Domestic Drift
by Leontia Flynn
Issue 66 Spring 2011
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A grassy dome littered with tiny flowers sits in the middle of an earthy path. The scale, at first, is confusing: is this a small mountain, or raked leaves in a garden? A plastic shark and an orange ball balance, equally improbably, on irregular, glassy waves in what must be a paddling pool, or part of a child’s toy. Yet real and imitation wave patterns contradict each other and this – along with what seems to be heavy weather engulfing the foreground – confuses the eye and gives us pause for thought.
These deceptive images are part of Clare
Gallagher’s series Domestic Drift, and like
many here they point in two directions at once.
They both acknowledge the repetitive and
unremarkable nature of domestic experience,
and point to the capacity of such experience to
provide moments of lyricism, humour and
imaginative intensity. Domestic experience in
this context means not just housework but
childcare. The children in question are figured
in an up-close, fragmented way, which serves
to suggest the de-centred nature of Gallagher’s
‘drift’. Often – as when a pair of (presumably
unoccupied) Wellington boots poke from
beneath a wooden gate, a crack or fault-line
snaking away from them across cement flags –
they highlight a clear preoccupation with
thresholds. Yet any expected association of
‘outside’ with wildness or freedom, in contrast
to a confined interior, is refreshingly
overturned in these conjunctions. The face
peering in, humorously, through the glass of a
back door, is in fact that of a little boy. When a
child’s silhouetted hand is seen stretching away
from the foreground, it is only its gesture,
pressing against the barely perceptible, rainedon
window, which lets us know we’re on the
inside – and yet rather than claustrophobic, the
image is one of yearning and imaginative
power. Also suggestive and funny on the topic
of confinement and escape, is the photograph
of what seems to be a ladder, drawn in crayon,
on the wall beneath a small high window. On
second glance, the window is perhaps a mirror.
Whoever climbs this make-believe ladder,
would therefore see only her own face,
reflected in the gloomy interior. Though – who
knows ? – in a day of de-centred drift, this
moment of self-definition may represent
another sharp glimmer of freedom.
From: Domestic Drift by Clare Gallagher
Everywhere, then, Gallagher’s images suggest how the extraordinary is implicated with the ordinary, the lyrical with the oppressive. On a leaf-patterned bedroom wall, shadows from the window cast another leafy frieze. We can hardly tell one from the other; the shadow tree sprouts wallpaper flowers. In this way, the apparently ‘private’ space of these photographs is shown to be forever subject to and mixed up with the wider world. The cyclical nature of domesticity, and its accumulation of small mundane tasks, is acknowledged in a way which does not preclude lifting a moment from the series, and focussing on it with surprising clarity. The pile of leaves in the garden may need to be raked again another day, but for now it looks pretty. Post-it notes fixed to a fridge suggest a to-do list extending into the future, but with the moment arrested, work suspended, the image is allowed to become not a niggling reminder of things to be accomplished, but something rather beautiful. It is my favourite image here, and as with many of these photographs it has a particular kind of light that I like very much. It is an ordinary, mid-day, indoors kind of light, which in some photographs gives way to deeper evening light. It evokes not just the drift of what we now call care-giving, but the drift of days in childhood, memorialised in those hazy orange photos from the seventies. The dull, perilous, endless and wide-reaching days, that is, whose concerns are inseparable from those we like to think of as the ‘outside world’.
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