Eleanor McCaughey : When you open your door to a mountain

When you open your door to a mountain is a presentation of new work by artist Eleanor McCaughey at Kevin Kavanagh.

The complex relationship between a ‘belief’ in something and a ‘knowing’ has always been a point of departure in McCaughey's work. Maybe somewhere between is a good place to dwell, collecting stories and ideas over time, building the anatomy of something new that is always growing.

For McCaughey, the act of representing a feeling or a question through paint is never simple, it requires much research, daydreaming, listening, conversation and making. With this new work McCaughey operates as a ubiquitous decoder who candidly chronicles her mind's eye. Using symbols that best describe a concept and metaphors to ask questions that are simultaneously commonplace yet awkward- Is the wilderness the antithesis of all that is orderly and inspiring? A wild open place where one can lose their bearings, a boundary crossed at your peril. Is it a place where we need to go in order to disconnect from our carefully curated self to exhume our decaying self? 

Are we ‘the other’ in nature, the annoying pest that soils and destroys? Are we all vulnerable to becoming or being seen as the other? With a desperate need to belong, holding tight to old friendships with the ongoing search for new connections, maybe our ‘self’ and the ‘other’ are fundamentally intertwined. 

Is the ‘unworldly’ the world we wish to inhabit? Content with gospel in the hope of a just world in the afterlife. Are we alone? Our solar system is 4.6 billion years old, the universe is 13.8 billion years old. Is that time enough for life on other planets to evolve into advanced civilizations, capable of venturing across the cosmos and finding new societies?

Would humanity be ready for the ‘otherness’ of life from another celestial body orbiting a star.

The title for this exhibition comes from the poem ‘Is there a name?’ by Chris Jones

McCaughey’s paintings and Jones’s commissioned writings reverberate off each other and echo new meanings and interchangeable narratives within the work.