Working predominantly in film, Grace Weir is an artist who has successfully explored the difficult yet promising intersection of art and science in the long term. A significant exhibition by Weir, 3 Different nights, recurring, recently ran at the Irish Museum of Modern Art and featured artworks from twenty years of artistic enquiry. These included video, sound, sculptural, digital, and interactive pieces, as well as wall-mounted and pictorial works. The show was grounded in three major new films – Black Square, Dark Room, and A reflection on light, all made in 2015. Each film, in one way or another, follows the activities of professionals working with light, with its properties, behaviour, and limitations, as Weir herself was when producing many of the supporting works in the exhibition. This is incidental, however, to her more expansive curiosity about how direct human experience relates to knowledge, which often leads her to the formal structures of scientific theory.

 
The exhibition title is adopted from 19th century astronomer William Parsons, who discovered the spiral nature of certain galaxies. In the 1840s Parsons’ only means of recording his astronomical observations was to sketch them on paper, and the title refers to a note on a set of drawings he made on three consecutive nights. Weir displays Parsons’ drawing Whirlpool Galaxy, borrowed from Birr Castle Science Centre. As a document, the sketch is remarkably effective at suddenly contracting the expanse between the concept of a galaxy and the immediacy of hand-made objects. It is the recreation of this contraction, between lived experience and theoretical knowledge, that Weir regularly pursues. Her 2003 piece, Bending space-time in the basement, is a good example. In one of many ancillary video works that structure Weir’s thorough, interconnected enquiries, we see the artist build a

 
Her 2003 piece, Bending space-time in the basement, is a good example. In one of many ancillary video works that structure Weir’s thorough, interconnected enquiries, we see the artist build a home made apparatus for measuring gravity. This involves two pairs of cast lead objects. One is suspended on the extremities of a cradle, creating a sort of balanced scales free to turn on its centre point. The other pair is positioned on opposite sides of the circumference that the cradle traces. Repositioning these outer lead blocks will cause the cradle to rotate, slowly but visibly, by the gravitational draw of its heavy, free-moving objects. It’s a simple machine that demonstrates gravity acting on objects in parallel to its more familiar behaviour as a downward, grounding force.

 
The success of the piece stems from the fact that it is a video rather than a sculptural installation. The artist’s involvement is included in, and central to, the piece. The activities she participates in are quite rudimentary. She doesn’t look particularly scientific melting lead over a camping stove on floorboards. Nor does the work make any bold claims to an art historical position. It embraces interdisciplinary collaboration, successfully avoiding assertions of the rigours of one discipline or the other, and it does not force some analogy between them.

 
Elsewhere the artist explores knowledge that resists immediate personal engagement. Black Square is a two channel film that tracks a visit Weir and her team made to a high altitude observatory in Chile. Like Parsons before them, the scientists and technicians working there are making repeated nightly observations of celestial bodies. Through interviews and technical explanations, the film sequence thoroughly outlines the routine involved in pinpointing the location of a black hole at the centre of our own galaxy. Rather than finding a pinpoint, however, the most precise visual observation they can make of this object results in a single black (square) pixel representing an area one thousand times the black hole’s size.

 
Throughout the film we see Weir following procedural details and discussing the nature of black holes. Her conceptual understanding is not ultimately enriched by some kind of direct lived experience, which is reduced to an oversized pixel. It is the limitations of representation in astronomy that this pixel so effectively marks, and that Weir has distilled. However, a manifest analogy with Malevich’s Black Square, as a similar limitation or end point in modern painting, introduces difficult territory. Pleasing as the comparison may be, the effort to connect to art history seems at best unnecessary in a work that so compellingly examines a specific subject in science. At worst it forces the idea that the two fields share a common problem.

 
Weir is obviously sensitive to the pitfalls of drawing too deep an analogy between distinct developments in art and in science. Rather than making art that is supposedly ‘doing science’, her approach involves dialogue, collaboration, and looking at the work of experts and pioneers in various fields. Even when directly addressed, art historical connections aren’t laboured, as when she suggests a resonance between the work of Irish modernist painter Mainie Jellett and the study of light by Irish physicists.

