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Tori Mulhern is a talented painter and draftswoman. She has the uncanny ability to render portraits by magnificently capturing an individual’s physical likeness while infusing them with a palpable sense of being, drawing forth something soulful. An observant viewer is likely to pick up something in a smile or a gesture that seems vital and personal, as if she has pegged their spirit.
But for a period of time, she put it all aside. On Feb. 28, 2020, Mulhern’s cousin Celia Sweeney was the victim of a senseless and brutal murder in Charleston, South Carolina. She was 28. That tragedy and the black cloud of grief that accompanied it caused Mulhern to step away from artmaking, considering it too frivolous and self-indulgent.
Instead, the 2016 University of Massachusetts Dartmouth BFA graduate chose to focus on gardening, an activity in which participation itself is life-affirming. She also made a point of nurturing old relationships and cultivating new ones, not easily obtained objectives in an era of global pandemic.
Mulhern has done a series of portraits that she considers a meditation on gratitude in order to confront the inevitability of death.
Nevertheless, she persisted. She began working at Sakonnet Garden in Little Compton, Rhode Island, and it soon became more than a workplace: it had become a place of solace.
Under the mentorship of the private garden’s owners, Mikel Folcarelli and Johnny Gwynne, it became a sanctuary for Mulhern. And in a way, it was a meandering path back to art.
She currently has a painting exhibition called “While We’re Here” on display at the Co-Creative Center. She invites visitors to stroll with her through the Sakonnet Garden of her mind, a place of connected rooms and landscapes where relationships are remembered and compartmentalized and overlapped.
Mulhern has done a series of portraits that she considers a meditation on gratitude in order to confront the inevitability of death. She pays respect to those she loves and that she feels blessed to share time with by confronting fear and acknowledging the beauty of the present moment.
Nine large scale oil paintings hang in the space. There is a genesis point, so to speak, and that is the painting of her cousin, the only one that is not a traditional portrait. Instead, Celia is a tiny figure at the end of a straight planked walking path, playing with her little black dog Raider.
Surely, it is just a coincidence but in many cultures, a black dog is associated with death and the unknown.
The painting, called “Celia: Black. Cloudbusting,” is soft-focused and dreamily transient. It is a symbolic and literal passageway toward the light, to a better beyond. And like a dream, the details dissipate into the aether. But it suggests that Celia has found peace, even if it was too soon.
All but one of the remaining eight paintings were derived from photographs and/or video footage and all but one of those were taken at Sakonnet Garden.
The odd one out is “Mark: On the Threshold,” a portrait of her Taunton art studiomate and old friend Mark Phelan, an accomplished painter, sculptor and motorhead. He relaxes in a chair, in front of a door open to the woods behind him. A husky man with a grizzly and graying beard, Clark Kent glasses and a bottle of beer in his hand, he is clearly a rock for Mulhern; someone she can always depend on.
Phelan’s wife, also a good friend of Mulhern, is the subject in “Becky: Yellow. Radiant Healer.” She is radiant and goddess-like, her auburn hair, orange blouse and crimson skirt popping against an almost too-rich verdant landscape. With one arm cocked over her head, her elbow could not be contained within the rectangle of the painting, so the artist cleverly added a small panel to accommodate the errant joint.
Mulhern told me that her sister is known within the family as “the notorious dancer.” Her portrait, titled “Amy: Punchbowl. Dance This Mess Around,” confirms the reputation, as her long hair flies around her head and her arms vibrate in frantic motion. She is pregnant and her belly, swollen with child, is clad in shades of swirling blue. She is a vibrant Earth Mother, dancing to a classic B-52’s song.
“Aram, Jr.: Fernie. Proven Winner” is a portrait of her toddler nephew, the son of her older brother. (Aram Sr. and Amy are twins.) The boy happily crawls through the vibrant ferns, in a striped zippered hoodie, propelled by excitement and curiosity. Wearing blue eyeglasses and sprouting tufts of hair as he emerges from baby baldness, he beams with pure joyfulness.
Mulhern also exhibits a dual portrait of her parents, Bob and Kathy, a mechanical engineer and a retired marketing professional, respectively. In “Mom and Dad: Moss. I Will Follow” the middle-aged couple sit on two green chairs on a gravel path with a stone wall and a charmingly gnarly tree behind them.
They smile at their daughter with pride and affection. Bob has an arm around his wife and Kathy affectionately rests a hand on his thigh. It is sweet and simple and speaks volumes about years of devotion and mature love.
Folcarelli and Gwynne are each the subject of their own portrait. As noted, they are more than a couple of guys that Mulhern works for. They are her caring mentors. She spoke of Folcarelli making her a sandwich everyday, and of Gwynne educating her in the ways of plant design and garden composition.
In “Mikel: Veg. What are You Gonna Wear?,” Folcarelli wears a fluorescent woolen orange cap and a dusty mauve scarf, appearing both jaunty and casual. Positioned in front of a distant pink sunset, he radiates warmth. With confidence, a gleam in his eyes and a trim full white beard, he is fully in his element.
Gwynne wears a wide-brimmed straw hat and a tattered or paint-splattered (or both) sweatshirt and holds a hoe like a scepter, which casts an emblematic shadow across his chest. “Johnny: Orange. This is Gonna be the Best Year Ever” is almost mythic in its presence.
The strangest painting in the exhibition is “Pat. Tropics. Are You Gauguinna Go My Way?” It is Mulhern’s portrait of her boyfriend wearing shorts and a tank top and lying in a supine position on a lush green bed. The reference to Paul Gauguin’s Tahiti paintings is apt, given the almost tropical vibe of the image, but it also clearly nods to Manet’s “Olympia.”
Either way, it subverts the traditional notion of the male gaze by flipping it on its head. Mulhern instead makes it about the far less-discussed female gaze and does it successfully enough that Pat’s father said, assumedly half-jokingly, that he wished he hadn’t seen the painting, which made him a wee bit uncomfortable.
With the exception of the Mark Phelan portrait, all the paintings were done between December 2023 and February. All were a response to tragedy and a long mourning.
Grief lives in the heart forever and makes itself manifest at inconvenient or unexpected moments. But Mulhern has done something in this series. The death of her cousin looms large but she has found light.
A boss who makes her sandwiches. A woman warmly resting her hand on her husband’s lap. A cold bottle of beer in a friend’s grasp. A toddler crawling in the grass, a baby kicking in the womb of a dancing mama. Sunset. Music. Friendship, affection, family. The love and silliness of love.
There is a path forward.
There will be a closing reception for Mulhern’s “While We’re Here” at the Co-Creative Center, 137 Union Street, New Bedford on Friday, March 29, from 6-8 p.m.
Don Wilkinson has been writing art reviews, artist profiles and cultural commentary on the South Coast for over a decade. He has been published in local newspapers and regional art magazines. He is a graduate of the Swain School of Design and the CVPA at UMass Dartmouth. Email him at dwilkinson@newbedfordlight.org
