Eithne Jordanʼs Electric Tenebrism / October 4, 2018 by Eithne Jordan

With a great desire to be a flâneur (urban explorer), Walter Benjamin wrote passionately of the literary type who wandered the streets of nineteenth century Paris, looking and listening intently to the comings and goings of civilisation.

Voyage de Retour / October 2, 2018 by Eithne Jordan

Eithne Jordan, whose new paintings of Dublin are to be exhibited in November at the RHA, lives in France forsome monthseach yearatMontpeyroux, a village of the Languedoc. Three converging streets, each following its own wandering underground watercourse, decided Montpeyroux’s loose, strung-out form. Where they meet is the marketplace and a wine bar, the Terrace de Mimosa. The village houses, dating for the most part from the early 17thand 18thcenturies, are tightly terraced, each with its own internal well. Though all were designed to have cool cellars and dry lofts and living quarters principally on the first floor, they come in a variety of internal arrangements, many times revised over the centuries. Most are modest in scale with a couple of bedrooms and a kitchen; but packed in among these narrow houses are a few that have more spacious proportions, with rich internal plasterwork or perhaps an ornate balcony. These appear, long ago, to have combined the family home, workshop and storerooms of merchants or larger landholders.

Eithne Jordan at The MAC / October 1, 2018 by Eithne Jordan

by Ben Street

Travel is, for the most part, not the nouns and verbs of time but its qualifiers and prepositions, the bits in between. Look at anyone’s travel photos, shared on social media: time and space are concertina’d into a single lofty peak whose valleys magically disappear in posterity, in imitation of our selective memories. The self-edited life isthe life. Past imperfect, present perfect. And yet we know that the experience of travel is really a series of protracted conjunctions in a sentence. Elided from an anecdotal afterlife – then we got here, then we waited there – these liminal moments are what constitute the majority of our lives. But looked at properly, they emanate a coiled energy, like a deep breath before a dive. Eithne Jordan’s paintings of cityscapes collectively present a modest proposal about travel: that every journey provides the receptive eye with an opportunity to find beauty in disorientation and estrangement.