 
In A reflection on light (2015) Weir considers Jellett’s painting Let There Be Light (1939) within three settings – the painter’s Dublin home, a gallery in IMMA itself, and the School of Physics in Trinity College. Through her technical proficiency in film, and a thoughtful narration, Weir threads together moments in the life of a painting, and consequently of individual people and institutions. Jellett’s was a meticulous practice that expanded the vocabulary of abstract painting; her grandfather was a scientist who contributed to the understanding of light polarization. In her film, Weir’s narrative allows a necessary slack in the connections she weaves between diverse understandings of light and, by extension, time. The connections she does suggest are intriguing and not overstated, allowing the viewer to consider any affinities between the methods and findings of painter and physicist. It is a worthwhile strategy for working in the intersection of disciplines in which shared terminology doesn’t always equate to shared understanding or meaning. This exhibition, effectively a retrospective, was a comprehensive account of an artist’s career that has been earnestly and extensively acting at the interface of art and science. Unifying this exhibition was Weir’s endeavour to position an individual experience, necessarily hers, within systems of knowledge. Varied, connected ideas are what lead the artist to experts in different fields of science, and it is by continuing to follow the trails of these ideas, in embracing their subtleties and recognising their limits that Weir has developed an interdisciplinary practice of enduring value.

 
This exhibition, effectively a retrospective, was a comprehensive account of an artist’s career that has been earnestly and extensively acting at the interface of art and science. Unifying this exhibition was Weir’s endeavour to position an individual experience, necessarily hers, within systems of knowledge. Varied, connected ideas are what lead the artist to experts in different fields of science, and it is by continuing to follow the trails of these ideas, in embracing their subtleties and recognising their limits that Weir has developed an interdisciplinary practice of enduring value.

 
Grace Weir: 3 Different Nights, recurring was on view from 7 November 2015 – 28 March 2016.

The gallery’s first and second rooms contain two separate and distinct works that appear to be involved in a kind of exchange. The large drawing, Nothing seems normal anymore, is shown in the first room. Here, three sections of heavy paper almost entirely cover one wall, and combine to form the drawing. Clear draws her structures in varied tonal values. Precise, clean, and straight-lined, the work just about resists a reading as a unified, architectural diagram. The structures spill in a curve across the paper, overlaying and obstructing one another. They also mutually obstruct a single interpretation of perspective. Individually, they may be understood as legible, receding models, but in combination, they break down into an abstract, linear image.

In the following room, an installation titled Here’s the thing appears like a startling progression of the previous work. On a wall corresponding to that which supports the drawing in room one, two similar sheets of paper roll down from the ceiling, but now continue past the skirting and extend out across the gallery floor. On that floor, and on the paper itself, Clear’s models stand in three dimensions, constructed with fine wooden sticks. Studio lights cast their shadows on floor and paper alike. Those shadows share a space with the artist’s pencil marks, and the two are not immediately distinguishable. The drawn structures are bolder than those in the previous example and offer more clarity in the way they mirror the tangible wooden models.

This installation seems to suggest that these wooden models inform the design of the other work in the exhibition. This impression is quickly complicated as the viewer progresses through the gallery, however. In Clear’s animation, Blueprint, the artist’s forms appear again, this time emerging frame by frame, along with their shadows, to rotate in an unexpectedly precise circle. This type of stop motion animation is created as a single drawing where the artist repeatedly erases and adds marks for every frame. The technique was pioneered by the South African artist William Kentridge, whose influence is certainly present here. Notable examples of Irish artists who have adopted and innovated on this strategy include David Begley, Eamon O’Kane and Alice Maher. Often made with a soft medium such as charcoal, the erasures are not perfect and every frame leaves its trace. These traces, like the cast shadows of Clear’s real, wooden objects, resemble not just the shadows or footprints of those spatial structures in the normal way a shadow resembles an object; the traces so closely resemble the objects that the two are not easily distinguished. While obviously taking cues from her previous engagement with architectural formations, Clear is also uncovering a subtle means of developing a compelling abstract vernacular of her own. However intuitive and handmade, Clear’s wooden structures are designed; and that design is informed by the nature and behaviour of cast shadows and projected light. Each of Clear’s several modes of drawing (traditional, spatial, animated, or projected) seem to inform the creation of another, in a process that refines the artist’s aesthetics with each reiteration. The temptation to put some sequential or ontological logic to the artist’s productions is repeatedly frustrated.

An object casts a shadow. That shadow is traced or mimicked to create a drawing, and that drawing is animated or projected. Yet the construction of those objects is clearly influenced by the perspectival distortions involved in casting shadows or projecting images. Clear’s approach of closing this loop on the relationship between objects and their indexical signs is an intriguing strategy. It gives a sense of an open-ended proposition, of an artist still in the process of working out her ideas. The strength of this show was that it revealed that process for the viewer. In an installation, To calculate the unforeseen, a slide projection periodically throws images of the artist’s drawings over another drawing made on a wall in the gallery. In a darkened room these projections simultaneously illuminate and obscure the wall drawing itself. The two occasionally correspond; a slide of the wall drawing must have made it into the projector. Or it was used in the creation of the wall drawing.

