Caragh Thuring

The black line that meanders through Caragh Thuring’s 409 retraces the actual flight path of a glider over the Alps. Thuring recreates this event with minimal information: a building, mountain, aircraft, and line. Each element is rendered independently and in disproportionate scale. This creates a heightened awareness of the flat picture plane and exposes the multiple ways we understand space as an illusion. For example, the house rises from the bottom of the canvas, an assumed ‘earth’, and the mountain is much smaller, and made to look ephemeral or hazy, as if it was in the distance. The line of the flight path, pictorially at the fore, is ‘above’, looking down on everything else; it also looks like a map or a landscape paradoxically creating a solid ground. Thuring is interested in heavy industry’s ratios of man to landscape and construction effort to function: the enormous amount of engineering that goes into industrial structures that perform relatively simple tasks. Thuring sees this cumbersome relationship and potential futility as inherent to the act of painting. The Industrialist was developed from an image of an unfinished girdered building. The hard geometry of the architecture becomes dissembled through Thuring’s loose brush strokes, creating a space that’s both technological and human. Thuring often works directly on linen canvas and leaves its bare surface visible in many places. This replicates the aesthetics of a draught or blueprint. General Scenes Of Unloading is one of two paintings of a London docklands scene that Thuring made at the same time; this canvas contains all the imagery that she didn’t include in the other painting. For Thuring, the docklands are a complete eco-system where each element has a function that is part of an interdependent network. She is interested in how machinery can exist as a created ‘personality’ by dint of its manufacture or function. In her painting Thuring translates the scene intuitively; fragments of cranes, pipes, and security barriers become isolated and she highlights certain details while omitting others. Each separate vignette is painted in a delicate gestural way, like a cherished portrait.