JENNIFER TROUTON AND SIAN COSTELLO DISCUSS THEIR APPROACHES TO PAINTING AND THEIR RESPECTIVE EXHIBITIONS AT ORMSTON HOUSE.

Jennifer Trouton: My painting practice is informed by my interest in the historical devaluing of female artists and the genres which they, through lack of access, were forced to accept. Many years ago, I read a quote by founding member of the Royal Academy of Arts, Sir Joshua Reynolds: “Let men busy themselves with all that has to do with great art… let women occupy themselves with… the painting of flowers.”¹ This propelled me towards female painters like Vanessa Bell, Angelica Kauffman, and Rachel Ruysch. This in turn led to my making of coded contemporary still life paintings that narrate the history of women’s lived experiences through the objects and spaces that bore witness to their lives. I believe our practices have feminist concerns at their core, but where I explore spaces and objects, you explore the female form, reframing its role in art history.

Sian Costello: I love how your use of the still life reflects simultaneously on both the absence and the ever-presence of women throughout art history and contemporary society. I frequently use paintings from the Baroque and Rococo periods as reference material and am fascinated by the role of the artist’s model as a widely uncredited collaborator in the creation of these acclaimed and influential works of art. I see this as an extension of the wider trivialisation of feminine labour. In my paintings, I use my own body as model to reassess the physical work involved in maintaining a pose, and inverting the established power dynamic between artist, model, and viewer. 

JT: I spend months, even years, researching and developing my imagery before approaching a canvas. For me, beginning the painting feels like a final step, as most of the decision-making has already been done. But I look at your work and get a real sense of energy and playfulness, which makes me think that the physical act of painting is much closer to the start of your creative process. Your brushstrokes suggest a more intuitive approach.

SC: I am always trying to paint from the gut. I’m usually unsure of how the painting is going to look at the end, but rather, I enjoy the process of figuring out how to respond to each new mark laid down. I build my paintings in layers, from a pastel under drawing on raw canvas, through to the gesso, and then the oil paint has to be strategically placed on the more primed areas. It’s my way of holding on to that impulse to paint through every stage of the making, but it can also result in a heap of frustration and lost time. Sometimes I wish I had a more reliable process, but in all honesty, I think I’d start breaking away from it as soon as I’d have it established!

JT: Titles are something we both agree are important in the presentation of our work. I find untitled works frustrating and even disappointing. For me, titles are the first signpost in reading an image. I think of my paintings as maps and the titles are clues to be decoded. I spend a lot of time considering them. Sometimes they come at the beginning, the middle, or the end of the process, but they are never rushed or an afterthought.

SC: I’ve come to use titles as a way of signalling something abstract in my imagery. I like to use the sounds of the words like another brushstroke, a layer that engages the viewer’s tongue and triggers a memory, transporting them to somewhere other than in front of my painting. All the better if the effect is humorous; for example, my 2023 painting series, ‘Le Gubbeen’, was based on Jean-Honoré Fragonard’s late-Rococo painting, La Gimblette (1770). There is something very funny and indelicate about cheese.

JT: How do you feel about the role of beauty in your work? I often refer to my work as aesthetically pleasing, but rarely beautiful. I struggle with beauty as it is too often linked to femininity and so not seen as a serious artistic concern. Referring to something as beautiful can potentially diminish its strength and reduce it to a decorative craft, which the feminist in me abhors. I deliberately create attractive still life paintings and employ colour palettes that evoke a sense of nostalgia. This is to draw in my audience before asking them to also consider the uncomfortable realities contained within. The punch is contained within the beauty. 

SC: The subject matter that I deal with directly engages with the pursuit of beauty in the history of figurative art. I’m interested in who benefits from the construction of beauty, and what happens when society turns on what it once held in esteemed ‘good taste’. I’m particularly pleased with a painting when I feel it’s teetering on the edge of something beautiful and something disgusting, like the sheen on a glossy head of hair, which upon closer inspection, appears greasy and unwashed. 

JT: As an artist in my 50s, I’m keenly aware that my education and early career were electronically different from yours. I was unburdened by the wealth of information, imagery and opportunities that today’s superfast internet brings. And I’m not sure if I would have found my own style or voice in the context of all that external noise. As a Gen Z artist, how has the internet and social media impacted on your practice, for good or bad?

SC: I graduated at the beginning of the pandemic and so felt particularly vulnerable to the pressures of pleasing an audience and establishing a consistent brand early on. That being said, social media has been very kind to me, and opened up opportunities that I would never have been able to access without major art world connections in big cities. Things feel more democratic now, but I know it’s important to stay connected to real-world communities. I think that is key to maintaining any kind of longevity in the arts after college.

Jennifer Trouton is an artist based in Queen Street Studios in Belfast. Her forthcoming exhibition, ‘In Plain Sight’, will run at The RHA from 5 September to 5 October 2024. 

jennifertrouton.com

Sian Costello is an artist who works from James Street Artists’ Studios in Limerick. Her recent solo exhibition, ‘Hot Child’, was presented at Ormston House from 26 July to 31 August 2024.

@siancostelloart

¹ Norman Bryson, Looking At the Overlooked: Four Essays on Still Life Painting (London: Reaktion Books, 1990) 

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Cork-born artist George Bolster is based in New York City, with a studio just south of the historic Prospect Park in Brooklyn. Establishing a formidable career since the days of art school in his native city in the 1990s, Bolster’s resume speaks as much to how artists now function professionally as to his particular gifts. His profile is transnational with regular exhibitions in Europe as well as the US; when we spoke, he had just opened a solo at Uillinn: West Cork Arts Centre. Bolster’s work has become increasingly interdisciplinary and collaborative, and he is resolutely involved in theories and ideas – a concern with research that has come to underwrite much contemporary art. The artist has also has completed a number of important residencies and a major monograph of his practice, When Will We Recognize Us, will be published by Hirmer Verlag this year. Our paths first crossed at art school back in the day. I am interested to know how Bolster became the artist he now is, and what he thinks about the influences that shaped him.

Brian Curtin: What was your experience of art education in the 1990s – for example, the emergence of the influence of theoretical writings and a shift towards research-based practice?

George Bolster: I studied painting at Crawford and Chelsea colleges, and it is telling that I didn’t do any painting at the latter. In Cork the teaching was formalist and there seemed to be a fear of talking about art. But in London there was much more interest in art discourse. When I began at Chelsea, I was defensive because of my earlier experience, to the point that tutors took me aside and told me they were there to help me! I relaxed and taught myself to be supportive and constructive not dismissive. I was nicknamed Tristram Shandy, a figure of eccentricity. 

I initially encountered theory through reading publications by Zone Books and this led me to conceptual art. But, with conceptualism, I felt there was a flattening of the poetic with a dry language and execution. Ideas of research-based practice became more appealing and a lot of my work has consequently been collaborative, whether working with musicians or scientists. With conceptualism, I felt restricted, though that may just be me!

BC: What was the London art scene like when you graduated?

GB: It was the time of the YBAs (Young British Artists) who had come from Goldsmiths as I was finishing my MA at Central Saint Martin’s. Goldsmiths’ graduates got most of the attention, with art dealers at their graduation shows, but I did exhibit at smaller, alternative venues including screenings at Chisenhale Gallery. 

I never felt like a British artist, which was the brand, and had a problem with the term being celebrated due to colonial history. I didn’t try to fit in.

BC: A longer interview could unpack that. But at what point did you shift from ‘recent graduate’ to professional?

GB: I curated an international group exhibition ‘Multiplicity’ at Fota House in Cork in 2004 with Arts Council funding. This project continued for over a year because the final venue was Derry’s Context Gallery. Through this experience, I developed practical skills in all aspects of art administration, including pre-emptive problem-solving. ‘Multiplicity’ gave me a sense of being proactive and building community – something I had always yearned for, as being an artist can be lonely.

BC: How did your move to the US in 2008 play out in this respect?

