Institution
National College of Art and Design (NCAD)
Medium
Painting
Graduation Year
Class of 2023
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‘Keep scanning and scanning, then; scanning the skies, scanningthe horizon, scanning the tremendous expanses of temporary lands,to see the future coming towards us across the fields, across thewater.’Extract from Neil Hegarty’s essay ‘Klondike’ from ImpermanenceThe places depicted in my work draw on the concept of non-place, of the‘in between’. In doing so, they foreground the sense in which thefinal composition is the result of accretion and of fusion:observing landscapes and features from several different places,and recrafting, recasting, and reimagining them through thedrawing and painting process.The large gestural compositions depict a journey. They nod towardsa place, no place, anyplace; to familiar yet ambiguous and attimes unsettling places. The loci of such (non)places are never specified. Rather, these are interstitial landscapes marked byhuman intervention. They are mundane but comfortably familiar,spaces where the human meets the natural world. These places are unpopulated, but are humanised by a structure or other featurethat suggests habitation.In this sense, my work is concerned with the subjectivity ofperception of space itself. And, by considering the role andmeaning of non-places, I foreground in particular an emerging understanding of such spaces as artefacts of human endeavour. Theyare components of the machine of modern life and the systems ofmodern existence, which can render the human as secondary to themachine.Stills captured and grabbed from research video footage act as a starting point, a basic map for a composition. In the process of making the painting invention takes over, inviting an imaginative movement beyond the confines of the canvas to a place into which the eye and the mind can travel. Journeys, in other words, are both real and metaphorical: arrivals and departures, transitions and memories provide a complex suggestiveness of metaphor, and enable the imagination to recast both the past and a range of possible futures.The work moves between monotone charcoal and graphite drawings onpaper, to large-scale rhythmic oil paintings. I consider theeffect of the material and use it to describe or suggest mood andmemory. Working between materials in this way is by its natureinherently radical: it offers, always, the possibility that unexpectedness and transformation will register upon one’s work.And in this particular context, such a process of material changealso provides a vocabulary, and takes reality away from theoriginal source of the video.The paintings’ deployment of diaphanous translucent oil veilsimply something seen or half-seen. The substance of the paintingdictates where the nuance lies and where meaning might be found.Over time, different areas are built up and made more opaque. Thesense of light, space and mood of a painting does not comenaturally but through the process of working, and often by chanceand through non-deliberate acts that are part of the evolution ofthe piece. I react to what happens during the making of apainting. I want to be intrigued and surprised and createevocative works that convey curiosity and energy.
