality of a practice, of the world of relationships that shape an artist and their work. Beyond that, they allow for the work to live outside of the gallery walls, and engage with the emotional, political and social hereafter. As Walshe’s sculptural work continues to mature, they hope to collaborate with theatre makers to produce sets as a way to enliven the queer lifeworld in which their work sits within and informs. Just as the Easter Lilies are the botanic afterlife of an unknowable lost world of human desires, Walshe’s flower paintings and shrouded sculptures feel like the artistic process that longs to make our obfuscated sensual impulses materially legible.