The Molesworth Gallery is delighted to present I Land, an exhibition of new work by Catherine Barron. The show marks a departure from Barron’s recent series of paintings on sheet metal exploring the darker side of her family history. This is a more playful body of work – literally in the sense that she fuses early erotic photography with the preparatory landscape studies made during her time at the Cill Rialaig artist’s retreat. The I Land of the title is the human form morphing into individual or groups of islands along the rugged Kerry coastline that inspired her during her stay there. The title also references John Donne’s assertion that “no man is an island, entire of itself” and its pretext that we are all connected to - and dependent on - each other and the world around us.

The exhibition consists of one hundred small works, most no bigger than a postcard, superimposing an imagined seascape over erotic photography dating from 1850 to 1930. Fragments of the mostly female form emerge from purple, azure and cerulean seas, then reconfigure themselves as islands, headlands and rocky outcrops.

While still fetishistic, the original photographs celebrate aspects of the female body now virtually absent from contemporary erotic imagery. The women sport pubic hair, they are full-figured with rounded stomachs and breasts that have not been ‘enhanced’ by a surgeon’s scalpel. These photographs date from an era when a shapely figure was revered as opposed to the pornographied imagery prevalent in contemporary culture, in which the female form has become the objectification of a male fantasy.

Barron’s re-workings of the photographs are also underscored by an irreverence for the academic tradition of landscape painting, the rules and conventions of which were laid down by men. She has stripped away the fetishism of the original photos, leaving only the physicality of nature and the human body as one of its components, all of it subject to the ravages of time - be it five or five million years.

This is Catherine Barron’s third solo exhibition at The Molesworth Gallery. She has shown at the RHA in Dublin, at the RA in London and later this year will have her first solo exhibition with a major London gallery.