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Editor Enid Conway has brought together an impressive collection of talent in the first issue of her new journal Bloomers: Emerging Female Artists In Ireland. Structured around three longform illustrated essays, Bloomers dives deep into the insights that the featured artists bring to their work. Conway notes, “Female Irish Artists reconcile with a culture historically oppressive to the female identity and conjure ideas that are intimate and interrogative.” This emphasis on discussing artists’ interpretation of the external world through their own internal worlds, and how that influences their viewpoint, runs through the magazine. It’s typical of how we discuss female artists’ work. That said, the tone and content has a distinct and unapologetically feminine slant, informed explicitly by contemporary Irish feminist battles such as Repeal. With that framing, the question of whether the publication is feminist becomes moot.

Of the illustrations published, I found Repeal by Tara O’Brien, The Free Clinic by Chrissy Curtin and Princess Nokia by Dearbhla Ní Fhaoilleacháin-Ryan to be the stand-outs. O’Brien’s Repeal (the featured image with this article) depicts five women of diverse appearances standing hand-in-hand to protest for their rights. Her style makes wonderful use of flat colour-blocking and cartoony lines – I would absolutely wear this on a t-shirt. Curtin’s The Free Clinic is a view from above of an intimate, tense moment in a doctor’s office with two figures rendered in greyscale within a green and orange scene. The pencil shading is incredibly lifelike, and both the angle of the image and the unreal coloring create incredible tension. Princess Nokia is a crouching feminine figure that could almost be in a fashion editorial, but depicted in very washed-out pastel tones with blank white eyes. This use of colour seems to be typical of the examples of Ní Fhaoilleacháin-Ryan’s work, and there’s something simultaneously eerie and delicate about it that I really like.

The one downside to this very strong debut issue is that the layout does the content no favours in terms of readability, nor does it sell the magazine or its featured artists well. Producing independent print media is an ongoing struggle between generosity of content and printing cost, and Bloomers by nature requires large-format visuals. Having said that, I am fully confident that as the publication progresses, this wrinkle will be ironed out, and I’m very much looking forward to seeming more Bloomers in months to come.

 

Issue 1 features contributions by Emily O’Brien, Enid Conway, Chloe Tetrault, Linda Young, Tara O’Brien, Chrissy Curtin and Dearbhla Ní Fhaoilleacháin-Ryan, and separately discusses the work of Jeanann Moloney and Annie Forrester.

Bloomers is sold in The Library Project in Temple Bar and Pop Cafe in Cork. It is also part of the National Visual Arts Library at NCAD. Conway has also recently issued a Call For Submissions for the second issue with a deadline of 25 July.