LAST FRIDAY, the Norman Villa Gallery hosted the opening of Debi O’Hehir’s superb Galway Arts Festival exhibition, Hooves and Watermarks, her first new show in four years.
The exhibition continues what has become O’Hehir’s iconic theme representing the horse in ink drawings, wire and bronze sculpture. Excitingly, also included are works featuring the human figure re-introducing this theme into her artistic oeuvre.
The fluid high spirited energy and grace of O’Hehir’s art belies the years of disciplined figurative study and steady evolution of her unique imaginative voice.
Her ink drawings are unedited and convey a vibrant sense of energy and movement with the interplay of form, light, and shadow. Her sculptural works both bronze and wire are elongated stylised, and elegant, their purity and line impart a sense of optimism and re-emergence.
Debi O’Hehir was born in England but grew up in Kinvara. She was a familiar figure in Galway’s arts scene of the late 1980s and early 1990s, exhibiting at both Galway Arts Centre and Galway Arts Festival, before moving to London where she began showing at the Northcote Gallery.
In 2001 she returned to Ireland to work at the Leitrim Sculpture Centre and she continues to live in Manorhamilton while exhibiting widely. Her work is held in numerous collections in Ireland and throughout Europe, including a collection in The Arts Council, Dublin.
The freedom of dancers
With the opening of Hooves and Watermarks, Debi sat down with me to talk about some of the ideas and experiences that informed the exhibition. She starts by discussing her return to the human figure after a gap of two decades, presenting graceful images of divers, dancers, and gymnasts, often in mid-leap and exuding a joyous sense of liberation and airiness.
“I started swimming a couple of years ago,” she begins. “You know that feeling where you think ‘I can’t do that anymore’? But I went swimming and I found I could still do it after a couple of weeks. I then started thinking about the freedom of the body in water and also looking at dancers and gymnasts. What dancers do, it looks so free. I initially went for horses also because of the freedom they can suggest.”
The images were also O’Hehir’s response to personal pain and her reflection on the travails of recession-era Ireland.
“I put my back out a few years ago and I couldn’t walk for nearly three months,” she tells me. “It was the first time ever I felt trapped with some sort of disability and that was when I started doing all these free floating figures.
“I was also feeling the anxiety of the state of the country and the risk of losing my house and maybe having to go on the dole. So a load of fear was in me and I hated it. That was the whole idea of doing the work and doing things that might even look very light-hearted - there are dancers doing tango dances for instance - and just play for a bit and I had a fairly good time doing that.
“The idea matched up with this feeling of freedom but it was also me just saying ‘Let’s go into free fall and see what happens instead of holding on for dear life.’ And with me that includes holding on to horses for dear life; obviously the financial rewards from doing the horses kept me in work but also maybe in one mode. It might have outlived its day but I’m not saying I’m never going to go back to them again.”
An au revoir to horses?
While the exhibition might mark a farewell (or at least an au revoir ) to horses as a subject for O’Hehir, they still figure prominently in the show, both in drawings and sculptures. She notes an evolution in her treatment of the subject.
“I’m using more colour than I’ve ever used before in the horse pieces,” she says. “Then with works like the small ‘Charleston’ one I’m letting them go abstract, letting the ink work more than me, instead of me putting the image on it all the time. But I’m going to be abandoning them now, for a break and not be ‘flogging a dead horse’!”
She concludes with her thoughts on the how her works on the figure and the horse bear upon each other.
“There is probably a thread there in this show pulling them together, there is more movement,” she says. “The figure in water is nice because I work with water, everything I do is water-based. I had stopped doing the figure maybe 20 years ago. At the time I wasn’t able to handle it because I thought I was going to end up doing these bad Athena posters. I was depressed so all my pictures were a bit weepy, so I always hid behind the horse.
“That way I could be weepy and depressed and all that but it was a picture of a horse, the horse wasn’t depressed. Whereas if I was doing figures I would have wanted somehow in my simple little mind that it would be more cathartic if I drew people who looked liked they were suffering.
“The horse was easier to stand behind and use that for any expression I wanted. I wouldn’t be as exposed in the same way I’d have been had I gone on in the same way that I was going with the figure. Maybe I’m more joyful now despite everything!”
Hooves and Watermarks is certainly a joy to look at and well merits a trip to Salthill and the Norman Villa Gallery in Salthill. The exhibition runs for the remainder of the Galway Arts Festival and continues until Saturday August 3. The gallery opening hours are 12 noon to 6pm.
