In Phibsboro, an artist looks a little differently at her family

In a small studio on the fourth floor of Phibsborough Tower with a window looking out onto the distant snowy Dublin Mountains, artist Lauren Conway placed a white leather bag on her desk.

Across its slightly worn, browning surface, there was a caption in green lettering: “Visit to Ireland of Pope John Paul II 1979.”

The bag belonged to Conway’s mother, Karen, also an artist.

Lauren Conway unzipped the memento and pulled out a few of its contents – old copy books, pupil journals decorated in elaborate floral illustrations, and a booklet from the mid-1980s about the band Frankie Goes To Hollywood.

She flicks through the days in one school journal, noting bus strikes, exam dates and inscrutable messages written in code, she says. “These would’ve been from when she was, like, maybe 12.”

Next, she opened a blue Adidas shoebox full of A4 sheets of paper, featuring sketches in pen and marker of esoteric symbols and mythical figures. Her younger brother did those, she said.

Finally, she opened out a series of folders and binders. They contain pages of meticulous notes on chemistry, with sketches of light absorption and emission spectra, and diagrams on the states of matter.

These notes, the works of her twin sister, Grace, were carefully colour-coded on post-its and in refill pads, in yellow, blue, off-white, pale green.

Grace’s organised notes on bio-pharmaceuticals correspond with a series of canvases which were propped up against the walls around Lauren’s studio.

These paintings, inspired by Grace’s notes, depict bookshelves and filing systems, albeit without their names on the spines, in all the colours of those charts kept in her sister’s carefully organised notes.

Together, these three archives form a triptych of projects, past and forthcoming, in which Conway explores the inner lives of these three family members.

Her latest, Draw a Card, looks at her sister’s divergent interests in chemistry, astrology and crystal healing.

In one sense, these are portraits of her family.

But they are also Conway’s attempt to understand herself, she says. “It is taking the time to consider what someone else has laboured over, is interested in, and is passionate about.”

Family portraits

From Galway, Lauren Conway first came to Dublin to study at the Institute of Art, Design and Technology in Dún Laoghaire, where she graduated in 2021.

That October, she staged her solo show, Karen, wherein she created a biography of sorts of her mother, as told through sketches, photographs, collages and found objects.

Woollen dolls. Photos of a young girl. Sketches, detailed and minimal, showing kids playing basketball and meeting then-Taoiseach Charlie Haughey at the Young Scientists Exhibition.

It was a project Conway approached nervously. But her mother was more than happy to let her use items from her own upbringing, she said. “And she made this sort of off-the-cuff remark, like ‘You might as well make a show about all of us now.’”

That didn’t seem like such a bad idea, Conway says, and so, she embarked on a collaborative drawing project with her younger brother, Damon, which she intends to exhibit next year.

The third, but second to be publicly exhibited is Draw a Card, which opens on 30 January in the Royal Hibernian Academy of Arts.

The show looks at her sister’s interests in astrology, tarot readings and crystals – in contrast to her studies of bio-pharmaceutical chemistry, she says.

“It wasn’t something Grace would talk to me about, or at least, not for a very long time,” Lauren says.

Her chemistry notepads were always lying about in the house, Grace Conway says. “I suppose the colours of the folders, how they were colour co-ordinated, how everything was extremely organised, fascinated Lauren in a way because we’re very different.”

The notes, themselves, are testaments to the things that Grace values in life, Lauren says. “It’s what she puts her energy into. It’s how she works and thinks.”

Handwriting is an intimate gesture, she says, while looking over a pink A4 sheet. “A lot of the reason I love painting is because you stand in front of painting, knowing the artist was there, whether it was 400 years old or made yesterday.”

In either case, you are close to where somebody else has been, she says.

Sisterly subject

One-by-one, Conway examines the different paintings that make up Draw a Card.

They show shelves of books, most without the titles on their spines. The locations and the information contained within the books is not disclosed, she says. “It’s like subconscious thoughts and beliefs.”

Conway juxtaposes an overabundance of information with a scarcity of it too, she says. “It’s all flattened out.”

There are greyish green book cases, and views of the rows of books hidden by other books.

Some she painted straight on to lend the impression that they are two-dimensional, and comparable to the colour-keys and spectrums created by her sister.

“The colour schemes have been changed too to relate to my sister’s pieces here,” she says, pointing at the notes on the floor.

As a general rule of thumb, when Grace was organising her notes in school, pink was to indicate chemistry, while green was used for biology, Grace says.

“It was just kinda a way to visually manage what was going on, because there was so much information to absorb,” she says.

Grace isn’t sure which of her interests – chemistry or crystals – came first, she says. But she liked the balance of the two contradictory subjects.

“One is facts and figures, where there is a right and wrong, and the mystical stuff where there is no right or wrong,” she says.

She never took the interest in mysticism too seriously, but she liked the rituals, and the variety of crystals connected in with the colour co-ordination that she deployed to arrange her more logical studies.

“They are red, orange, green, and they are all supposed to heal different parts of your chakras,” she says.

“And I’d organise them, with a little pink bag for my pink crystals and a green one for the green crystals,” she says, laughing.

As was the case with the other projects, Lauren spoke with her sister while carrying out the research process, Lauren says. “I wouldn’t necessarily say I get more information speaking to them than I do through making the work, which is the interesting part of it.”

Grace was generous with her time, she says. “But her approach to it is a professional approach. ‘I will give you these materials and you do with them what you like.’”

Being the subject of her sister’s latest exhibition hasn’t necessarily shown Grace something about herself, so much as it was a way of the pair bridging a gap between their two distinct paths in life, she says. “Because there really isn’t any overlap.”

But it is nice to see something that was carefully crafted, and never intended to be anything besides meticulous study notes, being elevated to an artistic subject, she says.

“Like, Mom is an artist. Damon is doing filmmaking. Lauren went into the fine arts. I’m very much the outlier,” Grace says.