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| Familiar by Martin Healy was at Triskel Arts Centre, Cork, September, 1999. |
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| Other articles by Siún Hanrahan |
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| Spooked II |
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| It's All Fun and Games Until Someone Loses an Eye II |
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| Negotiating Childhood |
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| The photographs in Martin Healy's exhibition, Familiar, invite us to revisit childhood. The protagonists are two boys and the photographs are situated in their home and the grounds of their home. As the photographs are still and thoughtful rather than frenetic and carefree they seem to trace rather than elide the profound negotiations of childhood. |
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| In Spooked II the boys block the viewer's access to a sweeping driveway. Standing on either side of the drive, the two face the viewer. The older boy's stance is almost confrontational. With arms akimbo, he looks directly and unflinchingly at the viewer and his feet are planted firmly on the ground. The younger boy is ambivalent. His feet are not so firmly planted, his hands are pushed deep into his pockets and his anxious gaze is directed toward a spot behind the viewer. The two boys thus present two positions in the transition from dependency to relative independence. The older boy is assured in his practising of masculinity, the younger boy is not. |
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| Familiar is focused upon the younger boy and his negotiation of an autonomous identity. In the exploration of possibility this involves, play offers a transitional space, combining both inner phantasy and outer reality. This third space, between inside and outside, is reflected in the space of The Well. In this photograph, the young boy is lying on his back and holding aloft a 'water-blaster' gun in a shallow space between the top of a concrete bunker and an open-sided roof. There is an ambiguity in his contemplation of the gun. On the one hand, there is recognising all the parts, a technical fascination and imagining of 'the real thing'. On the other, there is a sense of choosing - to identify with this object and all that it stands for, or not. His stance, with the gun held away from his body, is non-committal. |
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| The young boy's position is vulnerable and confident by turns. In one photograph, despite being dressed to brave the elements he hangs back from the threshold, earnestly looking toward the brightly lit space beyond but not yet moving toward it. In another he has crossed the threshold and is playing a part but his 'Batman' stops short of pointing his gun at the viewer. For all his bravado his position seems precarious and exposed. By contrast, in It's All Fun And Games Until Someone Loses An Eye II the night sky is beautiful and full of promise and seems to be where the child is, imaginatively, while the couch on which he is ensconced offers both security and space. Indeed, the barrier effected by his lowered visor, denying the viewer access to his 'soul', suggests a growing confidence in the independent space that he is creating. |
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| The tentativeness of the child's making sense of the world is reflected in the blindness of It's All Fun And Games Until Someone Loses An Eye I. And yet the blindness is also ours. We can see only a fraction of the world occupied by the child, and this is true in the exhibition as a whole. Although the boys' wider world is inscribed within the photographs - in computer games, plastic guns and Hollywood costumes - the world of the photographs is the world they share with their parents. The boys' own world ranges beyond the realm of the photographs and is not wholly accessible, either to their parents or to us. |
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| Despite their 'reproduction of the eye level and space of the child', the space of the photographs is not simply that of 'the child'. Familiar offers a view from the outside; an adult's struggle to understand the negotiations of childhood. Although this is acknowledged in a single photograph, which is taken at 'adult height' so the viewer is not 'one' with the boy crouched in play, ambivalence about the space of the viewer is largely suppressed within the photographs. |
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| Siún Hanrahan |
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