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Victoria Children’s Hospital entrance sign,1998) and Dublin (his Teething Troubles in an Energy Efficient Restaurant, Crow Street ESB sub-sta- tion gates, Temple Bar, 1995), recalls the industrial nature of a commission aimed to commemorate the history of gas in Ireland and ‘those thousands of workers and customers who have been part of the Dublin gas story’. 1 Bord Gáis not only wanted to mark the completion of its gas mains renewals programme, but to provide a visual record of ‘the former presence of their works in what is now Dublin’s docklands’, to mark the ‘almost total disappearance of the gas industry that used to occupy most of the land.’ Kindness believes his proposal was successful because it avoids nostalgia and history lessons. Instead, it consid- ers the industry as a ‘composite por- trait of a 20th- century pre-digital society built from observations, anec- dotes and personal memories’ 2 as widespread gas distribution heralded modernization and the end of the Ireland of De Valera (represented by traditional ingredients and anthropo- morphic gas-cooked and simultane- ously gas-lit dishes). Like his other public, site-specific works, such as the now iconic 10-metre-long, blue and white tile-clad Big Fish (1999) installed beside Belfast’s revived river Lagan, ‘Gaswork’ offers a wealth of unexpected visual puns and surprising conflations. Always interested in applying age-old technical processes to AUTUMN 2012 T here is a new arrival on Dublin’s Sir John Rogerson’s Quay. Gaswork (Figs 1&2)’, an unexpectedly human-scale installa- tion commissioned by Bord Gáis Networks from the Belfast-born, London-based artist John Kindness was officially ‘unveiled’ on a strip of cobbles beside the Liffey, once the main artery of the city. Measuring 6 x 4 metres and 2.5 metres, its elliptical drum form evokes the mighty, now- obsolete gasometers which once bor- ded its site. These provided Dubliners with gas from coal before the advent of North Sea gas and the transforma- tion of an extensive hard-working community into leisure-bent, specula- tive property development. Its colour- ful vitreous enamel surface fired on steel, well-known in other forms to admirers of Kindness’ many public and private artworks in Belfast (Royal IRISH ARTS REVIEW | AUTUMN 2012 58 AUTUMN 2012 | IRISH ARTS his witty, idiosyncratic adaptations of popular culture, Kindness has enjoyed applying the skills of Trico, one of the few companies still using vitreous enamelling, to his graphically painted double frieze illustrating the manufac- ture (base) and usage (top) of gas. He is attracted by friezes as narrative precursors of the comic strip, long val- ued as wordless transmitters of visual imagery, as in his Belfast Frescoes (1994, Ulster Museum) which record his childhood in a series of twenty beguilingly observed frames, impecca- bly painted in lime fresco onto small pieces of slate. That mid 20th-century vanished world he grew up in reap- pears in the upper frieze. Here, three children poke a gas meter to release coins, flanked by the hen and chicks and sow and bonhams that used to grace the pennies they needed to buy the nostalgic array of sweets above them. More images of the beguiling old Irish animal coinage appear on the gasman’s van beside their friend’s father and his shaggy dog, poised before a pint with meter money he’d substituted with lino-cut discs, and beside mother with her bizarre apron depicting her diet of cabbages and bacon and the foetus in her womb. She proceeds towards her gleaming gas cooker with a beheaded De Valera masquerading as a ham on a plate, followed by two men bearing a cab- bage and a wild hare for the pot. The joys of gas-heated hot water are por- trayed by a naked towelled and tur- banned woman, while U2’s Adam Clayton languidly sponges an arm, poised like his namesake in Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel fresco – but here in an old bathtub from which steam rises in the shape of Ireland and the rest of Europe. The morphing borders which often adorn Kindness’ paintings are here gas flames running uniformly along a terracotta-coloured rim (like Greek pottery decoration) above the indigo blue backgrounds of each frieze. To these colours, taken directly from the triple-layered processional friezes of the 2600 BC double-sided Sumerian ‘Standard of Ur’ (British Museum), Kindness has added a flat palette of cream, flesh-pink, black, pale blue and grey. The customs, superstitions and dangers associated with coal, its transport and labour illustrated in the lower frieze are drawn from the accounts of the many people who spent their lives working in the indus- try. We see coal bags made of naked miners’ backs hunched on a horse- pulled cart; coal-black faces upturned in loaded trucks or coal-face piles; a coal steamship risking war-time German shells, children with whoop- ing cough being held over a tar pit by their parents to cure them; injured men clocking in, then taking refuge to ‘work’ in the Store Room to avoid losing pay. Overalled scientists bear corroded, menacing-looking old cast- iron pipes for analysis, while a fellow office-worker charts their replacement strategy. Behind them men undertake the perilous, back-breaking work of drilling and digging out hazardous gas filtration beds with picks and shovels. The more you look, the more you see. Once again, with striking imagery and perfectly matched technique, John Kindness has synthesized ancient and modern, local history and memory, in a readily accessible yet highly original record of a changed world. Nicola Gordon Bowe is Associate Fellow, Faculty of Visual Culture, NCAD and Visiting Professor, School of Art & Design, University of Ulster. 1 Bord Gáis Networks press release, 2012. 2 Artist’s statement, May 2012. 1&2 JOHN KINDNESS b. 1951 GASWORK 2012 Sir John Rogerson's Quay, Dublin A striking new installation by John Kindness on Dublin’s Sir John Rogerson's Quay, borrows from the ancients to recall the history of gas in Ireland, writes Nicola Gordon Bowe Gaswork HE IS ATTRACTED BY FRIEZES AS NARRATIVE PRECURSORS OF THE COMIC STRIP, LONG VALUED AS WORDLESS TRANSMITTERS OF VISUAL IMAGERY
