The Sublime, a volume of The Whitechapel Documents on Contemporary Art Series, begins with a provocation by scholar Thomas Weiskel; “The essential claim of the sublime is that man can, in feeling and speech, transcend the human. What, if anything, lies beyond the human – God or the gods, the daemon or Nature – is a matter for great disagreement.” It is this “what” that the group show “Natura”, curated by Brian Mac Domhnaill at the Lavit Gallery, ponders. Featuring artists Debbie Godsell, Dee Hurley, Hina Khan, Julia Mitchell, Chloe Nagle, Conor O’Brien, Kate O’Kelly and Deirdre O’Mahony, the show’s premise “explores the unusual and often strained relationship human beings have with the natural world”. The selected artist’s worry and examine boundaries of “the self”, while oscillating between the environment as a site of personal and global histories.

Conor O’Brien’s works examine understandings of “the self” on a cellular level. A collection of paintings, Porous I – IIII, are arranged in a square with a pink amorphous motif positioned at the outer edges of the pictorial plane – moving towards one another as if caught in the act of multiplying. The paintings appear as stylized versions of life underneath a microscope. In Daisy LaFarge’s Lovebug (2023), the writer cites the peculiar nature of autoimmune conditions (where cells cannot distinguish between the self and “other” resulting in the immune system “attacking itself”), as a prompt for reconsidering fixed notions of identity. LaFarge’s book is a wonderful celebration of ideas of intimacy, the human body and microbial life, and complicates our perception of selfhood. This kind of corporeal reality, what feminist theorist Julia Kristeva defined as “the abject”, typically evokes horror and disgust. However, as with LaFarge’s writing, O’Brien’s friendly, pop-palette and round, soft shapes see ideas of a monstrous “other” wane in favour of more fluid descriptions of humans and nature. Their strange pink blobs are akin to an invitational Rorschach test for the viewer. The work expands from the microscopic to draw macroscopic connections with hagstones, organs, marine life, as well as philosophical considerations. There are two ways to view life under the microscope, as LaFarge’s book documents, one can observe networks or one can perceive hierarchies. O’Brien’s paintings generate questionings of professed “others” in society and marginalised queer bodies, in particular.

This “dissolution of the self” resonates strongly with the interpretation of the sublime as “witnessing a thing whose meaning is one’s own annihilation”. This definition is offered by the artist Mike Kelley, and categorised under the subheading “the uncanny” in the aforementioned Whitechapel anthology. Chloe Nagle’s strange photographs evoke the sense of eeriness and creeping horror that Kelley describes, in an overlap between Freud’s ideas of the uncanny and the phenomenon of the sublime. Nagle’s aesthetic is moody and intense, presenting ordinary scenes as vaguely supernatural. The unsettling focus on objects that will outlast human life, such as concrete structures, positions the viewer as a visiting alien. This sense is particularly affecting in Still Points (of a turning world), where Nagle arranges an image of a mound of earth imprinted by the machinery of track loaders next to a graveyard scene. The artist’s attention to her surroundings pulls one out of their familiarity in a manner similar to I Who Have Never Known Men (1995), the popular novel by Jaqueline Harpman. The viewer momentarily becomes Harpman’s protagonist, examining a strange and barren land for clues as to what happened to the world.

It is the position of historical inquiry into our activities enacted on the land that connects with the interests of Debbie Godsell. Godsell grapples with narratives that assert “mastery” over nature. Her work can be considered as challenging ideas of the “Lawscape”, defined in Men Who Eat Fairy Forts (Askeaton Press, 2020), as a cartography that renders all beneath it the “inert background for the unfolding of the human saga”. In her screenprint, The Promised Land, Godsell draws a connection between past and present colonial acts. The work depicts an archival photograph of Constance Croker, a Cork woman of Anglo-Irish Ascendency. “Big House” culture, the tradition where a class hierarchy is created and access to land, money and power is monopolised, is distilled in this imagery. The motif of the horse is particularly potent, not least because of Dublin writer Brendan Behan’s witty commentary, classifying the Anglo-Irish as a “Protestant with a horse”, but because of its art historical relationship to equestrian statues as tools of imperialist propaganda. Godsell underscores this agitprop, ideological framing with her loaded titling of the work. Weiskel’s questioning as to whether anything, be it God or the divine, lies beyond the human reappears here. Godsell’s work asks what nebulous forces are invoked to “promise” a land? The phrase immediately summons the colonialist perspective that informs the conflict in Palestine, as well as Ireland’s complex history within the project of the British Empire. The dried oat stems, affixed to the print’ surface, comment how our current landscape is impacted by past economic and political decisions.

