The Unsuspecting Gallery: An Investigation into Art and the Ussher

““I never understood the educational value of bare walls”, wrote George Dawson, at the inauguration of the Exhibition Hall and the Henry Moore exhibition at the then-Berkeley Library, 1967. Following a long tradition of appreciation for the arts at Trinity College comes the arrayed walls of the Ussher Library, an effort to encourage studiers, promote modern art, and beautify the space. The youngest addition to the Library Complex, the James Ussher Library first opened in 2003 as a modernist building jointly designed by McCullough Mulvin Architects and KMD Architecture. Built to provide 750 reader spaces and store more than 450,000 volumes of printed materials, the library sees an influx of students and faculty every day. What they may not pay much notice to are the unassuming pieces of artwork that decorate the space, so ingrained in the atmosphere of the Ussher and our everyday life. The pursuit to investigate the Ussher’s art began in ascending order. The first and second floors of the library did not amount to much; although a list of artworks hangs on the wall of the latter, none of the pieces listed are currently on display. The third and fourth floor was where some hope bloomed, on par with the tree-tops, for there emerged bursts of colour against the gray concrete. Prints, I found, are the most common medium in the Ussher, with oil and sculpture following, all in a contemporary style. You can expect to find everything from Fionn McCann’s “Rory” (2008), a print portrait of the drag queen Panti Bliss, to Deborah Brown’s “White on Canvas with Blue” (1962), an abstract oil on canvas donated by the estate of Professor Anne Crookshank. In their own varied vibrancy, these pieces stand apart from the downturned heads of Ussher-goers. Subjects of the artworks include the ecstatically screaming woman in Alec Soth’s “Mary” (2014) and the calming fluid motion of Colm Mac Athlaoich’s “Redland” (2017), a welcome change of pace in an environment that often feels the stressful anticipation of looming exams. It is undeniable that these pieces have the ability to lighten the mood, to motivate, or even just to serve as something nice to look at. However, this alone wouldn’t do for me. I was trying to get to the origins of these artworks, and this is where the problems first begin. In my search, I was able to locate the art, but without plaques or any source of information surrounding each artwork, it became difficult to discern important details of works of art such as those given earlier. Despite this, while leaving the fourth floor of the library I was given a clue. To my left, a bust statue of WB Stanford, Regius Professor of Greek (1940 to 80) and Pro-Chancellor (1977 to 82), stares perpetually at an unassuming A4 piece of paper hanging on the wall opposite. This page details the University Art Collections at the Ussher Library, with a small-font list of the artworks presented in the preceding reading room, a QR code and offered smartphone interactive tour. Unfortunately, the tour only details a select few artworks from the over 3,000 pieces placed around campus. However, following this crumb, I was brought to a webpage under the Trinity College website, to learn more about the University Art Collections. With acquisitions first entering the collection in 1710, Trinity has a long history of art appreciation. Modern art was first brought to the college in 1959 with the help of George Dawson, a professor of genetics. Influenced by a similar scheme in the University of Cambridge, Dawson introduced the “Art Hire Scheme” to allow students and faculty to borrow art pieces in Trinity’s collection to display in their rooms and offices on campus. A number of pieces in the Ussher are on display thanks to this scheme, but the scheme has been suspended since 2019 while the art collections have undergone renovations. Unfortunately, the University Art Collections website does not offer any further insight into the Ussher Library’s individual artworks, with the Academic and Artistic Collections last being updated in 2016, a year before some of the most current art in the Ussher was put on display. Additionally, there are still pieces in the Ussher which remain unacknowledged; a series of three seemingly related paintings stand on the far right wall of the second, third and fourth floor of the study space and depict three separate figures standing still and looking dejected. Informative labels identifying these artworks that are so distinct from the themes of the rest of the Ussher would, perhaps, enable students to more fully appreciate and understand the pieces that they encounter every day. Additionally, this would more fully recognise the artists whose works have been acquired by the University Art Collections, offering the chance to showcase the artists currently shaping our society to a diverse range of the student body. Nonetheless, the Ussher stands as a testament to the efforts of the Collections to continue staging “multi-disciplinary collections and exhibitions [that] are used as platforms for debate, for the initiation and exchange of ideas, and bringing people together”, and what better place to see such goals come to fruition than in a modern university library.

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