‘What is the artist to do in the face of every damn thing?’—Eoghan Smith on issue 3 of profiles
The vibrancy of Irish artistic activity in the last decade can partly be measured by the plethora of new journals, often spearheaded by dynamic, young editors, which have appeared on the Irish cultural landscape.
profiles, which is published just once a year, tends towards a smaller number of carefully chosen, high-quality works. Editors Clare Healy and Sarah Sturzel have a clear sense of mission: the journal is dedicated to both literary and visual art, and is specifically concerned with portraiture. These elements make profiles internally coherent. The thematic echoes and interconnectedness of work lends a Joycean quality to the issue. As one might expect with such a carefully curated publication, this year’s profiles (issue 3, 2024) continues the exceptionally high standards set by the first two iterations.
The thematic echoes and interconnectedness of work lends a Joycean quality to the issue
Issue 3 begins with Marie le Men’s Aimée, a watercolour portrait of a woman sitting on the floor by her bed. At first glance, everything appears to be recurrent geometric patterns and colours: the bedclothes are a red and white patchwork; the woman’s face, hair and hands are shades of red and pink; her shirt is bright red. The checkered pattern of the bedclothes is picked up in her black and white dress, shaded with greens and blues, and in her green and pink checked sleeveless jumper, adorned with a sunflower broach. This colour scheme is reflected in the bluey-green walls and pink curtains in the background. Behind her, out of the woman’s view, a striped orange cat is dozing on the bed.
Aimée depicts the individual in tension with the surrounding structures, perhaps even struggling to maintain her distinct human-ness
But it is the woman, situated left of centre, that disrupts all these apparent symmetries. Her eyes cast a distant, slightly forlorn expression, while her left hand hovers to clasp her right. Other markers of individuality are found amid the patterns: a long plait is slung over her right shoulder, a tattoo snakes down her left hand, a nose ring shines. Aimée depicts the individual in tension with the surrounding structures, perhaps even struggling to maintain her distinct human-ness.
This tension is felt throughout the issue: it ranges across the private domestic space to the spheres of geopolitics and global citizenry that engulf us all. r alice’s story ‘in a soft place’, about an aid worker accompanying a dead man back to his native Algeria, explores post-war hauntedness, intercontinental migration, and memory, traversing European and African coordinates such as Sarajevo, Zagreb, Paris, Tangiers and Dublin. Beginning with the uncompromising line: ‘rot instantly gets in my mouth’, it is a desolate, unflinching story replete with images of death, decay, brokenness, and fragmentation.
In alice’s story, a rule of writing is disrupted: as it is printed on the page, orthographical orthodoxy in the use of capital letters is eschewed in favour of the lower case. In a world that feels on the verge of disintegration, the story invites us to question how ordinary human connections can be maintained and how the alienation of otherness can be overcome. It will be a key and urgent question in this issue of profiles.
Éadaoin Glynn’s outstanding Self Portrait with Estrogen Patch 1 (Bathroom Mirror Selfie) is an exploration of the artist’s interest in hidden female narratives
The feelings of being overwhelmed in ‘in a soft place’ is signified by the narrator’s plaintive statement: ‘i want to go home’. But even the familiar can be an unknown space. Éadaoin Glynn’s outstanding Self Portrait with Estrogen Patch 1 (Bathroom Mirror Selfie) is an exploration of the artist’s interest in hidden female narratives; here is a portrait of the artist’s menopausal body.
Cropped between the shoulders and the top of the legs, which eliminates the personal from the painting, Self Portrait is a magnificent mixture of splotches, squiggles, speckles and strokes of vibrant yellows, pinks, greens and purples. The clearly delineated body, set against a night-blue background, is a portrait of vulnerability and frailty, and yet there is strength and self-containment too.
Glynn’s painting is followed by a photograph by Aisling Dunne of a boy on the cusp of adolescence standing behind a caravan; his head is bent to the side where he rests a football in the crook of his shoulder. As with Aimée, there are numerous symmetries: the straight lines of the camper van’s ladders and bike rack, the rectangles of the cobblestones on the ground.
Young boys can go either way, or so it goes
Young boys can go either way, or so it goes. Stephen O’Donnell’s ‘The Foray’ centres on two brothers who steal some eggs from a gull’s nest. This act of natural transgression, orchestrated by the older child, is not for kicks but for the tenuous promise of money. The power dynamic is unbalanced: the younger boy is bullied into going along with the sorry enterprise.
Along the way they are attacked by the mother gull and an admonishing older woman: these maternal voices are ignored by the boys. Their own mother is absent and their father, apparently ill, off-stage and hated by the boys, is a troublesome shadow of death. Told in crisp, unadorned prose, it is a distressing tale of lost innocence, transactional emptiness, mortality, neglect, and a violent, burgeoning masculinity.
Such are the carefully woven threads in profiles that the next story, the brilliant ‘Loss Adjustment’ by Dara Higgins, is perfectly positioned
Such are the carefully woven threads in profiles that the next story, the brilliant ‘Loss Adjustment’ by Dara Higgins, is perfectly positioned after ‘The Foray’. Higgins’ story, which is reminiscent of Kevin Barry, focuses on a discontented middle-aged man named Noel. Noel is bored and crushed to defeat by the capitalist grind and ‘cunts in space’, and so he leaves his partner and job to reinvent himself as a poet: ‘I’m against the world’, he says, ‘the whole thing is a swizz. We shouldn’t be living like this’. ‘Great art’, he convinces himself, ‘comes from starvation’, and so Noel sets off in time-honoured fashion for a Spartan cottage in the west of Ireland. In fact, Noel’s whole idea of the artist in revolt against his society is certainly naively romantic, but that is about all it is. Or is it? ‘Write it all down’, Noel concludes. In many ways, Higgin’s story – by turns hilarious, poignant, and deeply serious – provokes a simple but pertinent question that this issue of profiles asks: what is the artist to do in the face of every damn thing?
