"Head for the Hills: The spiritual journey of Hilary Irons’s “Sheetrock Mountain”
By Ian Paige
Portland Phoenix, August 30, 2006

Comparative mythology suggests a motif classified as the “axis mundi” and often represented by distinct cultures as a cosmic mountain or tree. These archetypal images represent the gateways between the world of the deep psyche, the material world, and the lofty realm of the spirit. Through honest investigative development of both technique and thematic intent, painter Hilary Irons manages to create works that provide common ground for seemingly unbridgeable aspects of being.

The works collectively assembled for the show “Sheetrock Mountain” at Aucocisco represent a stylistic achievement and a deepening of personal and social questions concerning memory, the antagonism of human and natural presence, and feminine structures of dominance. Irons creates visual fables that allude to the utopia of memory tainted by the dystopia of reality.

The oblique narrative concerning Irons’s childhood spent in an intentional community is exemplified in “Fractured Bargello.” A small home built from logs with large glass windows is set in the frame relative to a soon-to-be solar panel system surrounded by tools and buckets. This is a nominal human presence such that the true subject of the painting is more the interplay of this partially-rendered scene with the infusive background and the overlaying Bargello pattern (picture the triangular patterns of a grandmother’s afghans). The three disparate elements meet in psychological congress. Geometry manifests itself in a usually unseen day-glo formation, but seems to be made of the same stuff as the house, the trees, and the grass.

“Night Bargello” presents Irons’s position on the inter-dominant structures between women. A tall-standing conifer floats in a gorgeous gouache milky night-sky and full moon. Three women, or three images of the same woman, are seemingly dancing around the tree like a maypole. There is no joy in the scene; the women look more as if they are chasing each other, angered and fearful. Accompanying them is a single horse, silently watching as either patient spirit animal or docile domesticated servant.

This interpersonal drama is evoked further in “Plotted Mandala.” This time, a central figure decisively tears pages from a book that features examples of sacred geometry. The other women rush to the center, horrified and grasping at tossed pages floating in the air. Some have bags of collected seashells, an overt example of embodied geometry. A centralized mandala pointing to the four directions emanates a white light radiant to the point of subsuming parts of the figures, leaving only outlines. The tradition of woman as keeper of sacred and natural knowledge is called into question. Here, women within social structure are at odds with the divine and one another by hoarding knowledge or committing a self-imposed state of amnesia from their born knowledge.

The artist’s illustrative style particularly lends itself to the broad, even fields of pen and gouache on paper, but the style translates as well to oil and acrylic on canvas. The most successful of these larger pieces is “Salmon Falls River Moon.” Another mandala presides over a sprawling landscape featuring yurts and a community of women busy with various activities. This mandala is composed of sacred relationships of triangles, oriented so as to recall the feminine symbol of the chalice. Radiating from the power symbol is a milky white field covering the background and flowing through the center of the canvas in the form of a rushing river.

If we are, as mystics and prophets perpetually posit, all one and reflections of each other, Irons’s social and gendered investigations may be more personal than she may know. These women can just as easily reflect the fractured aspects of any one personality born of a unified ground, swimming in worldly ego-related dominance, and aspiring for more sacred transpersonal awareness. There is no doubt that this promising young painter will continue to join technique and intelligence to explore the journey further.

"Beyond Frames"
by Ian Paige
Portland Phoenix, January 13, 2006

You don’t need to get too far from Portland’s Arts District before you remember that plenty of people are just looking for pretty pictures of lighthouses. Each passing year, Portland’s sense of artistic community seems to grow stronger. The congregation is growing, but where are the itinerant preachers? The University of New England campus in Biddeford is a damn long slog out of Portland in this January weather, but that’s exactly why it’s so comforting to see young area artists and their forward-thinking ideas represented.

The work of Hilary Irons, collectively entitled "The Ladies’ Paradise," is beautifully illustrative yet intellectually demanding, off-the-cuff in its stylization yet remarkably complex in execution. The works featured in the Stella Maris Hall (by the office of the prez no less) range from ornate canvas pieces to scraps of paper with doodles and written notes about B vitamins. All works are characterized by a cartoonish style of figure drawing predominantly focused on colonial-era women in various poses of everyday living. Gouache on colored paper manifests bright, distinct forms such that background and foreground are no matter; Irons’s women explode with drama and activity in a psychedelic flattening of pictorial space.

A mother lies in bed with her naked child surrounded by maids practicing needlepoint and a small child diligently praying. The mother and child reach up to a giant silhouette of a cat looking down on the whole scene. Yes, that’s correct, a big freaking psychedelic silhouette of a housecat with a colorful Eden full of gumdrop-nibbling ponies inside.

Silhouettes are primary themes in almost every work. These outlines of animals often function as windows into magical other-worlds by framing the action itself or breaking the space entirely with a block color. Combine these spirit animals with the busy worlds of Irons’s ladies and we start to see what the artist is getting at. The social hierarchies of women concerned with power structures achieved through mastery of the feminine are at odds, or at least intertwined with, the natural world of the animal, always knowledgeable of something deeper beyond the realm of the social or the barnyard.

This is not necessarily a cry against the patriarchy. These women are in their own worlds, their own paradise, and creating their own subjugation. One gouache work shows a Where’s Waldo? world of women speaking at lecterns, holding boom mics, and generally busy as bees can be in a modern world. Above them sprouts a plant that spirals to the top of the page where emerging Victorian peasants run from an unknown enemy. Conversely, another image shows women from the early 20th century scrubbing toilets, taking baths and coyly passing notes to one another while modern schoolgirls listening to headphones sprout from the top of the plant structure. All the women are united by their detached, almost resigned, expressions.

Jared Radding’s new show "Something is Going to Happen" is a few paces away at the UNE Campus Center. Five green monochromatic works composed of a matrix of sixteen pages of notebook paper each are displayed in the reception hall. With small variations in tone and frequency of filled lines on the pages, Radding creates an optic display that ideally creates a meditative response. Another similarly styled work is multicolored, a suggestion that the theme is one in progress. Any effect on the viewer is generally discouraged by the haphazard construction of the pieces. This is a surprise from a gifted young artist such as Radding who has proven himself in the past and will undoubtedly continue to represent the Portland artistic community in the future.

These two artists are ambassadors in a land where unframed conceptual works are far from the norm. Surrounding Irons’s paintings in Maris Hall were many office workers (yup, all women) in the process of forming their own version of the pieces on the walls. Judging from their concerned inquiries as to the nature of the work, it’s clear their Ladies’ Paradise is unsettlingly stranger for the show’s presence. That’s a pretty good indication that the Portland idea factory has plenty more preaching to do, even as it pollinates mainstream Maine and the lighthouse culture.