GB: I initially moved to San Diego and responded to the sharp change by curating TULCA Festival of Visual Arts in Galway, which I titled ‘i-Podism: Cultural Promiscuity in the Age of Consumption.’ I worked with artists whose work had impacted me during my move, with the iPod as a metaphor for a personal digital library of important sights. It was also an auto-critique of the figure of the curator by removing any implicit sense of objectivity and embracing subjectivity – again, being proactive while pushing against expectations of who or what we are. Moving to the US was also important because I began the shift away from the deconstruction of Christian imagery in my early work.

BC: Was there a catalyst for that?

GB: I completed the Robert Rauschenberg Residency and then a residency at the SETI Institute – an organisation that investigates extraterrestrial life. I discovered Rauschenberg’s environmental activism in the 1960s and how, alongside Warhol and others, he created the ‘Moon Museum’ which was attached to Apollo 12 in 1969. I then visited NASA to research a project that digitises pre-Apollo mappings of the moon and began to further wonder about the conservation of artworks for the future. This project was housed in an old McDonald’s building because the ventilation system was perfect for archival storage. Essentially, I became interested in the need for us to evolve less damaging forms of technology for our cultural longevity in the universe. 

BC: The installations you recently showed at Uillin: West Cork Arts Centre use large Jacquard tapestries with epic landscape imagery.

GB: I began with Jacquard in 2014 but the early experiments failed, and I returned to the medium in 2017. Back to your question about research, during the time of the residences, I met a scientist who spoke about the importance of failure in experiments. The concept of failure as a requirement for discovery gave me a more profound insight into, say, da Vinci than any study of art history ever could. 

The Jacquard machine was the basis of computational language, a process of programming resulting in something akin to an analogue/digital image. I am interested in making a virtue of glitches, staging a sort of dysfunctional relationship between myself and the machine which is analogous of human relationships to the environment.

BC: Finally, how have your evolving interests affected you personally? During your introductory talk with Seán Kissane at Uillinn, you looped back to religion. 

GB: I grew up in an atheist household. Religion depoliticises how you interact with the environment. If you think you’ll go to heaven, why care about the planet now? Belief, or unquestioned knowledge, causes us to stagnate, to exist in stasis. And, let’s face it, humans are a lot older than their gods. 

George Bolster’s solo exhibition ‘Communication: We Are Not The Only Ones Talking…’ ran at Uillinn: West Cork Arts Centre from 7 January to 11 February. 

georgebolster.info

Brian Curtin is an Irish-born art critic based in Bangkok. He is the author of Essential Desires: Contemporary Art in Thailand (Reaktion Books, 2021). 

brianacurtin.com

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Miguel Amado: In your projects, you seem equally invested in enabling reflection about your own identity and bringing different people together. Would you agree?

Alice Rekab: I think that’s really astute. In the Ireland I grew up in, I was very much in the minority in a lot of ways. I didn’t have any mixed-race friends at all, even when I went to college. It was only when I moved to London to do my PhD that I met other artists of various heritages who were making work – or even just looking at the world – through the lens of being mixed race.

MA: Ireland was very culturally homogeneous in the 1990s.

AR: I distinctly remember being 12 or 13 years old and suddenly seeing other Black people in Ireland for the first time – for example, a woman at the back of the bus that I couldn’t identify. I recall wanting to speak about that, but also feeling this strange sense of alienation, because obviously there aren’t that many Sierra Leonians in Ireland, and I had no way of knowing which part of Africa the woman was from or had connections with. Navigating all the nuance of difference and African-ness was a learning process, particularly as a young person growing up in a mono-racial society.

MA: Your recent project, ‘Family Lines’, which included an exhibition at The Douglas Hyde and multiple events in and beyond the gallery during 2022, engaged with this inquiry in two ways: conceptually, through your works, and practically, at grassroots level, as you facilitated encounters with others.

AR: ‘Family Lines’ was about an internal, subjective conversation that happens through clay, the paintings, the images, the albums. It constituted a place of self-discovery, something deeply personal that then becomes political. But it was also about making a space to share my experience, specifically of intergenerational migration, as much as enable its examination with and through multiple voices. Thus, it also allowed me to reach out to a community with whom I wanted to connect and enable the public to engage with.

MA: It is as if the project operated as a platform not only for your works, which engage with underrepresented narratives, but also for Black Irish creatives, who are still part of those same underrepresented narratives.

AR: My aim was for them to be heard by others and to be heard by one another, showing that one’s voice isn’t the only voice – that one is not alone – and understanding that the conversations we have with one another are a way of dealing with invisibility or erasure. When you are raised in the West, a lot of ignorance is ingrained in you, because we’re not taught otherwise. I didn’t learn anything about my father’s family, or what Sierra Leone was, or about West Africa through school. And if who one is does not matter, that has an impact on one’s sense of belonging.

MA: This is why you often talk about the emotional and intellectual impact of your first visit to Sierra Leone in 2009.

AR: I always knew I was Irish Sierra Leonian because I had a close relationship with my grandmother, but that was in the vacuum of mono-racial Ireland, and thus I only understood my heritage in relation to her. The first time I went to Sierra Leone, I was in her company, and that was the moment I realised I was Irish Sierra Leonian in relation to her within a Black majority context. That was revelatory yet difficult, as I became aware of the complexity of my light skin tone. When people there looked at me, they didn’t see a mixed-race person, even if I spoke Creole or understood the nuances of local behavior. And I also became aware of the privilege I had, just from having been born in Ireland. So that trip was the catalyst for the consciousness of being myself, appearing to me in a mirror larger than the borders of my inner world.

MA: You seem to translate this experience into your works, whether they are 3D pieces, paintings, or digitally collaged lens-based imagery, and particularly when you use materials such as clay.

AR: The use of clay emerges directly from my body and from the subconscious as something that is almost impossible to articulate verbally. The material enables that which feels outside of language to manifest physically, as it has this kind of primeval quality. The animals I sculpt are my interpretations of the souvenirs that were in my home, objects that had been brought over by my father’s family in the 1960s as symbols of their culture. They allow me to critically examine mainstream Western representations of Africa as a place where wild and unknown things live, as I play with the emergence of an African tourist industry for the Western gaze and the need for immigrants to connect with their geographies of origin through material culture.

The idea of mapping ways of understanding – that’s where the paintings come in. I use boards, sometimes reclaimed, as the surfaces onto which I apply a mixture of clay, images, and oil stick, and there’s a lot of cutting and texturising, which in a way operates like a sort of fractured, temporal diagram of life. For instance, Our Common Ancestor: Five Panels of Enmeshed Historical Narrative (2022), which was on view at The Douglas Hyde, suggests a quantum timeline in which different times are superimposed on one another and create meshes that get read through in different ways; they are a short-circuiting of human history and personal and cosmic histories. There are these master stories, but there are also intimate ones – for example, a miniature picture of my grandmother sitting solitary at a table next to a vast depiction of a fossil and a stellar explosion. Certain stories are valued differently, depending on your proximity to them.

The digital collages reconfigure all the elements. They often feature family photographs, which I may bring together with other images. And then there’s a digital drawing aspect that creates the links – both literally and symbolically – as well as areas of intensity through mark-making of what seem like coronas around certain figures or objects, as a means to bring to life dear people or beloved animals that are dead.

MA: Your latest exhibition, ‘Mehrfamilienhaus’, is on view at Museum Villa Stuck in Munich, and features works that, while speaking to the core of your concerns, look at new areas of interest.

