Catherine McWilliams: Selected Work 1961 - 2021

Catherine McWilliams

Catherine McWilliams
Selected Work 1961-2021
F.E. MCWILLIAM GALLERY & STUDIO

Foreword
Dr Riann Coulter
The F.E. McWilliam Gallery and Armagh City,
Banbridge and Craigavon Borough Council are
delighted to present Catherine McWilliams: Selected
Work 1961 – 2021. For over six decades, McWilliams
has produced original and compelling images of life
in Northern Ireland. From a self-portrait painted
when she was 21 to recent compositions exploring
the threat of climate change, her work ranges from
the domestic to the surreal and prioritises the
experiences of women and children. McWilliams
lives in North Belfast, in the shadow of Cavehill, and
taught in a local secondary school during the worst
years of the conflict. Throughout those decades,
her work documented everyday life – from marriage
and motherhood to teaching and teenage rebellion
– at a time when the media was saturated with
images of violence and destruction. Within this
context, McWilliams’ paintings of home and the
suburban landscape constitute a radical alternative
to the dominant view of Northern Ireland during the
period.
Initiated and co-curated by Dr Louise Wallace,
Lecturer in Painting at Belfast School of Art,
this exhibition provides a unique opportunity to
appreciate the quality and range of McWilliams’
practice and confirms her place in the canon of Irish
art. A painter, an academic and a fellow resident
of North Belfast, Dr Wallace’s deep engagement
with McWilliams’ work has been central to both the
exhibition and this publication. I am grateful to
Louise for proposing the project and for sharing
her research with us.
Gathering together work made over 60 years
requires a great deal of cooperation and goodwill.
We are grateful to have been able to borrow work
from numerous collections including the Irish
News, NI Civil Service, National Museums NI, the
Arts Council of Northern Ireland, Queen’s University
Belfast, Ulster Hospital, Unison and BBC NI. Thanks
also to the private collectors who have generously
lent their work for the exhibition. Thank you to
Graham Rees, Simon Mills, Colin Finley of Grallagh
Studios, David Kearney of Concept Framing, Brian
Delaney of Caldwell Installations and the staff at
the F.E. McWilliam Gallery for all their work on our
behalf.
The exhibition would not have been possible
without the support of Simon McWilliams
whose knowledge of his mother’s work has been
invaluable. Most of all, thank you to Catherine for
her patience and enthusiasm and for allowing us a
glimpse into her world.
2

