John P O’Sullivan meets with John Kindness ahead of his exhibition ‘Odyssey’, at the Royal Hibernian Academy
For any Irish artist taking on Homer’s Odyssey, the shadow of James Joyce looms over the project. John Kindness is a great admirer of Joyce but, when he embarked on his engagement with the Greek epic, he resisted the temptation to do what the Dubliner had done and set it in a contemporary context. He further distanced himself from Joyce by referring to his hero using the Greek form of his name, Odysseus, rather than the Roman version, Ulysses. However, when we spoke recently at his well-appointed studio near Stratford in east London, Kindness was keen to acknowledge that Joyce’s masterpiece has influenced his art and that there are connections between Joyce’s Ulysses and his ‘Odyssey’. ‘My approach to the Odyssey has very much to do with Joyce’s way of making art. He would bring in everything – every scrap of literature, technical documents, an advertising bill, a sports newspaper – right up to Shakespeare and Milton.’ Similarly, nothing is too large or too small, too mundane or too grand, to be given the unique Kindness treatment. This is a man who sees soda crackers, toilet seats, sandpaper and cab doors as vehicles for his art and who can switch for subject matter from Desperate Dan to Herakles, or from his father’s morning rituals before he set off to work at the shipyard in Belfast to the machinations of Circe as she sought to ensnare Odysseus.
Sonia Shiel turns painting on its head, writes Catherine Marshall, and her exhibition invites reflective pauses, moments to question what you have just seen
Gráinne Coughlan examines the work of Bere Island artist Mary K Sullivan
Aidan Dunne considers the work of four artists, whose paintings are on view in the atmospheric space of Rathfarnham Castle
