Sharon McDonagh | Living In Eternity: Tomorrow Never Comes
The clock stopped at the time of birth; marking a transition between worlds as the first breath is drawn.
The anguished screams of birth, become the rhythmic sigh matching the cadence of a weary world; a world that continues to turn on its axis, its daily revolutions of the sun ensuring the forward motion of time. Seconds begat minutes, begat hours, begat days, begat months, begat seasons, begat years, begat centuries, begat millennia and so on. . .
Time may be perceived by many as chronological but what if the reality of it is that it is not. What if the truth of the matter resides not in what we see, but what our mind perceives as possible. All of reality and time occupying the same space at once, eras stacked up on themselves. Can you be sure that everyone around you exists in the here and now. Occasionally a shiver down the spine gives rise to the thought that someone has walked over one's grave. Zeitgeist is the spirit of the times. A Time Ghost.
Civilisation is built on the remains of all previous civilisations. Like the formation of rock from sediment, the accretion of history builds the present; the past being always with us, beneath us, around us and on top of us, informing and chastising whilst also warning us.
A glimpse into the world of Sharon McDonagh provides us with a glimpse of worlds beyond. This world is a triangulation point between three states of existence: past, present and future. In McDonagh’s world reality is a skein, becoming ever more translucent the more it is picked at and unraveled. Gradually worlds are drawn closer together until we can feel them around us; a cool breeze brushes the skin as history moves around us -a swirling vortex of non-corporeal activity, warm breath on the nape of one's neck -the visitation of a friend long since departed.
Resonate is an exhibition in which time, knotted and impenetrable, has been picked away, creating windows onto worlds that no longer have form.
Guglielmo Marconi believed that messages could be transmitted great distances through nothing but air and it was this that led him to invent wireless telegraphy. Einstein suggests that along with height, width and depth, the fourth dimension -time- is also necessary to generate accurate coordinates. It has also been said that Marconi believed that a sound once made never actually ceases, it just becomes inaudible to the human ear. He wanted to build a receiver so powerful as to be able to pick up sounds from history - the sermon on the mount? The first use of wireless telegraphy in a commercial setting was on the doomed maiden voyage of The Titanic. When the RMS Carpathian arrived at the scene of the sinking, the boat had slipped beneath the waves nearly two hours previous. The Carpathian was still receiving the SOS transmissions upon its arrival at the scene of the disaster.
Echoes of the past mask the reality of now.
Eventually it will all crumble to dust: the present casts a shadow on the past and we exist only in an unwritten future.
Visitors to this exhibition who are familiar with ‘The Basement’ from past experience may find themselves questioning their understanding of what is real and what is not. It has become part of our reasoning over the years that the environment of ‘The Basement’ is what it is, and that it never tries to emulate the appearance of a gallery. Instead of white walls and hushed tones it is bare brick, crumbling plaster, York stone floor and, at this point, the dialogue with remnants of eleven years worth of previous exhibitions.
Whilst it has become de rigueur over the years for the incumbent artist to work with or around the remnants of other people's work, never has that been taken to such a literal extreme as this exhibition. When McDonagh visited to measure up and prepare a couple of months before her exhibition, I apologised for not having quite cleared up after the ArtCouple exhibition, her response was “leave it all”. From the start, this project has responded not just to the remnants of other artists' work, but has also become a dialogue between the artist and the venue itself. She has also created a level of uncertainty in the viewer as to the truth of the exhibition; how much is new work, how much is previous work, and how much are stage props, added to what was already there to confuse and force the viewer to question the nature of what it is they are looking at.
Several pieces are from previous series’ of work but four are made directly in response to the venue itself. Pieces that recreate not just sections of the environment but also capture a more phenomenological sense of surroundings. In some cases the new works echo the half real, half performative detritus of ‘The Basement’ with McDonagh overpainting one piece from another venue and converting it to match its present surroundings. In another case the process is reversed and the image, a close-up of a lightswitch and some trunking from a basement space in York, remains, but flashes of colour have been added to refer to a real lightswitch and trunking, located only centimeters away.
Here the work blends in with its surroundings, tricking the viewer into believing reality is what we can see rather than what we sense.
“Believe none of what you hear, and only one half of what you see”
At some point the clock starts ticking again, the fragile veil between states is lifted and we can continue our journey. We must learn to understand the messages of history, they will always be there; testaments to what came before as we prepare to go beyond.