Hope is Something Rooted – the work of Catherine McWilliams
Dr Louise Wallace
‘Pandora has a box filled with all the woes and
miseries of the world. When she opens the
box and lets them all out, the one thing left is
hope’ 1
Catherine McWilliams
Catherine Mc Williams is singular among artists
in Northern Ireland. She has painted life in Belfast
for over 60 years, a period of great difficulty and
change in the North. The overarching stimulus
across these works may be termed ‘painting
as empathy’, a practice that mines deep and
complicated feelings for a city, its people and
environs. McWilliams’ commitment to that project
elevates her depiction of the everyday to the status
of radical act.
In some ways, her project begins with Self Portrait
(1961) where she captures her own resolute gaze
in a range of Van Gogh yellows. McWilliams’ use of
yellow across key works may be seen as a marker
of hope, an attribute which Liam Kelly describes
as her ‘irrepressible tendency’. 2 This tendency
radiates from the image of herself as a young
woman to encompass and define her life’s work. For
McWilliams, hope is something rooted in home and
hills, in city streets and back gardens, motifs she
returns to throughout her career.
McWilliams moved to North Belfast in 1966 with her
husband, fellow painter Joseph McWilliams. From
this point onwards, her practice becomes largely
focused on the urban. While art history highlights
the isolation of the painter’s studio, McWilliams’
seems to be full of locals: people running in the
park; dinner ladies; council workers with a digger.
This connection to people has been evident from
the beginning. In her early career she was an art
teacher at St Gemma’s in ‘The Bone’ area of Belfast.
The locale was marked by social and economic
deprivation. During the conflict the schoolgirls
would be subject to nightly riots and police raids.
McWilliams describes the art room as an oasis for
her pupils amidst the darkness of surrounding
streets. She taught the girls life drawing and
they looked at each other to study form. As she
puts it ‘I drew them and they drew me’. 3 There is
a great tenderness in McWilliams’ pencil studies,
empathetic encounters that do not need words.
Girls and Motorbikes (1973) is a complex study of
life in Belfast at that time. There is an anarchic
energy to the group of girls out after dark. There
were 1800 explosions recorded in the city between
1970 and 1975. 4 Belfast’s back streets were spaces
of sudden, mindless violence. Despite the immanent
danger, here is a moment of meaningful exchange
between McWilliams and the girls. It is an excessive
image because of the unusual depiction of a female
gang on large motorbikes, holding the viewer’s
gaze. The artist remembers the chance meeting
as immediately ‘powerful…I had to get home and
paint that right away’. 5 Although the group is in
shadow, there are bright lights behind them which
McWilliams describes as windows in a nearby tower
block. Here, yellow is symbolic of indominable
agency.
Fionna Barber notes the painting’s significance
in relation to the depiction of the conflict, “Girls
and Motorbikes represents an important corrective
to the currency of representations of women as
‘victims of the Troubles’.” 6 Barrister Michael Lavery
purchased the painting the same year it was made.
At that time he was defending Liz McKee, the first
female to be interned at the age of 19. Lavery
greatly admired Girls and Motorbikes and believed
the figure on the far right to be a portrait of McKee.
Although McWilliams did not intentionally depict
McKee and makes no claim to be a political painter,
the painting is a memorable image of feminine
power at a time of great uncertainty and fear in
Belfast’s history.
Writing in 1977, Mike Catto described the depiction
of the city during the conflict as the preserve of
‘the urban landscapist…here the painter or sculptor
must contend with what men are and what they do
with and to each other.’ 7 Catto’s statement reflects
the way that art made during the conflict has been
collected, curated and canonised. This has arguably
led to the conflation of the masculine with the
urban and an emphasis on violence and victimhood.
Dominant discourses have pushed the remit of
Northern Irish art away from domestic, feminine or
maternal spaces. Yet these are precisely the sites
that preoccupy McWilliams’ urban landscapes: an
empty playground with paramilitary graffiti; pupils
in a local all-girls school; an elderly lady outside
her home after a police raid. These paintings
bring the ‘domestic spectre into focus’. 8 They are
extraordinary in the visual schema of ‘Troubles Art’
for representing the vital role women played both
at home and within the community. McWilliams
remembers that ‘women were left to hold onto
things and keep everything going’. 9 This recentring
of focus is as a radical reinterpretation of power
during times of conflict, placing women at the
centre of the narrative. Writing in ‘Fortnight’ in
1985, Ann Davey Orr states,
Photo: Michael Burns c. 1985
4 5