AR: ‘Mehrfamilienhaus’, or ‘A Home to More Than One Family’, continues my exploration of the family unit, but expands it in dialogue with this site, Villa Stuck, which was an artist’s house, and where other artists now exhibit. I produced this exhibition while in residence in Munich in the summers of 2021 and 2022. Thus, I am reflecting on the notion of being a transplant, of being brought into a location and trying to establish a connection with its people and territory. I am also exploring questions of artistic inheritance – for example, what it means to be the child of an artist, or to live with an artist. At Villa Stuck, Franz von Stuck’s studio was the grandiose room, while the family’s living quarters were modest. In my home, my father’s studio was in our front room, and when he was working, he couldn’t be spoken to, no matter what was happening. So I am looking at this tension between art and life, and the psychology of being an artist. And thinking about Villa Stuck as a home to more than one family: the von Stuck family’s story and presence within the architecture, and my family’s story, which I intertwine with that one.

MA: So you are very intentionally engaging with a house that belonged to an artist, and considering dialogues between artists and generations, while keeping your key themes – mixed-race identity through African heritage, migration, displacement, monoculture – in tension as well, although perhaps less overtly.

AR: Bavaria is white, wealthy, and conservative. I am curious to see how the team at Villa Stuck facilitates engagement with African communities in the city. In the circles I moved around, while in residence in Munich, I haven’t heard questions of diversity or the experience of being a migrant. On the other hand, engaging with something as intimate as ‘home’– as an architecture, a territory – is a political statement. In the West, there is a conversation, if not an understanding, among professionals and certain audience segments  around the historic subalternisation of practices that do not adhere to the modernist framework, which is a Western framework. But whether this conversation could connect with broader issues in Munich (and anywhere in Germany or the rest of Europe) as an environment for migrants, remains to be seen. That is the common task to which I hope to contribute.

Miguel Amado is a curator and critic, and director of SIRIUS in Cobh, County Cork.

siriusartscentre.ie

Alice Rekab is an artist based in Dublin.

alicerekab.com

Rekab’s solo exhibition, ‘Mehrfamilienhaus’, continues at Museum Villa Stuck in Munich until 14 May.

villastuck.de

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Renèe Helèna Browne is a self-described ‘teenage fanboy’. The diverse modes of their practice – which include writing, sound, film and sculpture, often taking an autobiographical approach – are underpinned by fandom as a means of constructing identity. Rooted in writing, their work is also about language and how gender and class are inherently inscribed in the sounds we utter. Originally from Donegal and currently based in Glasgow, Browne has a research-based practice with many institutional ties, having just been announced as Talbot Rice Resident Artist with Edinburgh College of Art at the University of Edinburgh, and having also been a Research Associate with the Centre for Contemporary Art Derry~Londonderry last year. In recent work, Browne adeptly mobilises text, image and sound to create montages that persistently reflect on ideas of trans embodiment, masculinity and voice. 

Browne’s video essays combine a broad range of filmic devices, creating multi-layered narratives. A recent moving-image work, Daddy’s Boy (2020) – shown at Berwick Film and Media Festival and aemi screenings – explores ideas of hegemonic masculinity through collaged video footage of Browne’s father, who goes about his business on the family farm with a bland acquiescence to the camera’s gaze. Part recorded during lockdown in rural Donegal and part assembled from a larger archive Browne had unconsciously been building over time, the film is layered with the artist’s lyrical voiceover, describing their fascination with the popular film classic, Jurassic Park, and in particular, the T-Rex. 

Throughout the film, Browne’s fandom operates as a means of self-critique. Browne’s queer identification with and adoration of the monstrous creature of T-Rex is a vehicle through which the artist is able to reflect upon and perform their own (conflicted) gender identity and learned masculinity. As Browne moulds a T-Rex into form with pink and orange plasticine, the object of desire is identified and possessed through this act of moulding. Combined with the footage of Browne’s father – a manifestation of their desire to be the archetypal lone, self-sufficient, unquestioned male – fandom becomes a way into trans identification, presenting the viewer with a portrayal of a desired mode of behaviour; a masculinity that is innate and non-performative. Jealousy, desire and idolisation operate at a level where these impulses collapse into one another, creating a collage of trans embodiment.

The use of popular film, music and television references as a means to construct identity is used throughout the artist’s practice, not as an act of homage but deconstruction. In Sacred Disease (2019), a video essay shown as part of Browne’s MFA degree show in Glasgow, the artist describes and breaks down a scene from the 90s series, Sex and the City, in which the character Samantha gorges on a cookie that says, ‘I love you’, making herself ill. In conversation over Zoom from Glasgow, Browne confides: “I really feel so deeply affected by fiction. I’m really interested in how it operates, the visual mechanics of it and breaking those things down.” Making work around the subjects they’re enamoured with is a means of being close to the objects of desire that Browne can’t access. “Fiction can do so much more than laborious, heavy cold theory and has its own voice.”

In A Wall or Bridge Disappears Abruptly at the Hinge (2019), Browne utilises fandom as a way of reworking canonised icons, histories and objects to reveal what might be missing in more conventional approaches. In a text, written about, to and with Eileen Gray and her work Le Destin, a four-panel lacquered screen, Browne mines the images of the work and its maker. Throughout the text, written towards the end of their MFA, a close look at the artwork is interwoven with personal narratives and tangential musings, not unlike TJ Clark’s book, The sight of Death: An Experiment in Art Writing, published in 2006, which Browne cites as a reference point. In conversation, Browne explains how they were writing through feeling, rather than writing through some pre-structured thoughts: “I found it helpful to do that through an artwork that already exists in the world, in an attempt to build a subjective viewpoint on something that’s sitting in front of you.”

This loose and experimental approach to form is also seen in earlier work, such as Four Scores for the Ear (2018) – a vocal soundscape experiment, aired on Dublin Digital Radio for ‘Sound in Exile’, a curated programme by Jane Deasy. Here we see Browne’s interest in voice surface through abstracted sonic communication – repetition, singing, chanting. Love Song to Drake (2018) mines similar territory, an ode to the hip-hop artist, where Browne sings and riffs off the lyrics and style in an act of fandom, similar to “drawing pictures of Amy Winehouse as a teenager.” Browne describes it as a paradoxical act of ‘crush and criticism’ in being a fan of Drake and his “clever use of lyrics”, while also resisting the identifications expressed in those lyrics, in particular his ‘martyrdom’.

With identity formation a common theme in their practice, it is not surprising that Browne is interested in accent – a tie to one’s identity, similar to race and gender. The power relations and hierarchies of voice and accent are more thoroughly explored in Deboned Voices, a five-part audio installation of disembodied voices with corresponding seating, shown as part of the Edinburgh Art Festival in 2018. Each sound piece had a chair chosen specifically for its sonic counterpart. ‘The Queen’s English’ was aptly listened to through headphones, in a posture-correcting chair. To Irish ears, this is imbued with a comical pomposity and overt poshness that perhaps to British listeners might attenuate to a mere accepted authorial voice. This section was juxtaposed with the ASMR-esque ‘The Lips Admission’, listened to while sat in a luxurious chaise longue and which talks sensuously in headphones about being ‘licked and bitten’. The artwork subtly explored sonic tropes and the ways in which gender, class and sexuality can be constructed and reinforced within the sounds we make, coherent or not.

As described by Joli Jenson, being a fan is “explored in relation to the larger question of what it means to desire, cherish, seek, long, admire, envy, celebrate, protect, ally with others. Fandom is an aspect of how we make sense of the world, in relation to mass media, and in relation to our historical, social, cultural location.” Browne performs identifications with and appropriations of their objects of fascination, often through a mode of gender deviance and transgression. The artist’s love for and adolescent ‘crush’ on artists, celebrities, films and objects, in this sense, serves as a medium for constructing identity that transcends traditional understandings and limitations of class or gender. Their recent work operates between real and fictional worlds, where the inner depths of emotional life are brought to the surface and are unravelled for the viewer, questioning what it means to be in a body within the world.

Gwen Burlington is a writer based between Wexford and London.

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Meadhbh McNutt: Can you give us a glimpse of the processes behind ‘Tricks of the Trade’?

