Cover | Clúdach

Abstract

Cover | Clúdach Angela Griffith (bio) Click for larger view View full resolution Cover. Paula Pohli Stilt Barn Blue (2018–19) Tempera on board Used with the artist's permission rural ireland's agricultural architecture provides a window into its social and economic history. Just as the one-time ubiquitous thatched cottage of tourist postcards was gradually replaced by later twentieth-century "bungalow bliss," large, industrially made farm buildings implied status, progress, and success for the farmer and his family. The rough-hewn, hand-built, lime-washed stone byre was replaced with prefabricated steel, concrete, and corrugated metal sheeting. The earlier domestic-scaled stone structures were set aside, or replaced, with commercial-sized buildings, to house time-saving tractors and machinery and the required sundries for, and the fruits of, increased productivity. These barns or sheds would often dwarf the family home. The form of these buildings is utterly determined by function, not affectation. Customarily, aside from their utilitarian purpose of shelter and storage, the shed became a masculine communal space—a place for men to work, to congregate, to discuss, to advise—or they served as places of solitude and introspection. However, at present, the future of agriculture in Ireland is unclear. In the island's more isolated regions, the viability of small-scale farming is uncertain. Existing methods and limited levels of production are viewed as unsustainable, either economically, socially, or environmentally. As farmers age and are not replaced, their barns, stoical monuments to their family's presence in the locality and their labors, become neglected or abandoned. Nature begins to reassert [End Page 157] itself in these human-made spaces. Weather and time assault the structure. Rust and mold will form on exposed or damaged surfaces, plants will put down roots in cracks, and wild animals will find refuge there. It is in these spaces that the painter and printmaker Paula Pohli finds inspiration. This city-born artist's eye is drawn to their vaulted presence. She sees rural sheds as beautiful, describing their frameworks as elegant, even fragile despite their tenacity. The detritus that have gathered—the discarded clothing and footwear, tins, plastic wrapping, tools, machine parts, leaves, and dust—are all attractive to the artist. They are evidence of the passage of time, of human endeavor, and of being. Paula Pohli was born in Dublin, and over the course of her life she has lived in Quebec and Paris. She moved to rural Mayo in 2011. Since then, her husband, Walter, a German national, passed away. In the isolation of the countryside, she has had to learn to be by herself. What was once shared time is now only hers, and because of this she has become increasingly aware of its passing. Pohli is from a family of stonemasons, aptly named Rock. Her grandfather was also a fine sculptor, a businessman who had to balance the prosaic side of the company with the creative. However, the firm dissolved in the wake of Vatican II as demand for church decorations dwindled in the face of the reconfiguring and the refining of the church as a collective space. However, on moving to Mayo, by pure happenchance, Pohli discovered her family's stone carvings in a local church, creating a tangible link between her origins and her new home. Pohli, because of her artistic temperament and ambition, has often felt herself at a remove from the wider community. Her role is to observe and mediate society through her practice. She is drawn to fellow painter-printmaker Albrecht Dürer's master engraving Melencolia I from 1514. In his personification of Melancholy, Dürer explores the isolation felt by the artist, who he believes inhabits a different intellectual, spiritual, and creative plane. Pohli is aware that she sees things in ways others do not, and as an artist she willingly shares her vision of the world, of the real and the imagined. Like her family before her, Pohli is a master of her craft. She is renowned for her distinctively expressive linocuts, and she has been working with the exacting medium of tempera paint since 2012. All her chosen methods are labor intensive. Giving of herself and her days...