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The Sweet Revelations Of Abigail O'Brien

The remarkable series of photographs that Abigail O'Brien produced at the Oatfield Sweet Factory at Letterkenny in County Donegal can be read on many levels. The most prosaic interpretation would focus on the documentary nature of these works, which record the equipment and materials and processes involved in the making of traditional candies, but which also introduce us to the men and women who perform the necessary alchemy of sweet making. Mixing and kneading and pouring and extruding and pressing and tempering and slicing and wrapping, flow together into a sort of candy-choreography. Even outsiders can perceive the concentration, but also the rhythmic sureness and ease with which individual gestures are carried out. But we do not just see employees going about the practiced routines of work. We see them in repose as well - as in 'Breaktime' or in 'Time Out', which conveys a sense of fundamental separation and weariness that seem to place the viewer in the role of voyeur. The men and women depicted here might be actors glimpsed backstage after a performance, their masks dropped.

In summarising this sequence under the title 'Temperance', O'Brien suggests the search for balance and harmony, for a middle ground. Aristotle saw temperance as the summit between two chasms - the chasms of intemperance and insensibility. The artist explores these extremes in the rituals and processes of the factory floor, but also reminds us as viewers that our hunger may be bigger than our stomachs. Hence, a state of balanced moderation may be possible only after swinging into extremes ('Good Girl 1' and 'Good Girl 2') or trespassing into excess ('Fools Gold'). It is for this reason that O'Brien's work vacillates between the peaks of movement and rest, of luxury and emptiness. One can also see this symbolised in the delicious, baroque folds of a sugar-mass collapsing into smooth flat forms.

Abigail O'Brien: Bad Girl I, 2009

Lambdachrome, 99 x 120 cm, 39 x 47 inches

Click on image to enlarge.

In her application to become Photographer in Residence at the Oatfield Sweet Factory, Abigail O'Brien emphasized that she hoped to produce a work with "a relevance that will extend beyond the factory gates." This greater relevance embraces socialpsychological and aesthetic aspects. The 70 Oatfield workers constitute a community that has evolved in relative isolation for the better part of a century. Only through interaction and cooperation can their goals be achieved, though each individual must be fully concentrated on his own particular task, as we see in 'Undertaking' or 'Flay'. In such everyday and workaday gestures, O'Brien sees something ritualistic and even primal.

After the cycle 'The Seven Sacraments', shown in Munich in 2004 and Dublin in 2005, which brought the artist her first international attention, now the artist has moved on to an exploration of 'The Natural Virtues', to which 'Temperance' contributes a new chapter. Yet both cycles employ similar techniques and metaphors, so that one can indeed see all of O'Brien's oeuvre to date as a gigantic work in progress exploring the rituals and the dogmas of everyday life.

'Temperance' features 26 large Lambdachrome prints, as well as hard-candy casts of human organs, displayed on industrial trolleys. An accompanying video entitled 'Good Housekeeping' rounds out the ensemble. It shows a woman washing down the factory machinery at the end of the week: the ablutions after the excess, the middle ground between labour and repose. This multimedial, installational aspect of O'Brien's work sets her apart from the "stars" of the international photography scene, who aim for an entirely reduced, sober and sometimes sobering presentation of oversized images.

Abigail O'Brien: Synovia, 2009

Lambdachrome, 99 x 120 cm, 39 x 47 inches

Click on image to enlarge.

It is no surprise, then, that the products of the Oatfield Confectionary Factory, as it was once known, have provided not only photographic themes but also the material from which the artist has formed sculptures. These glistening "body parts", cast from medical models of human organs, might have been produced by the glass-craftsmen of Murano, but are in fact moulded from the molten sugar syrup used for hard candies.

One immediately senses what attracted her to this project. As in so much of her work, she is recording the rhythmic, almost rituallike work of human hands, and once more the theme of nurture is present. (The first taste to develop in an infant is that for sweet substances, which are particularly high in life-sustaining carbohydrates.) The aesthetic dimension is often stunning in its intensity: the voluptuous layers of cooling toffee like folds in a Renaissance drapery; the shimmering, taffeta-like shades of yellow and pink and orange and turquoise; the gleaming cylinders of rock candy; the shiny black "loaves" of liquorice; and the knife plunging into a red "heart." Added to this is the "patina" of the mysterious machines pictured here and the steam-shrouded figures on cleaning day, like Hephaestus' dutiful helpers at the forge. These form the basis for 'Good Housekeeping', the accompanying video of looped stills with Oatfield's "Health and Safety Regulations" providing the text.

There are surreal moments here, provoked by the anomalies of protective clothing that might equally well come from a research laboratory or an intensive-care unit or a canning plant. Workers are regularly provided with hairnets and gloves, safety shoes, ear defenders and safety glasses - even, where appropriate, with "moustache snoods". The surreal atmosphere is intensified by signs that suddenly shout from the background: "Fire Exit", "DANGER!" or "MOVING PARTS". These read like slogans from an industrial age when "new-fangled" machines both lightened work and often made it more dangerous. It also echoes a time when family businesses like Oatfield consciously acted in loco parentis. Those insinuated levels of interpretation help to account for the richness of the environment Abigail O'Brien evokes here, where the pragmatic and the sensual interact in a sprightly play of colours and textures. The sensuous, fleshy folds of 'Wrinkle 1' and 'Saponaceous' and 'Adipose', furthermore, exist for only a few short minutes before the poured material falls in upon itself. This transitory moment is turned to delectable "eye candy" in the painterly photographs of Abigail O'Brien.

David Galloway

Abigail O'Brien (*1957) lives and works in Dublin. With 'Temperance', Galerie Bugdahn und Kaimer is presenting its sixth solo exhibition of works by Abigail O'Brien. The artists work is in many international private and public collections.