Instead of painting … the bombings and
destruction, she painted people who in general
took no active part in it. She did a series of
paintings of the children she taught and the
women she met. Most of that work was bought
by the women of the area. 10
McWilliams’ more personal work documents her
home life and marriage to Joseph, a union of two
artists based on reciprocity and understanding. As
she describes it ‘we both agreed that we would go
into teaching somehow or other and would make
our lives as painters’. 11 McWilliams was committed
to family life and art. She and Joseph met the
influential German performance artist Joseph Beuys
when he visited Belfast at the height of the Troubles
in 1974. Three years later, the young family joined a
group of artists from Belfast who Beuys invited to
Documenta 6, the international arts exhibition in
Kassel, Germany. 12 The couple were also involved in
exhibiting and selling art through the Cavehill Gallery
which they established in 1986 in their home in North
Belfast. Initially exhibiting their own art in the two
large front rooms, they soon expanded to include the
work of friends and other local artists. The gallery
lasted 16 years and became a focus for artists and
art enthusiasts in the area. 13 McWilliams’ children
remember that making art was simply part of family
life; even on holiday both parents would spend time
drawing and painting. Inevitably, they also became
her models and Boy with Pigeon’s (1982) is a portrait
of the artist’s son, the painter Simon McWilliams.
Boy with Pigeons 1982
Mixed media on paper
36 × 40 cm
All these aspects of life - teaching, motherhood
and marriage - are folded into McWilliams’ visual
language.
In particular, the artist elevates the everyday
intimacies of her long relationship across domestic
scenes which are reminiscent of Pierre Bonnard’s
late interiors. Where Bonnard painted his wife
Marthe in the bath, McWilliams draws and paints
Joseph in the shower. There are similarities in
the formal devices of both artists. Bonnard and
McWilliams frame the figure within the confines
of the bath or shower. There is a familiarity with
a particular body, reviewed in the act of washing.
The flesh tones in both artists’ work are reimagined
through memory and painterly touch. In McWilliams’
case, she uses vivid pinks and oranges to suggest
the heat of skin warmed by water. Both artists
are interested in capturing a partner lost to her/
his own private thoughts, locating the meditative
moment within a habitual act. This similarity to
Bonnard may be seen again in Breakfast Table
(1987) where Joseph’s figure is mostly hidden in
the kitchen clutter and potted plants. These works
are instinctive for McWilliams but are nonetheless
progressive for picturing her husband in the role of
muse within the domestic interior.
McWilliams depiction of the male nude was both
unusual in Irish art and controversial in the context
of the social and religious conservatism of Northern
Ireland. In an unpublished text written in 1983, the
art historian Eileen Black discussed how McWilliams’
life drawings and male nudes became the subject
of controversy when exhibited at the Royal Ulster
Academy and in an exhibition at the Peacock Gallery,
Craigavon
The drawings received praise from local art
critics but attracted … abuse from other
sources, who took predictable offence at
Catherine’s unfettered approach to male
nudity (while, of course, not raising too many
objections to the nude women she portrayed).
In fact, a second showing at Craigavon in 1983
… found Catherine being accused of producing
‘pornographic graffiti’. 14 Pornography is, in this
instance, very much in the eye of the beholder.
For Catherine McWilliams, the human form has
been, simply, her chief source of inspiration
for many years. 15
Studio Interior (1991) may be read as another
landmark composition in Irish painting. McWilliams
was asked to make work for a maternity hospital
in Dublin on the theme of giving birth. She decided
to document the birth of a painting, recasting
the art historical model of the virile, promethean
artist as a mother. The image has all the energy and
physicality of painting as an embodied experience.
She describes the work as ‘expressing something
about the need (to paint); I wanted it to be gestural
and painterly’. 16 The figure in the composition seems
to twist and dissolve into the brush strokes. Again,
the colour yellow foregrounds this positive energy,
the desire to inhabit the painter’s body and to make
painterly painting, where the ‘sense of the artist’s
touch … allows for a deep connection, painter to
painter.’ 17 This work is typical of a particularly
haptic quality to McWilliams’ compositions. It is
a tactile practice, where viscous paint holds the
gesture of the brush and heavy impasto work often
pushes the surface towards three dimensionality.
McWilliams’ dual relationships with the medium of
paint and the city of Belfast are co-dependent. Her
imagination is captured by local streets and urban
life. Even when her compositions deal with the
surrounding landscape – Cavehill, Black Mountain
and Divis – the artist’s viewpoint will frequently
pull in nearby housing estates, Lenadoon and
Ardoyne. McWilliams’ landscapes may be read in
opposition to twentieth century Irish painting used
to promote a nascent cultural identity. At the start
of that century, Northern Irish artists Paul Henry
and Charles Lamb journeyed into the rural west of
Ireland to depict an idealised ‘cottage landscape…
romanticised and emptied of critical contents such
6 7