Clear’s attempt to translate her thinking process is a generous endeavour, and it is effective. A series of small works on one wall did manage to break the sequential nature of a show that otherwise emerged as one continuous, unfolding idea. These six drawings, made with pencil or pen on tracing paper, and titled Plan 1, Plan 2, etc, are also the only inclusion of colour in the exhibition – albeit a somewhat muted colour, thanks to the transparency of the paper. They do, however, maintain the sense of studio activity, of contingency, or a sense of work in progress that is so appealing about drawings in general, and this exhibition in particular. At its centre, this show is concerned with some of the more definitive characteristics of drawing. Paper, pencil, and the artist’s gesture feature prominently, as well as linearity and structure. However, it is Clear’s interest in drawing as a cognitive process, as a means to visually translate abstract ideas, that is most compelling.

Screened on a freestanding monitor in the centre of the main gallery floor, the footage in Nephin is silent and colourless, following the tendency of O’Malley’s films in recent years. Watching it, the spectator is presented with a continuous viewpoint from behind the window of a vehicle as it travels along a country road, close to the artist’s childhood home. By this route the camera indirectly approaches the eponymous mountain before being led on a partial circumnavigation of it. The mountain controls the camera’s attention and, apart from occasions when the proximity of a roadside ditch washes the whole image in rapidly passing greys, Nephin dominates the upper half of the screen. Other objects in the landscape slide from right to left in our visual field at speeds determined by their distance from the camera. After the small dark blind spot in the upper right of the screen, O’Malley’s mountain is the most stable element in the film. Its gradual rotation is not obvious in short viewing, so awareness of it is contingent upon the temporal as well as spatial composition of the viewer’s experience.

Staging the tension between uncertain types of movement and apparent stillness has been a regular device of O’Malley’s video works, often functioning to provoke the viewer’s awareness of a specific perceptual mechanism. Another strategy regularly deployed to this end is the use of various glass screens, panels or fragments, which can play a role in the production of the artist’s films or be recruited as materials in various installations in the gallery itself. Again these reflective, transparent, or opaque facets often function to hold up some detail of the viewer’s embodied experience and position it alongside the work’s more obvious content or subject, and O’Malley’s show in the Douglas Hyde is no exception.

Coloured and clear glass appear repeatedly: in a way that only slightly alters its traditional function of framing drawings or prints in works such as Standing Stone (2014), in which a drawing is tinted by straw coloured glass, to the camera’s panning of the geometry of a neglected greenhouse structure in the show’s other video work, Glasshouse (2014). In this dual-channel video the side of a glasshouse acts as a filter to the camera, filling the screens and sweeping across them at a steady rate. The pictorial movement, again from right to left, is much more precisely controlled than that in Nephin, and occasional vertical sections of the structure’s framework scan across the video screen almost mechanically. The glass sections that they support, however, are stained or marked to varying degrees of opacity. Many are broken or missing completely. The result is a kind of visual conveyor belt that alternatively frames, obscures, darkens, or otherwise alters our view of the densely overgrown plants inside the glasshouse.
Several constructed works in the show further exploit the material and optical qualities of glass. Stand (Pale Straw) (2014) and Stand (Rose) (2014), consist of a pair of coloured panes that stand vertically on the gallery floor, scaled to the human figure. Though transparent, their respective straw and rose colouring, while obviously mediating a view of the gallery, draws attention to the surface quality of the glass itself; it makes the textures of the large screens much more readily visible. Elsewhere, a sequence of works on paper, all simply labelled Untitled (2014), offer textural studies in combinations of pencil, watercolour, and monoprint, which seem to take formal cues from the numerous screens and fragments present in the show. For instance, one small pencil drawing on board evokes the slightly rippled glass surfaces of the Stand works.

While the black smudge in Nephin, and to some degree the passage of darkened structural sections in Glasshouse, indicate O’Malley’s interest in ideas of the scotoma, the attention to texture and colour, as defined by the material properties of glass, offers a subtle, less immediate counterpoint to the blind spots of the videos. After all, it is by generating a perception of colour and texture, in relation with our environment, that we remain unaware of the minor blind regions of our own vision. This fact serves as a simple analogy for a more complex experiential relationship between body and world that is at the root of O’Malley’s work.

Ostensibly, the show’s subject matter derives from the rural Irish landscape and from O’Malley’s childhood home, evident in the picturing of mountains, standing stones, and earthen hollows, and in the use of terms like ‘straw’ and ‘rose’ in naming colours. However, the prevailing concern is the artist’s larger, ongoing phenomenological project. Though there is some degree of repetition in O’Malley’s methods, they are methods which continue to offer subtle inflections of the viewer’s observation of otherwise highly familiar environments.