Jan McCullough: I have a longstanding fascination with spaces of construction and assembly – industrial sites, workshops, garages and so on. During my recent residency at IMMA, I became particularly interested in their arrangement and the ad hoc structures created within them. The larger studio at IMMA encouraged a sculptural approach, and when the residency was suspended due to the pandemic restrictions, Peter Mutschler and Alissa Kleist were exceptionally kind in providing space and support to further develop the project, as part of the PS² Freelands Foundation Artist Programme. My process always begins with images. When I’m in a smaller space, I make maquettes and project tiny collages on the walls, to see what they would look like scaled up. It’s nice to create an immediate, large image that can be changed in real time – a kind of 3D collage. 

MM: The installations actually struck me as 3D collage, even while walking through them. You’ve tapped into home design forums and vision board workshops in previous research. Did it feel different to explore a space so directly related to your own practice? 

JM: It really did. It was the first time I used my own photographs as a starting point for my research. I have an evolving archive of found images that I use for notes, collages and preparatory sketches. I’ve always exhibited [my own] photographs as final objects but I had a strong feeling that this exhibition wasn’t going to be just a narrative photographic series. I wanted to move beyond that to recreate the tactile experience of sculptural objects.

I’m interested in the camera as an instrument for dissecting space. I use a powerful flash gun which reduces objects to outlines and colour blocks and singles out selective details. A lot of the abstract shapes in the show come from flash photography collages – the torqued metal and the steel and wooden constructions. It’s strange to look back at the source photographs. I sometimes remember them as though they all belong to the same space, even though they were taken in different locations. The structure in the middle room for example, is based on photographs of various workstations, scaffolding and ladders. I noticed, when looking back at the source images, that the process of collage had altered my memory of the original structures. 

The only photographs in the exhibition make up a triptych from a 2011 series called ‘Garage’, taken years ago in my grandfather’s DIY workspace. I held on to those photographs because there was something that kept bringing me back to them. It wasn’t a sentimental study; it was simply one of the first construction spaces that stood out to me. There was something intimate and almost childlike about that experience of walking around those objects. It was like walking through somebody’s den and you weren’t sure of the function of the machinery – things laid out on tables and floors. I wanted to reflect that in the work, referencing but ultimately moving beyond functionality. 

MM: How did your collaboration with Wendy Erskine on the booklet, Instructions for the Assembly of Workspace, come about? 

JM: I wanted to provide an abstract response to ‘Tricks of the Trade’ that would leave room for viewers to bring their own interpretation. The collaboration with Wendy was so nourishing and exciting. We had never met before, but I loved Sweet Home (2018), her collection of short stories. There was a particular story called Locksmiths that had really stayed with me. 

I posted Wendy a package of items so that we could have a tactile, collaborative experience. The package contained photographs, collages and a list of things I had in the studio that I had been using as a menu for the project: boiled linseed oil, timber battens, plywood off-cuts, gloss paint (eraser pink and biro blue), screw boxes… I wanted her to have complete creative freedom to do what she wanted with that inventory. Her brother has a workshop, and she phoned and asked him to describe to her all the things that lay on his desk. She came back to me with the text and I loved it. It’s as if you’re being dropped into the place; you can almost smell it. 

I’m obviously interested in the instructional quality of photography and how it prescribes a certain way of interacting with the space but it’s so great to collaborate with someone like Wendy who can take that in a different direction. The booklet was funded by Freelands Foundation in London and designed by Sean Greer at Nongraphic studio. I knew I wanted the text to be a tangible thing for the viewer to take home, and for that tangibility to translate in the digital version. Sean and I exchanged photos of hardware packaging in terms of the colours and fonts, and DIY instruction pamphlets for folds. 

MM: What’s next for your practice?

JM: I have just completed a month-long residency with Light Work in Syracuse, New York, in partnership with IMMA – remotely, due to the lockdown. I was very lucky to go to America for a research trip last year. Lockdown struck just two days before I was due to fly back to shoot new work. It would be great to get back out there but the initial research certainly won’t go to waste regardless. I will continue exploring the rituals and rhythms of construction in other locations. For me, photographic collage is the most practical way of drawing. I’m intrigued by the way the camera reconfigures forms. In February, I went completely back to basics and dedicated the whole month to sketchbooks. I’ve always made photographic sketches and collages but I’ve only recently realised how important the process is to the final work. It’s maybe best described in gardening terms: you plant the bulbs in winter, and they come up as something somewhat unexpected six months down the line. 

Meadhbh McNutt is an Irish art writer whose work traverses criticism, creative writing and critical theory. 

meadhbhmcnutt.com

Jan McCullough is an artist from Northern Ireland working with photography, sculpture and installation.     

janmccullough.co.uk
@jan.mccullough

‘Tricks of the Trade’ continues at CCA Derry~Londonderry until 1 May 2021. 

cca-derry-londonderry.org

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FOLLOWING A SCREENING EVENT ORGANISED BY VISUAL ARTISTS IRELAND, PROJECT ARTS CENTRE’S LÍVIA PÁLDI SPEAKS TO KADER ATTIA ABOUT HIS RESEARCH AND PRACTICE.

Lívia Páldi: The legacy of colonialism, specifically French colonialism, is one of your main artistic concerns, with an extensive inquiry that builds around the concept of ‘repair’. How do you reflect on a decade of work exploring the concept’s genealogy, as well as its political, aesthetic and architectural expressions?

Kader Attia: It didn’t start as strategic research, rather was born out of my various interests. If I had not become an artist, I would probably have worked as a historian. I’ve always been curious and didn’t want to be jaded into a single field. My materials come from very different sources and places. This is what I see as key problem we again face with current fascisms: the refusal of diversity; the refusal of the other. I mention this because one of the core states of ‘repair’, as it has been thought about by Western white male modernity, is this idea of supremacy on time and history. The idea that we are able to re-enact by returning to the ‘origin’; to the state before the ‘accident’, before the ‘injury’; that we are able to own time. It’s an incredibly false myth and also impossible.

For me, the notion of return – as derived from the Latin root of the verb reparare [‘restore’, ‘put back in order’] – is extremely dangerous, as it could equal theories of fascism; the idea of returning to the very early moment. That’s why I think the concept of ‘repair’ has an important political subconscious that we have to dismantle. I’ve become aware that by doing artistic research, you observe objects, people, human bodies, scars – in fact scars have this incredible power. As Cormac McCarthy used to say: “Scars have the strange power to remind us that our past is real.” To translate all these into an artwork is complex because one must address the status and potentiality of art today. My method has always been to avoid a denial of the past, of the genealogy. It’s especially important now amid a current fascination with technology in the arts. It is extremely important to elaborate on a corpus of work that is in dialogue with our significant genealogy because it is another part of fascism to deny the layers of history by only focusing on what we must return to and ignoring the in-between.

LP: Your research has involved long-term conversations, building over the last decade and feeding into your research-based moving image works and large-scale sculptural installations and environments. 

KA: It is something that one cannot control. Sometimes I start by finding a broken plate and repairing it, as recently happened to me in Berlin. For three weeks the pieces were lying on my studio desk and after a trip, I started to glue them together. It took me three days. The practice of being an artist is neither the meditative moment of drawing, which I like a lot, nor this sort of determinist thing that you know what you want to do. For me this plate is also research: you leave, come back, revisit, stay with. I showed it to a fantastic restaurateur, Anne Göbel, in the Dahlem Museum Ethnological Museum (Berlin). She said it was badly done because the cracks were showing; if she had done it, there would have been no visible signs. I think the dialogue we had was very interesting because of course she is a ‘soldier’ of the ‘order of the perfect’. For me, the injuries tell me plenty of things. These small objects I collect or repair, help me breathe within the ongoing processes of research. If all of my life’s work was a single book, then these small pieces would serve as punctuations. I have a heightened sense of care for objects but don’t spend the same amount of time or intellectual energy on them as I would with a film. My films and installations may take up to three years to develop. But both are very important.

LP: Often you employ everyday materials – such as cardboard, wire mesh, mirror fragments, couscous – to build installations and to employ various objects. 

