Extract from Anois, Temple Bar Gallery & Studios, 2001

Text by Declan Long

Pages 75- 79

ISBN  0-9519146 9 3

Like many artists now working, Katrina Maguire has avoided pressure to develop a specific, signature style and has instead over several years explored an ambitious range of techniques and ideas. Hers is a capacious, imaginatively heterogeneous practice which resists easy categorisation.  Yet from her early, low key sculptural works to the public art installation Bedding Out, it is possible to map a journey from the enclosed private spaces of the body outwards into exterior, more public contexts. The shift away from small-scale sexually charged sculptures has been an intriguing one and though her work has grown physically, it retains a welcome gentleness and subtlety in its execution.

Her delicate but demanding approach was clearly evidenced in the installation The Drawing Room, shown at TBG&S during 2000. In this absorbing work her own Temple Bar studio itself became the artwork. Maguire’s workspace was transformed by degrees over a number of months as the unadorned white walls were gradually covered with black and white charcoal drawing of a flock wallpaper pattern, the design appearing and disappearing across the surface. The Drawing Room made the artist’s private workspace a temporary public exhibition space but the intermittently clear and faded flock patterns metaphorically opened the artist’s mind to the public mimicking the coming-and-going of her memories of home. In her latest project Bedding Out, an installation for the Concourse space of the County Hall in Dun Laoghaire (which continues the momentum created by the showing of The Drawing-Room in Croatia alongside work by Dorothy Cross, Rita Duffy and Paul Seawright) Maguire again uses an intricate form of patterning. In this case the design comes from the ‘parterre’, a French ornamental garden layout which is designed to be viewed from the upper floors of a house. Unlike Katie Holten, Maguire does not plan to recreate an actual garden but rather the shapes are to be created on the huge floor space of this civic building using an immersive assortment of dried herbs and spices – a plan which is reminiscent of the Vietnamese artist Vong Phaophanit’s ‘Neon Rice Field’ in its conceptual combination of East and West. While the post-colonial resonances of Maguires merging of Western bourgeois decoration with plundered Eastern commodity are self-evident (and as a Derry born- artist living in Dublin, she has confessed to being sensitive to the related concern for recovering an identifying relationship between self and place), Bedding Out is fundamentally about texture, space and the potential interaction of the audience.