A more traditional approach to how Western art history has understood and depicted nature is found in the work of Julia Mitchell. It is interesting to consider her oil paintings of West Cork in the context of American abstract painter Barnett Newman’s seminal essay “The Sublime is Now” (1948), also cited in The Whitechapel anthology. Her magnificent and striking landscapes, on first impression, could be categorised as “caught in the problem of what is beautiful”, as Newman describes the Impressionists. However, when speaking of what inspires her to create a painting, Mitchell describes moments and experiences with her environment that echo human kind’s desire for exaltation. In Small quarry above Barleycove, the artist seeks to recreate, in the studio, the transcendental affect of the light she experienced moving across this jagged collection of rocks. Relocating from South Africa, Mitchell uses the act of painting to connect with her new life and to expand into her surroundings. A series of diagonal swipes of pinks and lime greens create a phenomenological depiction of place. The effect is a rosy rendering of a much romanticised part of Ireland, however, it is the artist’s desire to capture her personal bond with this terrain that thrums though the work, creating paintings that feel searching and alive.

The “what” that lies beyond the human is often mythologies, the West Cork area of Ireland is a layered cultural phenomenon that shapes our understanding and interactions with the environment. Deirde O’Mahony engages with one of the most complex cultural symbols in Ireland, the potato, and its legacies to recognise and counter land politics. Her work, The Family depicts an archival photograph from the Silke family collection alongside a plinth displaying porcelain cups cast in the shape of potatoes. In the early twentieth century, the Silke family created a thriving seed potato industry in Donegal, a legacy that has now all but disappeared. O’Mahony highlights this history to make a broader commentary on food security. This is underscored by her sculptural works, named after the Sárvári family, Hungarian potato scientists who bred potatoes with high resistance to blight disease. Her focus on family networks is suggestive of a more sustainable approach to interacting with our environs.

Dee Hurley brings this outlook to her entire making practice. The artist delights in the natural forms found in plant life and creates work from the materials of her garden. Her attention to patterns is both micro and macro – she observes the physical properties of particular plants alongside the motions of the seasons. In Interrupted decay, Hurley conscientiously collects and preserves decaying leaves. The arrangement is held by a simple birch wood frame. The care involved in the work’s creation poignantly calls to mind a bird using organic matter to fashion a nest. Hurley’s positioning of the human within nature is clear; we are part of its cyclical rhythms.

This swing between individual and systematic perspectives is also evident in the works of Hina Kahn. In her large-scale gestural paintings, Kahn expresses outbursts of intensity. Whisper of Land depicts a landscape in stylized flames, rendered with a thick black outline, accompanied by lines of red and blocks of yellow. On closer inspection, these blocks have scores of patterns suggesting a “scarring” of the land. The imperfect symmetry of the image as it expands across two conjoining canvases  emphasises this portrayal of violence. Kahn takes refuge from these emotive responses in traditional South Asian miniature paintings, which she describes as being a “domestic” process undertaken at her kitchen table. These two strands of the artist’s practice mirror the schism we often encounter in our experience of the world, between our personal situations and global conflicts.

Throughout this exhibition, the nature of patterns – both physical and behavioural – reoccurs. Repetitions in our human impulses and histories; sequences in plant forms and landscapes. Echoes of our ideas and philosophies – the theory and aesthetics of the Sublime. Kate O’Kelly’s work Cloud Vessels originated out of an inquiry into process. The porcelain pieces emerged from the artist’s inquisitive engagement with objects and materials. The resulting cloud shapes are elongated, the fluffy outline of the cloud is propped up by a long stem. From a side-view, the sculptures look like plant forms, but when observed from above, they resemble peculiarly oversized cookie cutters. The visual connection between these celestial phenomena, the plants that occupy the space beneath our feet and our domestic utensils is indicative of the connection between all things that the show “Natura” illuminates. In 2015, another group show “Under the Clouds: From Paranoia to the Digital Sublime” at Serralves Museum of Contemporary Art in Porto explored the complex layers of mythology in the cloud as a cultural metaphor of post-war paranoia and an utopian metaphor for today’s digital sphere. The curator, João Ribas, declared “In these ineffable clouds lies the phantasmagorical nature of our contemporary sublime”. Perhaps this is to be expected – after all, computers see patterns and we see ourselves.

Sarah Long