as references to poverty’ 18 . Tricia Cusack relates the
folk roots of this type of painting to a pre-colonial
and pre-urban golden age that exists only in the Irish
imaginary. Fintan O’Toole describes the resulting
visual history as predicated on ‘the disappearance
of Belfast’. 19 Paul Henry’s work is defined by ‘the
that time such movement was curtailed by check
points, barricades and bodily searches conducted by
the police. Yet McWilliams chooses to paint a female
body lit from within, whose luminosity has the
capacity to dematerialise the barricade she passes
through. The artist explains,
be Gaia myself almost.’ 26 It is tempting to view
McWilliams’ treatment of the Gaia theme as another
self-portrait. The works are representative of a
powerful life force and determination, qualities
that were first present in Self Portrait (1961). In
this way her project of ‘painting as empathy’ has
a discussion with Beuys about the Free International
University. Fig. 3 in Christa-Maria Lerm Hayes, Beuys’s
Legacy in Artist-led University Projects – Tate Papers |
Tate, accessed 10/1/2022.
13 Op.cit at 1
14 ‘Angry DUP councillor claims that art gallery staged a
Pornographic Exhibition’, Lurgan Mail, 22/9/1983.
aesthetic of emptiness…wilderness is seen as innately
more noble, and infinitely more worth looking at, than
ordinary urban existence’. 20
McWilliams shatters this fallacy of a pre-colonial idyl
to insert Belfast into painting’s history, depicting
its colonial present. Ardoyne and Lenadoon are
the product of Northern Irish emergency housing
policy during the 1960s and 1970s, when swathes of
houses began to cut into the hills to form Belfast’s
edgelands. Those communities were forged through
shared experiences of deprivation and the trauma of
conflict. McWilliams’ depiction of housing estates is
in contradistinction to an aesthetics of emptiness.
The lights are on in Ardoyne and Lenadoon; boys are
playing football in a field between the houses and the
hills; life goes on, no matter what.
When McWilliams turns to the Pandora myth for
a series of works in the 1980s, she realises an
opportunity to reiterate her theme of resilience. Six
of these important paintings were selected for the
exhibition Pandora’s Box which opened at Rochdale
Museum and Art Gallery in 1984 and toured to
several regional galleries in the UK. 21 In Woman with
a Security Barrier (1983) the delicate lyricism of the
female figure contrasts formally with the dark lines
of the metal fence behind her. Jill Bennett locates
the potential of affective art as a way of processing
trauma and conflict. Bennett describes how an
artist’s relational understanding of specific sites can
reproduce ‘… a perceiving body in ways that illuminate
encounters with specific postcolonial locations’ 22 In
Woman with a Security Barrier McWilliams reproduces
her own perceiving body and her physical experience
of movement through the city during the conflict. At
I portrayed Pandora as a Belfast girl … (who) is
accepting of the greyness of the barriers and
the soldiers, they are part of her landscape.
However, she can lift herself out of it. You can
live with all that trouble as everybody did in
those days and still elevate yourself out of it. 23
In this way McWilliams’ empathetic practice opens
up a range of complex emotions for the viewer,
moving through trauma to articulate empowerment
and hope. In somehow making visible this
experiential arc, McWilliams is painting ‘something
irreducible and different, often inaccessible.’ 24 S.B.
Kennedy suggests that the Pandora series nods to
an art historical idea of Mother Ireland, however
McWilliams’ treatment of myth goes beyond such
tropes. 25 Although her female figures are absolutely
tied to an idea of land and history, her women
are always active, not passive; urban, not rural;
corporeal, not sainted.
The link between land, female figure and mythology
recurs across McWilliams’ work. She has been
interested in the legend of Tuatha Dé Danann and
Danu or Dana, the earth goddess of Celtic mythology
and first interprets Danu as a woman bringing
peace to the North. More recently the goddess has
become Gaia, highlighting environmental concerns
that have taken precedence in sculptures and
paintings. Where McWilliams’ previously saw the
Belfast hills as protective arms outstretched to
Belfast, she now urges her audience to return that
consideration. It is clear that she feels a sense
of kinship with this narrative, stating ‘I want to
come full circle. Above all, McWilliams’ late career
is testament to her enduring relationship with the
land. The artist finds her own hope through this vital
connection to place and derives a sense of peace
from her beloved Belfast hills.
‘I still walk up to Cavehill and then you’re
surrounded by the trees and you can look across
at Black Mountain, you can look across at Divis
and feel that they are there. That’s the best
part of Belfast for me.’ 27
Endnotes
1 Interview with the artist, 18.02.2022
2 Kelly, Liam. Thinking long: Contemporary art in the North of
Ireland. Vol. 3. Gandon Editions, 1996, p. 78
3 Op.cit. at 1
4 Brown, Stephen. “Central Belfast’s Security Segment: An
Urban Phenomenon.” Area 17, no. 1 (1985): 1–9. http://
www.jstor.org/stable/20002110.
5 Op.cit at 1
6 Barber, Fionna. Art in Ireland since 1910. Reaktion Books,
2013 p. 173
7 Catto, Mike, and Theo Snoddy. Art in Ulster 2: A History of
Painting, Sculpture and Printmaking, 1957-1977. Blackstaff
Press, 1977, p. 7
8 Reed, Christopher. Not at home: The suppression of
domesticity in modern art and architecture. Thames and
Hudson, 1996, p. 15
9 Op.cit. at 1
10 Davey Orr, Anne, ‘Pandora Rising From The Ashes’ in
Fortnight, 1985
11 Op.cit. at 1
12 Documenta 6 ran between 24 June and 2 October 1977.
In a photo in the Documenta Archive, Joseph, Catherine
and Jane McWilliams can be seen in the audience during
15 Black, Eileen, ‘Catherine McWilliams (née May) (Born
Belfast 10 February 1940)’, 1983, courtesy of the author.
16 Davey Orr, Anne, ‘Pandora Rising From The Ashes’ in
Fortnight, 1985
17 Fortnum, Rebecca. “Baggage reclaim: Some thoughts
on feminism and painting.” Journal of Contemporary
Painting 3.1-2 (2017): 209-232, p. 221
18 Cusack, Tricia. “A ‘countryside bright with cosy
homesteads’: Irish nationalism and the cottage
landscape.” National Identities 3.3 (2001): 221-238. p. 222
19 O’Toole, Fintan ‘The Lie of the Land’, Gallery of
Photography, Dublin, 1995
20 ibid
21 Pandora’s Box toured to the Arnolfini, Bristol, Midlands
Group, Nottingham; Ferens Art Gallery, Hull and Laing Art
Gallery, Newcastle.
22 Bennett, Jill. Empathic vision: Affect, trauma, and
contemporary art. Stanford University Press, 2005, p. 71
23 Op.cit. at 1
24 Ibid, p. 10
25 Kennedy, S.B. “Catherine McWilliams, a Retrospective
1961 - 2004” (2004) p. 13
26 Op.cit at 1
27 Ibid.
8 9

