An artist draws inspiration from the tangled peace of a Donabate forest

A papier-mâché deer head hung on a coat rack just inside the doorway to Nicole Manning’s studio, in the back of Draíocht, the arts centre in Blanchardstown.

Its paint-black eyes and snout looked up to the roof. Its antlers resembled grasping branches. 

Beside it, on the next hook over, was a skull cap. It too was made from papier-mâché, although the shreds of newspaper weren’t painted. 

It also had antlers. But pointed down to the ground this time, like the branches of a bare willow.

Taped to the white walls and scattered across the paint-splattered concrete floor were A4 print-outs of Manning, wearing or clutching these hand-made headpieces inside a derelict cottage.

They were reference photos for Manning’s paintings. 

In them, with earthy colours and heavy brushstrokes, the artist depicts herself with antlers as she reaches into an old cupboard, or cradles the deer’s head as she crouches bare-foot in a forest.

The headpieces aren’t meant for public display, she said on Wednesday afternoon. “It’s an important part of the process, the hand crafting of everything.”

It’s nice to slow down the creative process, she says, pointing to the deer’s head on the opposite side of the room to her workdesk. “That bastard took a month and a half to make. I was constantly trialling and erroring these balloons that popped.”

Taking elaborate steps to stage the scene that will be captured in oil paints makes the actual task of painting far more personal, she says.

Play is also important to all this, she says. “I think the whole point is to allow myself to be a kid.”

Manning’s work is rooted in her experience of living with post-traumatic stress disorder and how that manifested as chronic stomach pain.

“So much of my teenagehood was stripped away pretty early,” she says. “I never really allowed myself to be this kid. So, I think that’s what has become important to me.”

Woodland creatures

Manning sat cross-legged on an old office chair next to her work desk. 

On it were notebooks, books about artists and one about the connection between the mind and the stomach, a few coffee cups and paint brushes.

The studio – in which she was the artist-in-residence for August – smelled faintly of fresh oil paint. Jazz floated from a portable bluetooth speaker.

Propped on the radiator nearby was a square self-portrait of Manning. Her skin tones are striking, a blend of brownish reds and greyish pinks, all thickly applied to the canvas.

The character in the piece sits under a tree, next to a dining table set with a white cloth. In the background is a thicket of fiery red trees.

Manning grew up in the coastal village of Donabate and adores the nature there. 

Chiefly the wooded areas in places like the 370-acre regional park on the grounds of Newbridge House and Farm, she says, swiveling about in her chair. “Me and my mum would go on walks, like two or three times a week.”

Her mum would ask the same question: beach or park. “I would always hit the park. Like, didn’t give a fuck about the beach. Get me into those trees,” says Manning.

It was the feeling of seclusion, and the wealth of life hidden in the forest, she says. “Woodland creatures. Hibernation. This sense of being lost.”

It also felt like a place that overlapped symbolically with the experience of trying to get a medical diagnosis for a condition, she says. 

“To struggle with something consistently, but yet nobody realises, so it’s this constant feeling of shouting into a void,” she says.

“A sound is still a sound around no one,” she says, quoting the lyric from Fiona Apple song “I Want You To Love Me”.

That answer to the rhetorical question of whether a tree falling in the woods is one that relates a lot to the experience of a trauma, she says. 

Visceral forest

On the studio wall which held up the coat hooks, Manning had hung a work-in-progress spanning three rectangular canvases.

It captured a woman wearing a white Victorian dress as she lay between a pair of trees.

Manning approaches the idea of the forest as a place with dual metaphors. 

It was a place of solace, she says. “Like, it was always something I felt comfortable within. Whenever I was struggling, I would always be with the trees.”

But the twisting of tree branches also captures the feeling of stomach pain, she says. “The tree branches to me always looked like intestines. Those similarities between human nature and worldly nature are interesting to me.”

Now 23 years old, Manning has dealt with chronic stomach pain for eight years, she says. “I struggled with mental illness, and that started to come about physically.”

That pain became almost constant by the time she had enrolled as a student in the National College of Art and Design, she says. “It only took until I got to a psychiatrist to be told you have PTSD, and that’s what your stomach’s a symptom of.”

The motif of deer-like figures links into this too, she says. Their antlers mirror the branches of trees. 

She is obsessed with deer, she says. “I always wished I was one.”

They symbolise hypervigilance, she says, before pointing out that that alertness is also a symptom of PTSD.

Manning had decorated the thin glass pane in the middle of the door into her studio with a strip of accordion-folded paper. She had also lowered all the white blinds to cover windows.

She tends to keep them down, she says. “I just can’t deal with somebody jumping up. I’m always, always alert. Any noise, any rustling.”

The forest is both a place of tranquility and danger, and that duality is a constant in Manning’s body of work, she says. “The forest can be a la-di-dah fairyland, and realistically there could be anything behind any tree.”

It is safety and the lack thereof, or the finding of strength in fragility that fascinates her, she says. “That’s the experience of living with chronic pain. You have to surrender to an element of vulnerability that’s inevitable and the strength that comes with that.”