KA: I believe in everyday objects as metaphysical entities – as having emotional and symbolic power. I think one of the stronger ruptures between the pre-Modern moment and Modernity is not just the rationalisation of our relations with others but also our relations to objects, in the sense that the hegemony of reason has cut us from the possibility of living with an invisible or parallel world. In our everyday life, it often translates as fear of being ridiculed. In his book, African Art as Philosophy: Senghor, Bergson and the Idea of Negritude, Souleymane Bachir Diagne writes that in African civilizations, where systems of writing did not exist, masks and sculptures were philosophies.¹ I really do think that this works the same with each and every object. Everyone refers to some objects as special, due to familial and other relations. This is how objects carry this philosophy and mythology. 

LP: Can you discuss your involvement in projects that look at changing our perception of objects in ethnological museums, regarding the way collections represent them as artistic or ethnologic material? 

KA: I have a continuous pilgrimage to inquire into the ‘hidden’ collections of museums – the forgotten items – and to excavate those objects that have been repaired and stored away. I met Clémentine Deliss (then director of the Weltkulturen Museum) in 2012, when I arrived in Frankfurt to explore the whole parcours of museums.² We continued to collaborate, as she was also interested in the question of giving new life to these ‘hidden’ objects. For me, she is a very exciting director for an ethnographic museum – which has generally been a very conservative and often reactionary context up until now – opening up ethnography to contemporary art. I also like the Musée d’ethnographie de Neuchâtel (MEN), where, as part of your research, you can touch the object and this ‘patina’ becomes part of the object’s existence. This is a legacy of the ethnographer and former director, Jean Gabus. 

LP: Your research into the ‘repair’ also connects to how decolonisation and understandings of restitution are addressed. 

KA: I’ve been working with these issues for over a decade and still (re)discovering different aspects of the repair concept. What is crucial to make clear, when we speak about restitution, is what these objects (colonial artefacts) really are, and to map their epistemology, making visible the hijacking of the non-Western epistemology by the Western one. The whole problem of restitution is that it concerns an ‘imaginary’ that has been colonised. Some of the objects might be considered powerless by now and might not be reclaimed, but then you talk to people who avoid going to see certain African objects at the Musée du uai Branly (Paris) or the Metropolitan Museum (New York). These objects are philosophy – and thus part of a complex cosmogony of conscious and subconscious symbolisms – even though the indigenous religions that produced them were colonised. When it comes to speaking of the non-rational, I very much respect the work and flexible thinking of Stefania Pandolfo, who links two discursive traditions – Islam and psychoanalysis – when speaking of illness, trauma and healing.³

LP: La Colonie (the space you established in Paris in 2016) strongly relates to your questions and research. In Le Monde, La Colonie was described as the headquarters of the ‘decolonial intelligentsia’. 

KA: For me it’s an unlearning place. It’s been a long missing part, a phantom limb, that now links debates on the Anthropocene, decolonialism and feminist critical work. The space is located by Gare du Nord within an ocean of diversity. I left Paris 11 years ago and have been working on the subject of colonialism for almost two decades, but I was not invited to exhibit there until recently. There has been a strong denial in France of that colonial history, and I thought the most efficient would be to create a space for ‘invisible’ topics, as well as for communities. I have strong networks in the banlieues and universities, artists, thinkers. I started by inviting activist organisations, which later extended into projects such as the ‘Decolonial School’.⁴

LP: Do you want programmes and debates, such as the ‘Decolonial School’, to influence current political conversations?

KA: It’s complex. On the one hand, over 600 people come for a debate on colonial issues, but on the other hand, we need to work on extending our network of competencies (e.g. to involve legal experts). I am currently having a series of conversations with my colleagues about the future of La Colonie. And though we have been attacked by some of the academic bodies, we have a great hope that the French academia will eventually introduce decolonial studies into their curricula.⁵ This is where I see a real task to be done, to affect the system.

On 25 November 2019, VAI, in partnership with Project Arts Centre, welcomed Kader Attia to present a screening of Réfléchir la Mémoire / Reflecting Memory (2016), followed by a Q&A. 

Lívia Páldi is the Curator of Visual Arts at Project Arts Centre, Dublin. 

Kader Attia (b. 1970) grew up in Paris and Algeria and spent several years in Congo and South America. These formative experiences fostered Attia’s intercultural and interdisciplinary research on colonial histories and immigration. 
kaderattia.de
lacolonie.paris

Feature Image: Kader Attia, Untitled, 2017, ceramic, metal wire, diameter 25.3 cm; photograph by Ela Bialkowska, courtesy of the artist and Galleria Continua.

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JOANNE LAWS INTERVIEWS CURATOR RAOUL KLOOKER, AHEAD OF HIS VAI EVENT IN FEBRUARY.

Joanne Laws: Perhaps you could begin by discussing your background and training? 

Raoul Klooker: I first studied Middle Eastern Studies and Arabic for two years but changed my major to History of Art and added a second minor, History of African Art. At the time I was working in a queer activist group that was based in the student union’s building. While in the final year of my BA, I co-curated a group exhibition on queer genealogies in contemporary art at nGbK in Berlin. Before working on that exhibition, it never occurred to me that curating could be an actual job option. An English friend of mine told me to apply to the Royal College of Arts’s Curating Contemporary Art MA programme, rather than doing an MA in History of Art in Germany. I was lucky to get some financial support through a German government scholarship, which covered a large part of my tuition and living costs and enabled me to co-run a project space on the side, called clearview.ltd.  

JL: Can you describe your previous involvement with the Counter-Histories film programme at Tate Modern? 

RK: I began working on the ‘Museum of Clouds’ programme (as part of Counter-Histories) while doing a curatorial internship at Tate Film with Andrea Lissoni and Carly Whitefield in 2018. The internship was supposed to be six months long, but got extended by four more months, so I could work on the screening series. Andrea came up with the title while thinking about an interconnected group of filmmakers, curators and programmers who have been collaborating and making films together in different constellations over the last ten years, without every formally establishing themselves as a movement or a fixed network. I researched the works of Gabriel Abrantes, Basma Alsharif, Alexander Carver, Benjamin Crotty, Mati Diop, Beatrice Gibson, Shambhavi Kaul, Laida Lertxundi, Matías Piñeiro, Ben Rivers, Ben Russell, Daniel Schmidt, Ana Vaz and Phillip Warnell (this list could have been longer of course, but we had to end it somewhere), and came up with different combinations of their films. 

I looked at the ways in which these artists actively collaborated by co-directing, sharing resources, or even acting in each other’s films. We also focused on common themes and shared formal interests that emerged when looking at these artists’ solo works together. In the end we grouped the films into six short film screenings, each with a different theme. We also invited as many of the included artists as possible, as well as a number of international film programmers and writers who have championed these artists’ works in recent years. During the screening programme at Tate in October 2018 they came together to publicly discuss their shared ideas and ways of working for the first time. 

JL: What is your current role at The Kunstverein Braunschweig? 

RK: I’m an assistant curator, working alongside a curator and the director. As a small team of three curators, delivering eight exhibitions per year across two buildings, we collaborate on bigger exhibitions and also get to curate our own projects every year. I’m also in charge of the Kunstverein’s press and social media, while my colleague manages the institution’s learning programme. The first project I worked on in Braunschweig was a group show focusing on collaborative art practices. I curated a display of two film series by the anonymous Mexican collective, Colectivo Los Ingràvidos, and invited the Berlin-based group, Honey-Suckle Company, to produce a new installation of automated instruments, photography and sculpture, which was their first institutional show in over ten years. 