Self Portrait 1961
Oil on board
63 × 52 cm
10

Family Landscape 1970
Acrylic on paper
74 × 54 cm
12

Head with Plants & Birds 1987
Oil on board
56 × 41 cm
14

Studio Interior 1991
Oil on canvas
91 × 91 cm
16

Jane Asleep 1974
Pencil on paper
26 × 38 cm
Jane in Pyjamas 1977
Pencil on paper
40 × 40 cm
18

In Bed 1993
Oil on canvas
61 × 51 cm
Brown Bedroom Chair 1994
Oil on canvas
41 × 41 cm
20

Breakfast Table 1987
Gouache on paper
73 × 53 cm
Green Wallpaper Still life 1988
Acrylic on paper
51 × 56 cm
22

Mouldy Orange 1993
Oil on board
51 × 61 cm
Northern Ireland Civil Service Art Collection
Allotments 1967
Oil on board
52 × 63 cm
24

Bubbles 1975
Oil on board
53 × 53 cm
26

Girls & Motor Bikes 1973
Oil on board
51 × 63.5 cm
28

Grey Street 1975
Oil on board
59 × 60 cm
Sunday Tied up Swings 1975
Acrylic on paper
41.5 × 58 cm
30

School Girl Belfast 1974
Mixed media on paper
58 × 49 cm
32

School Girl 1
Pencil on paper
40 × 33 cm
School Girl 2
Pencil on paper
57 × 42 cm
School Girl 3
Pencil on paper
50 × 43 cm
34

