C.A.HALPIN 'Inside The Outside World' 

C.A.HALPIN 'Inside The Outside World'

C.A.HALPIN 'Inside The Outside World'

In this, the first part of a four part survey of C.A. Halpin’s career to date, we sample some early hand-made books, prints, paintings, drawings, and limited edition items and collage work - this list giving a small sample of the great variety of media, technique and approach that runs through her ouevre, and the exhibition hopefully helps to highlight the consistency of Halpin’s unique sensibility in these various manifestations.

C.A Halpin was born in Liverpool in 1959, one of a large catholic family, and after enduring a convent education managed to escape what is in some ways an oppressive city to enrol in an Expressive Arts (Fine art and Performance) degree at Brighton Polytechnic, later completing a CNAA postgraduate Diploma in Printmaking at the same college.

She then makes her way to London and an illustration M.A. at the Royal College of Art, where she managed also somehow to train as an animator, a discipline that she continued upon leaving and led to her extended residencies in France and Spain, more specifically Paris and Barcelona. It is from these periods that her work as an Artist proper began and from which are drawn some of the earlier pieces in this show. But her work really begins when she returns to London, living in the Shoreditch/Hoxton area from 1994, at that time the vibrant, revivified crucible of the YBA movement. Here her interest in so-called Outsider Art leads her to establish the first incarnation of her gallery, named, with typical wit, The Outside World. This establishment becomes a crucial social focal point for the artists, musicians, writers, beatniks and oddballs of what at this time was a true, thriving bohemia. Indeed, her inclusive open–door attitude to her life, becomes not only a springboard for this unique moment in British Art culture but feeds in interesting ways into her restlessly creative life.

The Outside World art collection becomes a natural starting point for her works at this time, coupled with traces and echoes of the high modernism still apparent in Paris and Barcelona – the world of Picasso, Miro, Klee, Schwitters and later Dubuffet, Chaissac and the Art Brut movements. It is this wider European, as opposed to parochial, sensibility that perhaps demarcates her work from that of her contemporaries. This ever-present curiosity and openness to a wide variety of ideas and methods catalyzes with her empathetic character and generosity of spirit to produce the vibrancy and variety of her work immediately prior to and at this time. The sheer exuberance and wit of a piece such as “Awake” (1989) – a wooden box containing a googly eye, encrusted clock – continues in the intense colour and energy of “Les Oiseau du Diable” (1993) – an intervention into a colouring book (1993) – and the dancing, gambolling forms and personages of “All My Hopes and Dreams” (1994) – a strip format oil painting. In each, and indeed a good deal of her work, there is an incredible energy, a sheer life force that threatens almost to spring from the page, the box, the canvas. In this it is worth noting her past as an animator – the regard and presence of movement. In her work C.A.Halpin’s desire, or need, to incorporate movement, action and dance becomes not a dry theoretical exercise, an academic inquiry, but instead a natural state of play. Her colours and forms seem to grow and move and mutate of their own unforced accord. Figures grow extra appendages, flora and fauna cross-mutate, toes become people become tree become heads become phalluses become archetypal signs - crosses, hearts, eyes. In her beautifully covered books this kinetic energy manifests in the sequential nature of the turned page, yet the lines and shadows of individual images such as “It Takes Two” use the ambiguity of the two-dimensional image to create a destabilising visual experience as the eye, attempting to “read” the image is seduced into a strange multiple reading, a flowing, yet static suggestion of movement and thus a chiming with real, lived experience.

This is a constant in her work, very apparent in the extraordinary trio of “Black-Eyed Susan” paintings, her most recent work. These fascinating – in every sense – images are also rich in other characteristic traits her work carries a sensuality – of materials, of content, a submerged or apparent eroticism, and a very human virtuosity of colour and line. As she says,” I feel …excitement when I use images, with colour, paint, paper, canvas I feel the weight of the tube of paint as I take it from the shelf, I choose a brush like I would a partner for a date.” Alternately, other pieces demonstrate the breadth and openness of her approach to accident, incident, the internal and external worlds and their strange multifarious relationship. This aspect comes to the foreground in the intriguing way language, found objects and the written word become over time more incorporated into the body of work. Taking an interesting and original notion of the written word, handwriting becomes a representation of a person – in effect, a self-portrait. In a piece such as “Counting Down The Days”, (1996) Halpin takes her own name as written by her mother on a letter to her and expands it in size and form and bathes it in a rich haze of luxuriant oil colour. In other pieces, discarded scraps of human marks – shopping lists, drunken love letters, angry misspelt rants emerge, selected by the artist’s ever - inquisitive eye on her urban wanderings, from the lost detritus of the city. These orphaned texts are nurtured back into a poignant, often moving new existence, reborn into the artist’s sensual world.

Yet all this talk of play and good humour is to overlook the often, darker impulses that characterise some of the pieces – present in some way, perhaps, in all of them. “Say Your Prayers” (1991) for example, screams with the pain of war – redolent of the agonising drawings of children of conflict, in the way her found written scraps speak of urban oppression, the cry of love against the crushing weight of the city. In these pieces we find an at once strange yet utterly recognizable, at times deeply moving, yet always humourous – droll, black or otherwise – humanity. Collectively the pieces accumulate in an impressive fashion a poignant chronicle of an individual’s wry vision, it’s observational impulse an insight into our precarious, inescapable predicament.


© Mat Ducasse 2010