The first solo exhibition that I have curated at Kunstverein Braunschweig is ‘Dwelling’ by Richard Sides, which opened on 6 December 2019 and will remain on show until 16 February. For this exhibition, Sides has built an entire wooden house within the gallery space. Inside the house, is a screening of an experimental fictional documentary. Sides also constructed a faux concrete wall outside the building which makes it look like our garden has been privatised and turned into a real estate development. Next summer I’m organising a solo project by Markues, a Berlin-based artist who is currently researching the history of a now closed Berlin bar that had been putting on cabaret shows by trans women and cross dressers for 50 years, between 1958 and 2008. Later this year, we’re also going to be presenting a solo exhibition by Gili Tal. 

JL: In terms of your ongoing curatorial research, which art historical and contemporary themes/discourses are you particularly drawn to? 

RK: I’ve been interested in the ways in which queer culture and queer history can be represented in contemporary art exhibitions and institutions. I co-curated a group show in 2016 that was specifically looking into the ways in which queer discourse can reframe artistic genealogies. I think a driving motivation behind this was the very patriarchal art school system in Germany, in which certain male painters have passed on their status as genius enfants terribles to their straight male students/assistants, while often reproducing sexist and homophobic attitudes. 

Although queer art is a recurring interest of mine, I wouldn’t say it’s my main specialism. Recently, I’ve worked with a lot of different artists who work across site-specific or reproducible media to think about the ways in which neoliberalism affects our consciousness and the culture we live in. Even though artists like Colectivo Los Ingràvidos, Richard Sides and Gili Tal are all from very different backgrounds, with very different practices, what is politicised in these artists’ works is not (just) the themes or the content of their work, but also their material form. 

JL: Are you interested in artist-led or collectivist exhibition-making practices? 

RK:  Even during the first curatorial project I was involved in I was part of a collective of five friends, organising a queer group show at nGbK in Berlin in 2015/16. When I joined the project space clearview.ltd in London a year later, the collective aspect of our work was even more important, as we lived together while putting together exhibitions. From the beginning, we actively decided that we would not publicly communicate who initiated each show or event. I don’t want to romanticise artist-led spaces entirely, as they often require a lot of unpaid labour and self-exploitation. But I do think that project spaces are often the most interesting exhibition sites in bigger cities, because they can often be more spontaneous, experimental and politically outspoken than formal institutions. They also usually exhibit younger artists, whose work isn’t as commercially driven. Working in bigger institutions is often a lot more hierarchical, by comparison.

Raoul Klooker is part of the curatorial team at Kunstverein Braunschweig in Germany. 

On Friday 7 February, Raoul will deliver a presentation and group critique on Queer Artistic Practices during a day-long event at Visual Artists Ireland’s Dublin office. 
kunstvereinbraunschweig.de
visualartists.ie

Feature Image: Richard Sides, Site-specific wall sculpture, 2019, installation view as part of ‘Dwelling’ at Kunstverein Braunschweig; photograph by Stefan Stark.

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JOANNE LAWS INTERVIEWS KEVIN ATHERTON, FRANCES HEGARTY AND ANDREW STONES ABOUT THE EVOLUTION OF THEIR FILMMAKING PRACTICES.

Joanne Laws: How do you approach research and what are some of the prominent themes that have emerged within your moving image practice to date? 

Kevin Atherton: The ‘research’ word has entered the vocabulary of visual artists when they talk about what they do, resulting in a conflation of practice and research, which has led to a lot of posturing and confusion. I hear artists’ talk about doing their research and frequently what they’re referring to is old-fashioned ‘resourcefulness’. As regards my research, I’m not sure whether I do research at all or, alternatively, that I’m doing it all the time. My 2010 Visual Culture PhD – titled: Atherton on Atherton, An Examination of the Self-Reflexive Role of Language in Critically Examining Visual Art Practice Through a Consideration of Kevin Atherton’s Work – was intended to contest the relationship between the written and the visual. It was also intended to challenge the notion of visual art research. The prominent theme in my work over the last fifty years has been identity. 

Frances Hegarty and Andrew Stones: We don’t have a tidy research-to-outcome approach. We have constantly to reconcile two individual perspectives, each with its own complexities. We allow for some disorder, and a lot of ‘working out’ or testing of half-formed propositions. One of our projects – ‘Tactically Yours’ at Butler Gallery (23 June to 29 July 2007) – was partly about this process. Typically, we begin with a site or object that has sparked our joint interest (such as a plot of land, or a destroyed factory). We usually find that we have different investments in the object, but we establish enough common ground to devise, say, a durational image, or a series of performative gestures, specific to it. Our early energy thus goes into action that produces something new (usually recordings of some kind). We interrogate the emerging material with reference to what could be called a joint body of knowledge. Either one of us might have to incorporate elements that seem counter-intuitive, or antagonistic. For instance, we’ve each had to question our individual senses of national and cultural belonging – our own nostalgias. Many ideas do not survive in their original form. For exhibition we want, primarily, to create an involving field of affect, to engage the viewer in a thought and felt response to the ideas that have occupied us, whilst making the work. 

JL: Can you outline some of your technical requirements – such as access to production equipment or editing facilities – and how these impact on the format of your films?

KA: I worked out fairly early on in my career that my position as a film maker was in front of the camera lens, rather than behind it. Since 2014, I have been making videos that include some of my early films and videos. Re-entering my earlier works can sometimes feel like standing on a moving Möbius strip, where the past and present intertwine and become very complicated. I feel that as the maker of some early examples of ‘Expanded Cinema’, I set certain things in motion in the 1970s, and that I’m catching up with them again now. This means that I need a good technical person, both to record and edit what I do, but also someone who ‘gets it’ and ‘gets me’.

FH and AS: Our video and audio production is in-house and digital. As artists who worked with tape in hired edit suites, we really enjoy having a fluid, ongoing moving-image practice that’s not reliant on up-front production funds. However, our finished works are highly dependent on their manner of exhibition. It’s necessary for us to be at least as engaged with technologies of planning and installation as with video/sound editing. Our latest exhibition ‘The Land That…’ at The MAC, Belfast (12 April – 7 July) involved nine video feeds, with as many screens, multiple audio feeds, objects and automated lighting. We had to think in terms of parallel timelines, and degrees of synchronisation and slippage, as we sought to animate multiple spaces without the whole becoming confusing to the senses. Whilst we were editing video and sound, we used a virtual 3D model to visualise the whole work in the gallery. In the final phase, we drew on the commitment of the exemplary team at the MAC to realise in reality what we’d modelled in virtual space. 

JL: Each of you has films that feature in the LUX collection. How important are international archives and distribution agencies in the promotion of artists’ moving image practices and discourses? From an archival perspective, how have you dealt with film formats and technologies becoming outmoded over the years? 

KA: In the 1970s, I used London Video Arts (who became LUX) to distribute my work and, more unusually in the1980s, to produce it. Now LUX has copies of these and other more recent works of mine in their collection. I have been in a couple of group shows at the Whitechapel Gallery and the ICA in recent years where the work was sourced from LUX but despite this, I don’t feel that they actively promote me. If a curator was pursuing a particular theme, then I like to think that LUX might point him or her towards my work. The future proofing of time-based work isn’t an issue restricted to technical concerns. For work to prove to be prescient, its subject matter will determine its relevance in the future. 

FH and AS: Even when they’re legitimated on grounds of inclusiveness, archives can still be used very selectively. If the discussion of ‘archives and distribution’ includes ‘history and exposure’, then it also involves power and representation around artistic culture more generally. Do the rules of inclusion/exclusion that apply to art in general also apply to moving image? Should it be a special case? On a practical note, we don’t know of an archive that’s really met the challenge of representing multi-screen installation works after exhibition. Further, if the focus is on mere media-specificity (it’s film, it’s video) or the technical issue of ‘future-proofing’, then the detailed cultural context around the archived work can be neglected. As far as we can tell, having work in archives has not brought us much exposure, in terms of exhibition. Our work is discussed in academic writing, often on the basis of its concerns and effects, as much as its being film or video. To respond to that kind of interest, we try to maintain our own archive, to keep our works accessible in digital form. 

JL: Perhaps you could discuss your current work and any future plans? 

