In 2022, remarkable images began to emerge from the small Tuscan commune of San Casciano dei Bagni, human figures in bronze rising from the mud, scarcely tarnished after 2,300 years underground.
Margaret Corcoran remembers seeing some of the photographs and immediately feeling that the figures would somehow enter her work.
The artist went to her studio and began to sketch them. It’s a familiar process for Corcoran, whose practice often begins with reading the news in the morning and carrying the images that affect her into the studio.
The following day, by coincidence, Corcoran was giving a talk about Aphrodite at Trinity College Dublin; as it happened, the archeological director of the Italian excavation, Jacopo Tabolli, had been a researcher in the Irish university’s department of classics, and he invited her to come and see the figures.
RM Block
One thing that struck Corcoran was the apparent complexity of the sanctuary itself. The bronzes were votive offerings, many associated with healing, but there were also numerous small anatomical plaques – objects that could be held in the hand. To her, these suggested a place concerned not only with worship but also with healing and medical knowledge.
“Something about them stayed very firmly and strongly with me,” Corcoran says. “I still can’t fully articulate the draw other than that I really wanted to be near them and make art from them.
“I felt I had this real connection with them. I wasn’t sure at all how it would manifest in the artwork, but I was certain that a series would come out of these really powerful finds. And it all seemed so much about luck and serendipity, being able to have such close access to them. I wanted it, and then it happened.”
The artist allowed them to simmer in her imagination.
Then came 2023. Each day brought horrific images from Gaza: children killed, bodies in rubble, scenes of devastating violence and human suffering.
“All these horrendous images were coming through the media, particularly images of children,” Corcoran says. “The way I tried to bear witness was through my practice.”
In the studio, she found that the figures she was making as she tried to process what she had seen in the news bore an unsettling resemblance to the ancient bronze bodies emerging from the Tuscan mud.
The parallel troubled her. She worried that bringing the two sets of images together might be insensitive, that it might be wrong to liken the ancient beauty of the figures with the hideous images of genocide that were arriving each day.
“I kept questioning myself: am I allowed to express my opinion in this way? But I had this image of the baby coming up from the ground. It looked terribly like some of the scenes we were seeing.
“In my drawing I made the baby float above a crowd of people leaving Gaza, moving towards safety. At that point there was still hope for a ceasefire. So the baby is floating like a guide, almost like a soul, helping to lead them towards safety. I eventually made that image into a collage.”
As Corcoran researched the sanctuary further, she began to discover other ways in which the ancient material could speak to the present. The bronzes belong to a period of transition between the Etruscan and Roman worlds, yet the sanctuary appears to have remained a place in which those cultures coexisted even during periods of conflict.
As Tabolli has put it, “Even in historical epochs in which the most awful conflicts were raging outside, inside these pools and on these altars the two worlds, the Etruscan and Roman ones, appear to have coexisted without problems.”
Corcoran began to think of the bronzes as objects resurfacing from the earth in the way a buried memory can resurface: returning to the collective consciousness with something to say. It changed the way she understood her drawings and the political charge latent within them. She describes the resulting works as visual prayers.
“The Etruscan bronzes became characters in a narrative,” she says, “a plea for cessation, and for an arrival at safety and peace for those suffering.”
As the war continued, that narrative became more explicit in her work.
“Things were getting worse and worse, and I wanted to make that painting much bigger and include a scene from Gaza, with people coming into what I imagined as a place of safety.
“I used the figure of a baby extensively throughout the series. In Etruscan times a votive figure of a baby might have been placed in the spa in the hope of restoring that child’s health.
“These works are still quite raw for me – they’ve only just gone up on the walls – and I haven’t really talked about this before.”
She’s referring to the walls of the Kevin Kavanagh Gallery, in Dublin, where her exhibition, The New Life: La Vita Nuova, brings together the three strands that have occupied Corcoran over the past three years: the Etruscan bronzes of San Casciano dei Bagni, Dante’s Divine Comedy and the violence and upheaval of the contemporary world.
Across large canvases, charcoal and pastel drawings, watercolours and small oils, ancient figures and mythological characters reappear within contemporary landscapes, from Powerscourt to Palestinian olive groves.
One of the exhibition’s recurring figures is Apollo, who appears in a painting before an ancient Palestinian olive tree. Corcoran had encountered a photograph of the tree, one of the oldest in the world, and was drawn to the image of a man tending the earth around it. Into this scene she placed Apollo, weeping before the tree.
The association acquired another meaning at the exhibition opening, when the Palestinian ambassador to Ireland, Jilan Wahba Abdalmajid, saw the painting and pointed to traditions connecting the ancient peoples of Palestine with the Greek world.
For Corcoran, who had worried about how the work might be received, the encounter was reassuring. “I was so relieved, because I thought, ‘How is she going to see what I’m doing here?’ She thought it was absolutely appropriate.”
That process – making an image intuitively and researching its associations afterwards – is characteristic of Corcoran’s practice. “I generally do the work and then I’ll research after,” she says. “Because I don’t want to block it coming out.”
Alongside Apollo and the other male figures, Corcoran began introducing female deities into the work. Their presence became a way of responding to the images of mothers and children that had entered the series while shifting its balance of power.
“I put in a lot of goddesses,” she says. “I wanted to balance what was happening with motherhood with female deities, and try to redress the power.”
Another visual reference Corcoran returned to while making the series was the French symbolist Odilon Redon, an artist she had loved as a student, in her early 20s. The affinity is easy to see: both artists create dreamlike images populated by archetypal creatures that seem to come out of deep collective memory or myth.
Only recently, however, did Corcoran learn more about the trajectory of Redon’s work. His early career was dominated by the dark, often unsettling charcoal drawings and lithographs he called his noirs, while his later work opened into luminous colour, flowers and spiritual imagery.
Redon had lived through the Franco-Prussian War, an experience Corcoran found newly significant in light of her own work’s response to images of conflict.
“He starts with very, very dark imagery, lithographs, and he’d been through a war,” she says. “He was very traumatised after what he’d been through.” Later, she says, “he got into Buddhism, and all this colour flooded back into his work.”
For Corcoran, who had begun the series largely in black and white, it eventually felt necessary to infuse these “visual prayers” with colour. “There’s a great trueness in his works,” she says; “in the pigment, the bright colours.”
Redon’s movement from darkness into colour offered a kind of precedent. Corcoran had the sense that, through this transformation in his work, he had been reaching towards another state.
“And, you know, he healed.”
The New Life: La Vita Nuova, by Margaret Corcoran, is at the Kevin Kavanagh Gallery, Dublin, until Saturday, October 10th