Dark Lady 1972
Mixed media on board
48 × 29 cm
Oil on canvas
100 × 67 cm
36

Belfast Girl (Pandora) 1983
Mixed media on paper
76 × 58.5 cm
38

Irish Landscape II (Pandora’s Box Series) 1983
Mixed media on paper
56 × 73 cm
Former UTV Collection
40

Irish Landscape I (Pandora’s Box Series) 1983
Mixed media on paper
76 × 56 cm
42

Pink Nude with Stripey Towel 1988
Oil on canvas
73 × 38 cm
Showering Nude 1988
Pastel on paper
33 × 18 cm
44

Showering Nude 1 2000
Pastel on paper
33 × 18 cm
Showering Nude 2 2000
Pastel on paper
33 × 18 cm
46

Free to Fly 1979
Pencil on paper
45 × 30 cm
A Woman’s Place 1979
Pencil on paper
76 × 56 cm
48

Our Ladies Acre 1 2003
Oil on Canvas
51 × 66 cm
The Irish News Collection
50

Pink City with Football Field 2006
Oil on canvas
72 × 86 cm
Black Mountain: Lenadoon 2000
Oil on canvas
89 × 121 cm
52

Swimming into the Landscape 1979
Pencil on paper
53 × 76 cm
Dark Cloud with Bird 1980
Pencil on paper
53 × 74 cm
54

Nude with Crinoids 1979
Pencil on paper
41 × 51 cm
56

Dark & Golden Birds 1980
Mixed media on card
47 × 75 cm
58

Deck Chair 1992
Acrylic on paper
22 × 29 cm
Dinner Lady and Sink 1994
Oil on canvas
51 × 40.5 cm
60

Dinner Ladies Study no.3 1995
Acrylic on paper
20 × 35 cm
Unison
Dinner Ladies Study no.4 1995
Acrylic on paper
20 × 35 cm
Unison
62

Celtic Tree 1979
Viscosity print
50 × 25 cm
Angry Goddess with Cavehill 1986/87
Mixed media on canvas
107 × 141 cm
64

Cherry Tree 2018
Earth Goddess (Gaia) 2015
Mixed media on canvas
133 × 109 cm
Oil on canvas
120 × 80 cm
Northern Ireland Civil Service Art Collectiom
66

Misty Cave Hill 2012
Oil on canvas
61 × 76 cm
Arts Council of Northern Ireland Collection
68

Red Trees 2 2003
Oil on canvas
56 × 66 cm
Ivied Tree, Cave Hill 2004
Oil on canvas
76 × 91 cm
70

Yellow Digger, Cave Hill 1985
Acrylic on card
22 × 32 cm
Cave Hill with Traffic Lights 2001
Oil on canvas
51 × 61 cm
72

Evening North Belfast 2004
Oil on canvas
103 × 119 cm
Queen’s University Belfast Art Collection
74

Programming Committee of F.E. McWilliam Gallery & Studio:
Prof Philip Napier, Dr Suzanne Lyle, Dr Briony Widdis,
Jasper McKinney, MBE, Anne Stewart, Dr Louise Wallace,
Deirdre Quail, Christopher Hobson, Jill McEneaney and
Dr Riann Coulter.
Published by the F.E. McWilliam Gallery and Studio, January 2023
ISBN: 978-1-908455-31-4
Texts: Dr Louise Wallace and Riann Coulter
Editor: Riann Coulter
Design: Graham Rees
Print: GPS
© F.E. McWilliam Gallery, Catherine McWilliams
and the authors 2023.
F.E. McWilliam Gallery & Studio
200 Newry Road
Banbridge
BT32 3NB
T: +44 (0)28 40623322
W: www.femcwilliam.com
E: info@femcwilliam.com
Front cover (illustrated fully on page 17)
Studio Interior 1991
Oil on canvas
91 × 91 cm
76
77

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F.E. MCWILLIAM GALLERY & STUDIO