Reviewed by Anneka French
Two garden snails crawl across the face of Trish Morrissey. Leaving a trail of mucous and seemingly bickering during their slow, wet journey across her cheek and eye, the creatures are emblematic of Morrissey’s lockdown experiences of time and motherhood. The film ‘Self Portrait with Two Snails’ (2020), heightened in its sensory and emotional contexts, opens a concise exhibition of work made across a twenty-year period by the Dublin-born artist. It is bookended by another recent film, ‘Eupnea’ (2023), that touches upon similar subjects and closes the exhibition with an intensive examination of memory, endurance, the body and its breath (or lack thereof), all rooted in maternal trauma and powerlessness.
While both films are marked by a deep sadness, the photographs that make up the majority of the exhibition are, on the whole, a little more playful, even while they remain unsettling. Overlapping concerns exist throughout. The series ‘Front’ (2005-2007), of particular note, was commissioned originally by Impressions Gallery, and presents families on beaches in which Morrissey physically takes the place of the mother of the group, seamlessly slipping into the frame, sitting in their chair or holding their drink. The ‘real’ mother, meanwhile, becomes the photographer who takes the shot, with each photograph titled after their name. Morrissey is imposter and family infiltrator, yes, but the series is also a catalyst for conversations around fluid identities and the many more different types of family unit that have gained visibility since the works were first made.
‘Front’ foregrounds the slippages between fact, fiction or borrowed narratives that wrap around Morrissey’s works and which are flagged within the exhibition’s title. These bring questions of performance very much to the photographic stage. ‘Seven Years’ (2001-2004), also commissioned by Impressions, for instance, shows Morrissey and her sister in a variety of wigs, costumes and locations, supported by props that help the pair re-enact fictional family photographs including a couple posing on the bonnet of a car with ‘L’ plates. ‘Ten People in a Suitcase’ (2014−2015) picks up these ideas, featuring Morrissey in detailed photographic recreations of portraits of unnamed people held in a Finnish archive. ‘Rosa, Irma and the Sandman’ (2016) occupies similar territory, with the artist faithfully re-enacting photographs of adult twin sisters found within a collection in Sweden. These bodies of work are uncanny and humorous, allowing Morrissey to temporarily occupy various roles more obviously not her own.
The most moving photographs return to the honesty of Morrissey’s personal maternal position. ‘The Failed Realist’ (2011) and ‘The Successful Realist’ (2017) self-portrait series show Morrissey with different face paints styled by her young daughter. These are raw, mask-like, imagined guises, rendered painterly and striking in close-up against neutral backdrops. ‘Psycho Beach’ (2008−2010), ‘Dookinella’ and ‘Keem Bay’ depict the artist isolated, while a third photograph, ‘Gower’, printed large-scale, shows her at a rocky edge with waves lashing. The small, soft form of a child clings to her. On the precipice of something far greater than themselves, both figures are naked, vulnerable, faceless.
Varied in emotion and subject, Morrissey’s extensive practice is aptly supported by this densely layered and multi-tonal exhibition.
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Trish Morrissey‘s exhibition Autofictions. Twenty Years of Photography and Film was exhibited at Impressions Gallery from 15 July to 14 October, 2023. This first major survey exhibition of Trish Morrissey was originally produced by Serlachius Museums, Mänttä, Finland, curated by Kate Best, with Josephine Lanyon as Consultant Curator (Film). Trish Morrissey: Autofictions. Twenty Years of Photography and Film has been specially adapted to suit the single gallery space at Impressions Gallery, and is toured as a partnership between Impressions Gallery, Bradford, and Photo Museum Ireland, Dublin.
Trish Morrissey: Autofictions. Twenty Years of Photography and Film was reviewed for Photomonitor by Anneka French.
