In Phibsborough Tower, an artist reflects on her family’s past and the city’s future

Maeve Brennan gazed out the window of her studio on the fourth floor of the Phibsborough Shopping Centre.

She sat with her legs crossed in an old black office chair that was covered in dry splats of paint.

In the distance, a Ryanair plane was making its descent, getting ready to touch down at Dublin Airport, which was hidden behind rows and rows of trees lining the horizon.

Below her, a steady stream of people were marching towards Dalymount Park in their Bohemian FC jerseys, getting ready to watch the club play Cork City on Friday evening.

Football had never really interested her, she said. But she had enjoyed looking out onto the stadium since she and the 16 other artists in Richmond Road Studios relocated to the shopping centre in the autumn of 2023.

They had been evicted from their original premises in a warehouse at 1a Convent Avenue, just off Richmond Road in Fairview during the previous summer.

On one of the first evenings she was working in the shopping centre, she remembered hearing the sound of singer Johnny Logan’s voice, she says. “I was like, ‘what the hell is going on?’”

She learned Logan regularly sang his hit single ‘“Hold Me Now” before Bohs matches, she says. “So I’ve heard him singing loads of times.”

In front of Brennan was a large canvas on which she was painting a detailed portrait of her partner as he sat on a duvet-free bed, his legs crossed too, also looking out a window as sunlight poured into the bedroom.

The pair of them seemed to be mirroring each other with their heads turned in the same direction.

She’s been working on the piece for roughly 110 hours, she says. “It’ll probably take another 20.”

It also may be the last painting she is able to complete in the studios’ current temporary residence, as their licence to occupy the space is nearing its end.

The reality that this was never going to be long-term never really left the forefront of her mind, she says. “It was always the agreement and the arrangement, and the landlords have been fantastic.”

The hard thing, consistently, has been the uncertain future, she says. “You feel like you can’t rest on your laurels.”

Photo album

The thing that tends to amaze Adam Gibney about Brennan’s work, he says, is the sheer length of time she spends on each piece. “It’s impressive,” he says.

Surrounding her in her studio space overlooking Phibsborough are a range of meticulously detailed paintings, almost photo-realistic in her depiction of different scenes from life.

“All of my work is based on photographs,” she says. “I use photography almost as drawing. I don’t do much drawing. Part of that has to do with time. But part of it is how I’ve always worked.”

Seeing her paintings together feels like looking into an album of family photographs. 

One shows her mother and uncle at the dinner table. In another, titled The Child, her grandmother holds a baby in a driveway, sitting on the tailgate of a camper van.

“My sister is The Child,” Brennan says.

Brennan was raised in Swords, and remembers her dad taking many, many photos, she says. “We grew up with a lot of family photos, and in a way, your own memories become blurred with the photographs of the memories.”

The vulnerability of people in these pictures always fascinated her, she says. “My grandparents didn’t have outdoor furniture. They’d sit on the back of a caravan, and she hated having her photo taken, so she would never pose.”

Just below The Child is a slightly more impressionistic painting titled Sluice, depicting a male figure swimming in a river, surrounded by ripples and indistinct items reflecting on the surface.

It’s her grandfather swimming in the King’s River in Kells, a village in rural south Kilkenny, she says. “My grandfather’s family go back a little bit in that area. My grandmother’s family go back for generations.”

She was merging a number of images in that work, she says. “I went back to roughly the same place where these images were taken by my grandfather’s sister.”

Sluice combines those old photographs of him swimming with ones Brennan took later, she says. “I tried to overlap them.”

It was about trying to capture the deeper ties that her family has to that place, she says. “There was a real sense of place that I mightn’t have felt where I did grow up, this connection to the land, the buildings, the roads that were walked by my ancestors.”

Stills from an eviction

On the wall opposite to the studio’s window is a self-portrait of Brennan herself.

It depicts her in a red, white, green and yellow floral dress, sitting on an orange couch against a backdrop of a grey brick wall and double door, which is kept closed by a metal bar placed across it.

She crosses her legs and looks off to the side. Her complexion is pale in comparison to a self-portrait beside it in which her skin tones are glowingly warm.

The scene itself wouldn’t suggest any underlying conflict. But the title, Eviction Day, makes its context immediately clear.

She had been in Richmond Road’s original studios for 17 years before the artist-run space was served its eviction notice in April 2022, she says. “Then we were out of the building by the July.”

Her reference for the painting was a photograph, she says. “That was taken on the morning. I set up the tripod and took a whole load of photos. I liked that day, funnily enough.”

The lighting was different, she says. “It was falling in a way that gave this almost blueish look.”

Propped up against the walls around the room are three more canvases, these ones depicting empty rooms. One has a plastic chair below a window, with glimpses of corrugated warehouse roofs outside.

The others show similar interiors, with spare items of furniture, a tall wooden cupboard, a small school desk, a greyish set of shelves in a warehouse room.

Similar to her grandparents’ home, the warehouse studio was a familiar space that had been in her life for a long time, she says. 

“There was this funny feeling of regret in there. I didn’t do those paintings. I meant to put plants into the studio and make it look nicer,” she says.

At the very end, she had this urge to document the space as the door was closing, she said. “Time sped up. I wanted to remember it and how the light fell, because you’re like: well I’m not ever coming back in here.”

No clear future

There’s a shortage of artists’ studios in the city. 

In an effort to increase the number of cultural facilities, Dublin City Council included in its 2022 to 2028 development plan a “five per cent” policy requiring developers to include community and cultural spaces in its larger apartment complexes.

But the policy was scrapped after the Department of Housing published its new guidelines for design standards in July.

There is still the possibility that the Richmond Road artists may one day return to the place from where their name is derived.

In April 2023, developer Malkey Limited was granted permission by Dublin City Council to redevelop the former Leydens Wholesalers and Distributors – where the studios were located – as 133 apartments.

The mixed-use development also included artist studios. But a spokesperson for Malkey did not comment when asked on Monday if they had a timeline for the large-scale residential development.

The artists are still waiting to hear about that, Gibney says. “Everything feels a bit in limbo right now.”

That is a worry now, Gibney says. “We’re hoping that still goes ahead.”

The lack of a distinct future in any given studio is something Brennan contemplates as she works on this current study of her partner sitting calmly on their bed, she says. “It’s a strange one. If I learned anything from the mayhem of the last space, it’s that I became saturated by stress and then it disappeared.”

It was a daily routine of not knowing what would unfold next, she says. “And you learn to just go one day at a time, and as I do this painting, I know that whatever happens, I can work in my tiny kitchen. I know I’ll have the perseverance to keep going as best as I can.”