Brian McAvera’s new ‘Artists from the Archive’ articles are drawn from NIVARLA, our Northern Ireland Visual Art Research Library & Archive.
In some senses, Gwen O’Dowd, who was born in Dublin, in 1957, and attended NCAD (1976-80) is a female equivalent to Clement McAleer. Both use landscape, neither is topographically inclined, both are on the cusp of figuration to abstraction, and neither – thankfully – can be easily slotted into the School of Irish Poetical Landscape. Both of them have rich surface textures but whereas McAleer is constantly sensuous, O’Dowd has an almost puritan, dour, and gritty aspect.
With the misty-eyed Irish school of landscape painting, the evanescent, misty world of landscape was forever being dissolved into the poetic world of rain, wind, and spume. By contrast, O’Dowd’s achievement was to turn it into an anchoring solidity of iconic terrain. She swept aside the detritus of clichéd slush and instead assimilated the much more difficult, and complex area of the seemingly banal: the ordinariness of landscape, the texture of a shell or a basalt rock, the feel of a foot on grassy sward, the weight of space in an underground enclosure.
Paintings by Gwen O'Dowd (l-r) 'On Inis Mor' 1992; 'Uaimh 61' 1999 ; 'Wotan's Throne' 1994
The picturesque is dumped, which is why trying to relate her to the Romantic Sublime of a Caspar David Friedrich is beside the point. This is an artist who explores compacted, compressed surfaces which have absorbed both Abstract Expressionism as well as the tachiste Europeans such as Soulages, Manessier or Tapies. This is a painter who has a subterranean plumb line; who quarries into geology, into strata; who, like McAleer, treats people only as an absence.
Her earlier work was more overtly abstracted, more attuned to notions of urban decay but this slowly changed into a series of landscape and seascape works in which a sense of place might be present but where the exploration of wind and weather and aging upon the geology of the land had become dominant. She reacts against landscape painting as such, wishing to ‘do away with the prettiness of it all, to get underneath the surface.’
One can read her work in terms of the psychodrama of hollows, slits, phallic up-thrusts, and enclosures, but as a riposte to the cosy indeterminate world of poetic landscape, she has no peer.
Let the last words be hers: ‘I think anyone using the landscape as a source has an individual ambition to fulfil; each person responding to particular elements within it. When the result of those responses appears “removed” or “unobvious,” it’s really the struggle that the artist has experienced in attempting to delve beneath the surface and discover a system whereby they as individuals can confront it.’
Gwen O'Dowd in her studio; cover of Gandon Editions booklet on the artist; Limen 2 proofing, from the series 'Print Series 3 2021 / 2022'
Brian McAvera, March 2025
We’ll share new articles inspired by NIVARLA by Brian every week. And you can enjoy more of his writing on his own site here.
NIVARLA will launch formally this Spring, and items in the rare and special collection will be available to view by appointment. We will share more information on how to access and use NIVARLA soon!
The Northern Ireland Visual Art Research Library & Archive is supported by the Ampersand Foundation, with many books and archive items donated and on loan from the McAvera & Walker Library.
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