Despite living in peaceful isolation, Gerard Dowling seems intensely interested in the violence, greed and destruction of the real world. The reclusive artist works out of a Middle Abbey Street house much to the chagrin of Dublin City Council (they’ve been trying to evict him for years) and hasn’t exhibited here in over a decade, but there are still echoes of Dublin in all his work. He stands in his doorway, looking across the street at Arnotts and ruminating on how greed drove the department store into bankruptcy. At one point, he veers into a tangent about a teenage girl who, decades ago, was drenched in petrol and set alight. He proudly shows several photographs of windows smashed in anger, which he plans to enlarge for a future exhibition. The bulk of his art materials, though, are still salvaged from the streets and the Liffey – Since 1991, he’s been clambering down to the river bed at low tide to hunt for interesting pieces of junk.
Dowling takes that junk back to his sprawling, dimly-lit studio and works to turn it into “recycled art”. The results fill three rooms on the ground floor, giving it the appearance of a bizarre treasure trove. Some creations have a nightmarish feel, with wrought iron twisted into strangely disturbing shapes. Others have a strange sense of wonder – Dowling turned used computer parts and Christmas lights into what looks like a futuristic cityscape. His work, he says, gets a bit more attention abroad than here. “The last Irish exhibition was at ENFO in ’99. I spent a couple of years working on an exhibition for America then. That took me two years. It takes a long time to get an exhibition together for overseas – there’s a lot of customs and bureaucrats to deal with. But they appreciate it more in foreign countries than they do at home,” says Dowling, who says he just about broke even on his stateside trip. “The next exhibition, the one in Austria, is going to be different, just from the soundings of what people are saying. They’re not trying to put me on an ego trip. They have a lot of respect for recycling and the message behind it: rather than dictating to someone. You present something that’s there and they get the idea too.” He has various explanations for Ireland’s comparatively slow embrace of the form – an underdeveloped art scene, religious influences and the truism that “prophets are never recognised in their own country.”
For someone used to self-effacing interviewees and false humility, the comment is startling. Still, Dowling lives like a kind of contemporary prophet, even if he restricts his preaching to highlighting chewing gum on the footpaths by painting it in lurid pink (he was fined, of course, but notes proudly that the gum gets cleaned up now) and a piece made with soldered-together bicycles that he sets up on his railings: when passers-by look at it, he gives its single wheel a twirl and smiles in satisfaction. Most of the time, though, Dowling isn’t particularly interested in other people – he hasn’t been for several decades. “I’m from Ballyfermot, but I moved from there when I was fifteen or sixteen. I was in the seminary at Kimmage Manor in the sixties. I did three years there, and I just gave it up. I kept on running away, they’d send me back, I’d run away…so they gave up,” he says. “Whatever it was about my personality or the way I looked to people, it always seemed that they’d try to push me around and bully me. I’ve always had to deal with that, but now I don’t.” Dowling’s route into art differed a lot from the straight path followed by contemporary NCAD grads. Even though his father dabbled in art, he did so as a hobby, and his family weren’t particularly keen on Dowling doing it for a living: “most of them knew that I wouldn’t make any money out of it,” he says.
He trained in metalwork with his father, and spent part of his twenties making jewellery in Paris, before finally moving in to his Abbey Street home in the 1970s. “I was making jewellery here and then travelling over to Paris and selling it in there. [In Dublin], there wasn’t a big market for exuberant jewellery.” He had the odd notable neighbour – including two elderly ladies who lived in a kind of Georgian time-warp – but, he says, “I didn’t really have any relationship with anyone else in the house.” Over time, all his housemates either died or moved out, and he took over the four-storey building to work in on his own. “I think you need to be isolated to be creative: You need to find your own space and be able to deal with it as well.”
Dowling still keeps to himself, even within the Dublin art world: his experience with his American exhibition helped ensure that was the case. “I got a contract to do an exhibition in Columbus and, during the negotiations, I got three other artists included in the exhibition: one from Africa, one from America, and an Italian girl. The exhibition was called Mandrake because, if it happened, it was going to be magic. It was a very successful exhibition, everybody was very happy with it. But I’d never do it again – I’d never work with other artists. People kept on trying to mess it up all the time… delaying it to suit themselves. It was one of those arduous climbs up a wall where your nails are leaving scrape marks behind for ten years,” he laughs. “I’ve made up my mind that I’m never going to work with other artists again. I’d love to, if I could trust them, but you can’t really – because they’re competing. Artists are notoriously jealous of each other.”
Dowling’s wariness of people extends to the public too: for all the curiosity and interest he sometimes attracts, he’s leery about opening his door to visitors. “Letting people in here and getting them out are two different things. You know, a lot of people ‘Can I come in and have a look?’ it’s like ‘Can I intrude into your space?’. You know your privacy. It’s one thing if I invite somebody – it’s another thing if they invite themselves,” he says. The honesty (I had, after all, effectively invited myself in) is at once disconcerting and refreshing.
If Dowling seems sanguine about intrusions in his life, it’s probably because he knows that he’ll never isolate himself entirely from the real world. His long-running battle with Dublin City Council over his Abbey Street home-cum-studio hit the courts (and the newspapers) last year – it’s currently sub judice, he says, and he can’t discuss it. That legal tussle began when he set up his soldered-together bicycles, his first piece of recycled art, on his railings in the 1990s – it’s since been broken by passers-by and repaired several times. No matter how much he shuts himself away from people, then, they keep somehow getting at him, but he’s still gamely working away. “I do get depressed now and again,” he admits. “But I’m stubborn. Yeah, there’s a certain amount of ridicule and you develop a certain insulation from it, but I’m enjoying what I’m doing.”
Words: Derek Owens
Images: Paddy Hough
