Richard Malone on Labour, Class and Liza Minnelli

by Hetty Mahlich on 16 August 2024

The Irish designer, artist and maker speaks to SHOWstudio's Editor Hetty Mahlich about their new solo exhibition.

The Irish designer, artist and maker speaks to SHOWstudio's Editor Hetty Mahlich about their new solo exhibition.

A Record of Tenderness is housed on the border of county Roscommon, the only county in Ireland to reject the marriage equality amendment in 2015. The new solo exhibition of work by Richard Malone, staged at The Dock, considers queer identity and heritage through colloquial labour like stitch and masonry.

Incentivised by the eradication of queerness in colonial learning, particularly in classical sculpture, and the absence of domestic craftspeople in museum records, Malone's works weave new histories of their own. Draped and stitched jersey and canvas fabric installations form a rhythm on walls primed and painted by Malone and his father, and a seated sculpture reminiscent of a smoking Carrie Bradshaw interacts with a performance film playing silently on a small telly. It's left to the visitor to fill in the gaps.

We couldn’t not talk about Sally Bowles. - Richard Malone

HM: It’s a very gestural show.

Richard Malone: I chose figures and gestures deliberately because figurative work is...people see themselves in it. You have a natural reaction to it. I’m making gestures from characters and statues whose identities as queer people were eliminated through curation. That fascinated me at The Louvre [during a residency at the Centre Culturel Irlandais in Paris]. I was reading all these texts about how normal it was for same-sex relationships (in the ancient past), and then at one point in history you have a spike in conservatism; certain sculptures were celebrated as a couple until someone decided, 'absolutely not'. When they were put back together, their gestures suddenly made sense because they’re lovers. Those little nuances are really fascinating to me because we see it happen time and time again. Those things become more obvious to me because of my identity and where I’m from.

HM: It’s interesting, you looking at these artefacts, pinnacles in the canon of art history. Do you see the work you're making now as artefacts?

RM: I felt a bit responsible in a way because I wanted to engage with the artefacts and have these conversations, but I think it’s really important that the work isn’t a reference or a copy of them. Also to give the work the space, of being a queer person who’s working class, making work.

The first work in the show was me and my dad painting the whole space. I spent the day mixing the colours so they’re off…you wouldn’t notice them when go into the room, you have to turn around and look at the other wall. As the light changes, you have this evidence of labour appear with 72 different panels. It’s important to allow [the show] to be conceptual but also tender and human. The tender part, is for me, something that’s passed from one person to the other. It’s not necessarily language-based, it’s like my learning about stitch, cross-stitch or embroidery from my grandmother, my dad teaching me about building things.

HM: The subjects in your work, like class, are intangible yet could be represented literally, but you don’t. The work isn’t literal. The same is true of the clothes you make.

RM: I think that’s really important because for me if you get too bogged down with literal reinterpretations, those things carry a truth, it carries these ideas that we’re told. For me, it’s these social constructs everyone agrees are the norm, that could be heteronormativity or good and bad taste.

It's also not just repeating what my grandmother would have done, it has to be something else. It’s my output, it’s you leaving a question, it’s not a direct answer, it’s an invitation to engage with the work. Even the garments, sometimes they’re so abstracted from the body, other times they’re not. I find the idea of being glued to one aesthetic is quite a...it’s very capitalistic. That’s the ease of capitalism, 'this is what I do and you can rely on me for it'. It’s such a privilege to challenge that. It’s so different from when I started.

Richard Malone S/S 20 Look 30 / A Record of Tenderness installation shot

HM: Have you managed to get a sense of how people have responded so far?

RM: It’s refreshing to see people be open to what queer art should look like. To hear people say, when they go to this show, that it’s beautiful, because beauty is such a political thing.

To have that response when it’s made out of canvas, ironing different canvas, stitch, hanging certain fabrics in a different way. The way it's curated, you have to really go into the space. That was so deliberate. There’s a room you enter from inside another room, and then you have these films playing where the sculptural works are interacting with these dancers practicing gesture. For me, it was really important that the exhibition had no sound.

HM: You fill in the sound yourself.

RM: Yeah, exactly. I like that there is such a physical language. When we all sat down to do the filming with these six queer and non-binary performers, the beginning of it was just us talking. I was explaining the gestures that I’d witnessed in museums: symbols of intellect, power, symbols of upper-class learning. There’s this really interesting point in colonial learning where in Cambridge and Oxford in the mid-18th century, they reintroduced the studying of Ancient Greece in order to isolate the middle and working classes because people wouldn’t know about them. In that instance, they reintroduced people to queer art, because all of it is queer, these amazing nudes and beautiful poetry.

When we talk about [those sculptural gestures] in the queer community, we couldn’t not talk about Sally Bowles. There’s these things that aren’t considered plateau, it's Sally Bowles from Cabaret! Or it’s Liza Minnelli! Or the way Carrie Bradshaw smokes. Barbara Streisand’s hands in Funny Girl. These gestures that are really important to people. They’re not the things that are recorded in museums, but they are so important, so visual, and have informed sensitivity. It’s interesting seeing people being afraid to say [about the sculptures], ‘that looks a bit like how Carrie smokes’, or ‘how Liza Minnelli moves her knees’, because they want it to be so much more. I like positioning those things as equally important, because I think they are.

HM: Are you enjoying, as a maker, it being less about the clothes and more…I don’t know what the right word is...compared to being stuck in that fashion system?

RM: That system was always the problem for me. I chose to study fashion because it’s a labour that I can relate to, you can grow skill in it. I was always more interested in the actual making of things, so that’s why the made-to-order model came easily to me. That’s what I always intended to do, that’s how I understood garment making from a practical perspective. I still don’t understand the system of it [fashion] and its need. I struggle to understand what it’s for, who it’s for.

HM: There’s always this idea though, of people, that’s intrinsic to your work, class too. Maybe fashion was, or is, just one way into exploring all of that?

RM: Yeah. If you’re doing stitch, the natural thing is to tend towards clothes, or something domestic. Furniture is so expensive and luxurious, but clothes are an immediate thing that we all are in, everyday. It’s that immediacy that got me into fashion. Class is very difficult to speak about, in London especially, it’s invisible.

HM: Fashion isn’t necessarily an indicator of class anymore, you can’t rely on it like you could in the past.

RM: You can’t at all. Understanding the value of stitch, quilting, drapery, anything that’s in the background behind the scenes...for that to be centre stage, people don't know what to do with it. That's interesting to me.

These pieces ‘By Richard Malone’ - that is an indicator of who made the garment and that name, Malone or Ó Maoileoin in Irish, is a connection to my grandmother, then further back the travelling tailors, the old labour that was happening in the 18th century, this thread of stitch that literally connects us, represented in my name.

A Record of Tenderness runs until 5 October, 2024 at The Dock, County Leitrim, Ireland.

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