KA: Last year I collaborated with the Museo internazionale delle marionette Antonio Pasqualino in Palermo on a puppet version of my on-going video/performance piece, In Two Minds (1978–2019). I worked with a skilled puppet-master at the museum who made two marionettes for the project. These puppets of me at the age of 27 and me now as an old man, are dressed identically but the younger one still smokes. Having had the two puppets made to be in a new video, I’m now interested in using them to make my work for me. I am eager to see what ideas they might come up with.

FH and AS: ‘That Land That…’ at the MAC is the culmination of several years’ work. It can be reconfigured for other spaces. We intend a compilation film of works made “in and of” Ireland: Overnight Sensation (Belfast, 2001), Ex Machina (Carlow, 2006) The Land That… (Donegal, 2010–15). That would be for cinema screening, with surround sound. Meanwhile, Frances is embarking on new studio work, involving large drawings with related texts; Andrew is working on twin and single-screen video works, audio and musical works, and an online collaboration with Derry-based artists Locky Morris and Conor McFeely. 

Kevin Atherton’s video work has been exhibited in key historical exhibitions, such as ‘Changing Channels: Art and Television 1963-1987’, MUMOK, Vienna 2010. His work, In Two Minds (1978–2014), is in the collection at IMMA.

Frances Hegarty and Andrew Stones each have individual practices spanning several decades and have worked collaboratively since 1997.

Featured Image: Frances Hegarty & Andrew Stones, ‘The Land That…’, 2019, installation view; image © and courtesy of the artists.

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CHRISTOPHER STEENSON TALKS TO GERARD BYRNE ABOUT CONSERVING MEDIA ART IN THE DIGITAL AGE. 

With a career spanning close to three decades, Gerard Byrne is known for his complex film installations that displace sequential narratives with non-linear playback systems. Byrne’s films often incorporate multiple viewing planes, where episodic reenactments extend across the gallery space, running parallel to one another, encouraging the audience to explore the space, while piecing together the fragmented narrative. A notable example is A thing is a hole is a thing it is not (2010), which charts separate episodes in the history of minimalism, including: a radio conversation between Bruce Glaser, Frank Stella, Donald Judd and Dan Flavin; Robert Morris’s 1960 sculpture, Column; and Tony Smith’s career-changing epiphany on the New Jersey Turnpike, which led him to minimalist art. Other works assume modular structures of indefinite duration. Taking cues from the serial qualities of minimalism, In Our Time (2017) takes place in a radio studio. Using the modular structure of commercial radio broadcasting as temporal framework, the film is played in sync with the opening hours of the gallery. 

Byrne graduated from NCAD in 1991, just as ‘media art’ was about to experience a monumental shift from analogue to digital. As we discuss the evolution of Byrne’s working methods, he mentions a range of formats, including 16mm, VHS (and VHS-C), Hi8, Betacam SP, MiniDV, SD digital video, HD, 4k, and beyond. With this expansive collection of material, comes questions of storage and preservation. For Byrne, this has generally involved fastidious processes of digitisation and archiving, so even works created on analogue tapes (and kept safely in physical storage), also now exist on hard drives, making them more readily accessible. Giving a ballpark figure, Byrne estimates that he has over 100 hard drives of material. When I ask whether he has any advice for other artists on how they should digitally archive their work, he cautiously states: “Well, first thing I would say is, if you want to get advice on that, an artist is probably not the best person to ask. You’re better off asking somebody who manages data […] It’s not an art question. What I do for myself, is that I label all my hard drives in a very systematic way. They’re given a number, which goes up sequentially. The label also states the size of the drive and whether it’s an A or a B drive – the idea being that the B drives are backups of the A drives, so I usually try to have drives in pairs, if possible. And ideally, of course, you have a third backup. I also use a piece of cataloguing software called NeoFinder, which scans hard drives and makes an inventory of what’s on the drive. That catalogue is then accessible without the drive being connected. So if you’re looking for a specific file, you can search across all of the catalogues and find out which drives it’s on.”

Byrne has been working with non-linear digital video editing programmes since the mid-‘90s, when he was a postgraduate student at Parsons School of Design in New York. Then he was working with early versions of Adobe Premiere and Avid Media Composer; now he works with programmes like Final Cut. The project files for these programmes are equally important to archive, so that old video edits can be accessed for re-exporting and upgrading. However, Byrne concedes that, unfortunately, “software makers have no interest, or minimal commitments, to the idea of backwards accessibility”. This essentially means that unless you have a specific version of a piece of software (and the correct operating system on which the programme will run) you won’t be able to access that project anymore. Byrne gets around this situation by using hard drives to clone certain operating systems that will run specific pieces of older software, such as Final Cut 7. This clone drive can then be booted up from a computer, when he needs to access something. But this isn’t the end of the problem: “it’s also inevitably going to mean archiving physical computers, because it’s going to get to the point where certain operating systems are just not supported by newer computers. So, the only way you’ll be able to boot from them is by having an older computer… It’s farcical that you’re trying to save access to a file and that means you have to archive a whole computer.” Byrne has been dealing with archival problems like these for the past 10 years or so. With many of his major works in international collections, he’s been fortunate enough to discuss these issues with digital conservationists working in museums around the world. Digital conservation is becoming a professionalised field, with outside consultants advising both private collections and publicly-funded galleries on how to tackle the problems of storing and accessing digital formats. But Byrne admits: “In all the conversations that I’ve had in my travels, I’ve realised nobody really has definitive answers […] I don’t think anybody can do anything more than be reactive and try to make good choices.” 

These conservation challenges aren’t just limited to the digital domain. As well as guarding against the obsoletion of computer software, installation hardware also needs to be ‘future-ready’. Byrne’s installations require meticulous levels of thought and design, incorporating both bespoke software and specialist hardware. Byrne’s collaborator, Sven Anderson – who works tirelessly as the primary technical designer for Byrne’s projects – has been a lynchpin in devising these systems. However, with the necessary complexity required to playback the works, a number of potential problems can arise. Firstly, the component parts of his installations, and the fact that they can modulate in structure, duration and layout, lead to challenges when finalising the works for collections. There is a process of “delimiting the work in a very material way” that needs to take place before it can be handed over to a museum. Secondly, hardware, files and other interconnecting parts pertaining to an artwork needs to remain accessible and functional in years to come. Re-showing works that are less than even a decade old, can become problematic, if hardware breaks down and needs to be replaced. And thanks to a rising culture of ‘planned obsolescence’, replacement might be the only viable option, when things are impossible to repair. File formats can also become unsupported if new hardware is introduced. Such dilemmas can spiral, unless all aspects are carefully thought through. Indeed, the creation of these works involves a stringent period of development and testing by Byrne and Anderson. The first major project they worked on together was A thing is a hole is a thing it is not (2010). They decided that the best way for the work to be delivered to collections was as a “ready-to-go, verified system”. As Byrne recalls, this was a huge amount of work, with Anderson writing a 50-page manual to accompany the artwork, outlining all aspects of the installation, from set-up and running, to troubleshooting. 

For all the flexibility and increased convenience that digital technologies afford, they also introduce a set of challenges. “Migration between formats is actually a very natural quality of the digital environment we live in – that media can migrate between formats fluidly, and fluently – that’s kind of anathema to museums. At least in a historical sense, a lot of orthodox thinking around museums is an anxiety to change in relation to a work. To lock it down.” While custom-made presentation systems are currently only used by a minority of artists, they are becoming more common, as technology becomes more increasingly accessible. The role of museum collections in preserving these pieces of hardware is therefore likely to become a prescient issue, with Byrne concluding that: “As museum conservators’ knowledge of media and the technical side of media art advances, I think they’ll have more specific questions for artists.” 