Two paintings of men sit in the middle of the issue: ‘Holiday’ by Glenn Quigley and Thom Kofoed’s ‘before | after’. ‘Bear on Holiday’ is a portrait of a rotund, apparently sun-reddened man, topped and tailed by a hat and flip flops but otherwise entirely nude, save for a pair of sunglasses in his right hand.
Portraiture is of course self-reflexive, and is deeply embedded in all these pieces
He stands before the viewer, legs wide apart, slightly side-on. His eyes are small slits, presumably from the sun, and we are invited to gaze on him. The painting is humorous, but the Bear’s face is serious: his expression is thoughtful, even slightly defiant, as he squints back at us. Like Glynn’s contribution, Kofoed’s painting is a self-portrait: he wears a bandana, circular glasses and a plain t-shirt, drinking a cup of coffee, a diptych in oil. He slouches slightly less in the ‘after’, his t-shirt a little straighter, he stands a little closer to the viewer, his face a little less scowling, subtly and self-reflexively transformed.
Portraiture is of course self-reflexive, and is deeply embedded in all these pieces: it is in Glynn’s self-portrait, Higgin’s disillusioned poet, as well as in Kefoed’s painting. Chris Beausang’s ‘Irish Carnage: Essays on Irish Political Violence’ is also a self-reflexive, cerebral, dense metafictional account of an academic in a British university who is reviewing an essay collection of the story’s title. Interspersing brief personal memories with his opinions on the essays, the story is in part an observation on the intellectualization of Irish politics, and Irish history more generally. Beausang’s intriguing experiment, which recalls something of the intellectual bravura (if not the style) of John Banville, is of a piece with the journal’s overall aesthetic of self-awareness.
Jordan Lillis’s ‘The Oyster Pearl’ is a devastating story of sex, loneliness, indifference, and infidelity
The final three pieces in profiles turn back towards the female experience, which genders the framing of the issue. Jordan Lillis’s ‘The Oyster Pearl’ is a devastating story of sex, loneliness, indifference, and infidelity. Beginning with the shocking line ‘Aideen’s summer in New York was fairly decent, aside from the abortion’, it follows a young woman from the end of her J1 to her home in Galway, where she strikes up a pointless, dispiriting relationship with a married fish factory worker.
One finds in this story much of the sense of disillusionment and drift that pervades the pages of profiles. This lost-ness is there also in the portrait of the female hotel cleaner entitled ‘Luz’, by the artist Salvatore of Lucan: in this painting, a woman with exhausted eyes gazes at us in a mixture of sadness and accusation. And yet, though she may be worn out, there are fine details that suggest defiance and even agency too: she wears ruby-red lipstick and blue eyeshadow, and has a small but eye-catching CND symbol on the top of her right arm.
It is appropriate then that the journal concludes with two artworks focused on severance
The tattoo is a fitting sign: once a ubiquitous symbol of protest in the 1980s, the CND symbol is a reminder that humans have lived under – and protested – the threat of nuclear annihilation for 80 years; now that threat feels realer and less theoretical than at any other time since the end of the Cold War. In such circumstances, how can one not feel disempowered, frightened and overwhelmed? If the totality of profiles is filled with an atmosphere of anxiety – of being at the mercy of uncontrollable forces, of feelings of exhaustion, defamiliarisation and helplessness, even of catastrophe – then it is hardly surprising.
It is appropriate then that the journal concludes with two artworks focused on severance. Tom Roseingrave’s ‘Gracias a la Vida’, is a complex story of two South American women working in hotels in Ireland, involving a correspondence between one of the women and the estranged father of her child. It pulls in geopolitical themes of migration, civil breakdown and the nuclear threat. Like many of the narratives in profiles, its coordinates are disconcertingly global: Argentina, Ireland, Spain, Belarus, Belgium. The final image in the journal speaks to the alienation of a generation of people: Juliette Morrison’s ‘Estranged Lady Cooking Stew’ is a beautiful, bleak and melancholy portrait. Unlike ‘Luz’, the woman’s gaze is averted. But though the woman – all elegance and dignity – may be alone in her kitchen, less insistent than ‘Luz’, we cannot help but feel that while her alienation is inescapably female, it is in some important way also all of ours.
If the totality of profiles is filled with an atmosphere of anxiety – of being at the mercy of uncontrollable forces, of feelings of exhaustion, defamiliarisation and helplessness, even of catastrophe – then it is hardly surprising
If profiles is not only a series of portraits but a portrait of the contemporary world, then what is the picture that emerges? It is perhaps one of an atomised existence in a rapaciously capitalist, globalised world. It is one where voices of the exiled and the disempowered compete against powers they struggle to see, name and understand, but whose effects they feel everywhere. The pieces are existential but not existentialist: feelings of alienation are not accompanied by the dizzying, heroic freedom of the individual, but rather the crushing weight of anxiety.
And yet, profiles also captures at large the fundamental dignity of ordinary humans, who are, in the end, worthy of these portraits. The cover of profiles issue 3 is an oil painting by Philip Rainey of a figure dressed in a blue t-shirt but whose head is entirely submerged by the black background. It is a well-chosen image. profiles issue 3 may not leave you optimistic, but it will leave you in no doubt that there is still a power of truth left in art.
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Eoghan Smith is the author of The Failing Heart (2018), A Provincial Death (2022), and his latest novella, A Mind of Winter is out now with Dedalus Books.