Gerard Byrne is an artist and lecturer based in Dublin. He is represented by Lisson Gallery, Galerie Nordenhake Stockholm and Kerlin Gallery.
gerardbyrne.com

Christopher Steenson is Production Editor of The Visual Artists’ News Sheet. He also works as a studio assistant for Gerard Byrne.
christophersteenson.com

Feature Image: Gerard Byrne, A thing is a hole is a thing it is not, 2010, installation view, Lismore Castle Arts; courtesy of the artist and Galerie Nordenhake.

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JOANNE LAWS INTERVIEWS NICK MILLER ABOUT HIS PAINTING PRACTICE AND HIS CURRENT EXHIBITION IN LONDON.

Joanne Laws: The term ‘Encounter Painting’ is commonly associated with your work. I guess this relates to things happening in your daily life and how you respond to them? 

Nick Miller: Not really, it’s more formal than that. Back in 1988, still in my late-twenties, I had a kind of eureka moment about what art could be for me while on a residency in Dublin Zoo. I began to draw from life again, facing the otherness of animals in captivity. It became about meeting and holding contained energy through the act of drawing. It coincided with my reading of Martin Buber’s extraordinary book, I and Thou ¹. This helped frame my interest in trying to hold the life that I encountered in the material form of art. Since then, my practice slowly evolved to be one of setting up the conditions necessary (in the studio or outside) to encounter things – a person, landscape, or object – in a practice environment where there is also the best possibility of making a painting. 

JL: I remember a kind of eastern influence manifesting in your work in the mid-90s. Was that through your engagement with Tai Chi? 

NM: Yes. It followed on directly from starting to define that sense of ‘practice’ but was a parallel learning system. In the ‘90s, I was lucky enough to study in America with a friend of Alan Watts, Chungliang Al Huang.² An aspect of his teaching was very visual, using calligraphy as embodied physical movement. It gave me a way into that world of integrating eastern thought into a very western rooted art practice. You may remember from my teaching in the life room back then, that I used to get people to do physical movements and breath work, to try and wake up. Painting from life is a most literal ‘mind-body’ activity – absorbing information from outside, processing internally and releasing into the material of paint. Taoist thought offers a non-linear, spherical kind of approach, where the result is almost a fortunate ‘left over’ from your commitment to practice. 

JL: In your engagement with the archetypes of painting – landscape, portraiture and still life – are you are grappling with the medium to make this territory your own? 

NM: Yes, I suppose I am. We all look to enter art and hopefully find something authentic. A lot of the time – and I know, because I’ve taught in art college – education tends to iron out ‘wrongness’, so that artists can perform in a professional ‘art world’. I never got ironed out, so I used my ‘wrongness’ to make work. I could just say that I’m an old fashioned ‘life’ painter and leave it at that, but that wouldn’t be entirely true. In some ways, I’m not so interested in art. I’m interested – from necessity in the ‘art of living’ – with the problems of being a painter. Contradicting myself, I actually do have an enduring love for all those genres in the history of Western art. It is finding affirmation in the works of very different artists, in paintings that for me are portals across time – repositories of contained energy – that completely absorb and charge me.

JL: Your sitters are often fellow artists and friends, like Alice Maher or Janet Mullarney, then some of whom have since sadly passed away – including Barrie Cooke, Anthony Cronin Seán McSweeney and John McGahern. When that happens, do you find that their portraits almost take on an archival function? Is this work about posterity?

NM: Not really, or not at first. I started by painting my family and friends – no one with a public life. Portraiture is my first love, and I continually return to it as the root of all my work. The most exciting encounter is of one human to another and in my own personal trajectory, I like to hold something of the people I’ve met. As I became rooted in Ireland and the relatively accessible artistic community here, paying respect to those artists, writers or anybody who ends up sitting for me, is something I like to do. In truth, I feel most real when painting – that is the best of me – connecting to them. As people die, as we all do, I suppose the paintings can become a historical record, but I can’t have that as a goal – it gets in the way. I am not an archivist.

JL: Where ‘Vessels: Nature Morte’ reflects the utter collapse of meaning that happens when someone dies, your most recent series, ‘Rootless’, seems to transcend individual loss to focus more on the collective and the political. Can you discuss the evolution of this new work?

NM: My last still life series, ‘Vessels: Nature Morte’, had a deeply personal energetic core from a long collaborative project in North West Hospice, and the parallel passing of my own parents. For me they were the opposite to the “collapse of meaning”. They were about holding the last moments of life and meaning before it left. After that work, I was somewhat lost in the studio, wanting dialogue, but unable to find the people or conversations I needed to have. Like many of us, I was trying to process this crazy world that we’re all having to live with – the political mayhem that we seem to be generating on the planet, the climatic mayhem, the migratory suffering – all this stuff we are facing. In a fairly intense period in 2017-2018, I began processing that lack of dialogue in my own way, in the large-scale canvases that became the ‘Rootless’ paintings. They took on a life of their own, asserting the urgency of nature. I was exploring disorder and the possibilities of integration in more complex compositions, some of which I showed at the Oliver Sears Gallery in Dublin last year, but are currently being shown more completely at Art Space Gallery in London.

JL: I also remember your ‘Truckscapes’ with great affection. At what point did you decide to include the ‘viewing device’ of the doorway within those compositions?  

NM: The first couple of years in the mobile studio, I couldn’t find a way to paint. I was really high, enjoying the mad freedom of being in the landscape, meeting the rural world in which I was living, but there was a dissatisfaction in me – they just looked like ‘pictures’ that did not need to exist. I had been scraping off paint, correcting things and it was starting to dot around the truck doorframe. And then in 2001, while working on a painting of a Whitethorn tree in a neighbour’s field, I radically re-worked the painting to include the truck interior and the paint-spattered doorway looking out onto the tree, like a standing portrait.³ My experience became defined by the protection of the truck as a studio, of culture with a relatively narrow doorway to the infinite world of complexity outside – as a tortoise in my shell. I realised these were not landscapes, but ‘Truckscapes’. I began to adjust my practice of making them in the context of the truck view, and that’s how they became something real for me, as paintings of land, trees or whatever. 

JL: Many people recognise your muted and organic colour palette as being particular to your work. Does it come from living in the west of Ireland? 

NM: Basically yes… It is muted in an adjustive way, starting with a very broad palette (contrary to any advice I would ever give anyone). You’re trying to coalesce something into being, but the colour comes from nature. It is something to do with the light here. My studio is a warehouse with dirty, natural, overhead light. I’m trying to hold life – not commemorate it but hold it in the present – through a kind of alchemy. Through training, I work at an intense and surprisingly fast pace that suits my temperament. I’ve learned to relate it to focus in sport. 

JL: Do you drink Lucozade Sport while painting?!

NM: I’m trying to reduce sugar intake! Having taken up tennis as a first ever sport at 48 after a life of indolence, now it is taking over. After 10 years playing, I have competed for Connacht at Inter-Provincials, and at that level I am mostly losing with determined style. The concentration needed is similar to painting – a sustained attention, but on a yellow ball. Now I’m also swimming every morning in the sea – mainlining nature through cold water. I’ve become an addict. My partner Noreen describes it as my daily electric shock treatment, which is not far from the truth. It resets mind and body, until I return to my normal zombie-like self by the end of the day, catching up on Netflix or Brexit. My show in London ends on 29 March. Since I was born there and, after 34 years finally becoming an Irish citizen, it seems morbidly symbolic to me that my show is ending on Brexit day. 

Nick Miller is an artist based in County Sligo. His exhibition, ‘Rootless’, continues at Art Space Gallery, London, until 29 March. 
nickmiller.ie
artspacegallery.co.uk

Notes
¹ Martin Buber, I and Thou, first published in German in 1923.
² See: Alan Watts and Chungliang Al Huang, Tao: The Watercourse Way (Pantheon: 1975).
³ Whitethorn, truck view (2000-01), oil on linen. Collection of the Irish Museum of Modern Art.

Feature Image:
Janet Mullarney sitting for Nick Miller in his studio in 2017; photograph courtesy of the artist

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