14 minute read
Raison d’Être
from The Eye Issue #4
by The Eye
In conversation with Eimear Boyd, Anson Cording, and Ali Kemal Ali
By Katherine Michael
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IADT is a creative heaven for me. I absolutely love being a student here and I appreciate the spirit and community and the experiences that the staff and tutors provide for us creative misfits (meant in the best way). I love listening to people’s stories, particularly if they love what they are doing. I believe if we find something we love to be and do, then that helps not only ourselves but the world becomes richer as a result.
I spoke with Eimear Boyd our Welfare officer who recently graduated with a BA honours in Art, Anson Cording, a model maker who looks after the hire of cameras in the college and with Ali Kemal Ali one of our staff from the technical department.
As I was writing this article I came across the book The Prophet by Kahlil Gibran and there is a beautiful passage about work. “…And in keeping yourself with labour you are in truth loving life, And to love life through labour is to be intimate with life’s inmost secret. And when you work with love you bind yourself to yourself, and to one another, and to God”.
Eimear Boyd
I sit across from Eimear, I find her humble in her role as Welfare officer. She is wearing a navy college hoodie and a warm – cream hat that covers her brown hair and as she talks she smiles with her whole face. I ask her about the large Moon ball sculpture that hung in the college Chapel. She started in the art world in the Gorey School of Art with Ali and completed a portfolio preparation course which gained her direct entry into second year. On seeing the Print Room at an open day she made her mind up. Once here she was able to do copper plate printing, aluminium, collagraph and screen printing.
Collagraph print
Photography Eimear Boyd
While a student at IADT, Eimear got to see Ali making his now famous UFO that has featured at Electric Picnic the music festival and has been an integral part of the creation of Transmission. For the uninitiated, Transmission started in 2016 with Ali Kemal bringing together a collection of unknown DJs, artists and creatives.
“We decided we wanted to build a planet, I wanted it to be the moon. He knew he wanted to build it with a cross brace but I knew if you put a light in it you would see the joined lines, so I had the idea to make a Papier Mache mould first and that was when the whole collaboration with Ali really began,” says Eimear.
In the summer of 2018, Ali gave her the skills and tools to know how to work with fibreglass. They put a 140 watt bulb inside the moon and it was installed the following year at the Electric Picnic - it had a stepper motor inside so it had a moving lunar cycle.
This is a fine example were a project shared can become greater and that is the power of collaboration which is widely encouraged by the tutors within IADT. It is said that Geese fly further in formation than by themselves and both Eimear and Ali show this in the different projects they have undertaken.
"It’s probably the most memorable commercially acceptable artwork that I’ve ever been involved with in contrast to my prints which are very abstract. They are quite textile tactile quality prints."
"I absolutely love collagraph print, which is a form of print were you ink up the plate and stick down any material you wish to see the lines within the material rather than the etching or Intaglio, you get the reverse the textual material seeing what the material looks like on paper and ink."
She explains how she sees hints of the Fibonacci Sequence which are the natural patterns and symmetries that pop into lines even within tinfoil.
She is very passionate about what she puts her mind to. “I get a natural high from print and this welfare job too. You get to help people and it might be a little thing for you but it’s a massive thing for someone else,” she says. She talks about her involvement in the Scouts with art classes and she enjoys that too.
“You start seeing beautiful marks from banal things like orange peel and someone once printed dried raspberries! You can do the most wonderful and weird things with Print.”
Her dream job would be to be a print technician and she’d be delighted if the college would hire her. She smiles at the idea. “I applied for a masters in Japan in print but I’ll find another way of doing it. I might look elsewhere around the world. There are other studios doing amazing things. I’d like to have my own studio but I’ll see how that works out.
“Transmission has always been a love for me as it’s away from college and actually out there in the art world. I’ve been able to collaborate and make friends for life and every year improve and do more.” She smiles again: “I absolutely loved working on the moon. I can’t wait to work on a bigger piece.”
Does her full time welfare role impinge on her creativity?
“It’s the best thing I have done. It can be draining caring for everyone else rather than yourself and I know it’s important to keep in touch with my art.” She plans to do art projects throughout the year for climate change and a BYOB painting in Bakers pub and help the IADT print society.
Our time is nearly up and I ask Eimear what’s her favourite book.
The Magical Faraway Tree by Enid Blyton “Man that book!” she clasps her hands together and she lights up again. “That book fuelled my brain with so much creativity and imagination I still read it to this day. I absolutely love that book. A tree with magical people and at the very top of it is a door into a magical land that changes every day where a magical place exists.
Eimear recently graduated with an Honours BA Art.
Instagram: boyd.eimear & boyd.eimear@gmail.com
Moon installation
Photography Katherine Michael
Anson Cording
It’s only my second time to use and hire a camera and tripod from Anson - a brilliant facility provided by the college and same day I am encouraged by Ali and Tony from the student union to just jump in and take photographs of the installation of the Moon which hung in the Chapel and the UFO at a Festival for the dead in Glendalough for Halloween.
I see Anson has a pet robot! But it transpires technically it’s not. It’s actually a 3D printer moving back and forth forming an object like Frankenstein. He informs me it’s called the Franken Printer. To me it’s his robot.
Necessity is the mother of invention and his time working down in the camera department has led him towards designing and writing the firmware for a 3D printer. Before IADT he worked in display design and for Forbidden Planet years ago and for Paramount repairing one of the enterprise miniatures from Star Trek ‘cause it had been damaged in transport.
We discuss briefly the article I’m forming about work you love. He has a jovial manner which sparks the idea for the title. What is your Raison D’Etre? He stresses the importance of doing something you enjoy for the fun of it rather than the focus to make money.
For hire of camera equipment, contact: Anson.cording@iadt.ie
Ali Kemal Ali
During his lunch break I ask Ali about his cool UFO and how it came to be. I’m inspired by his immense positive attitude and open light-heartedness a real sense of possibility permeates around him. He’s wearing a black T-Shirt one of the many he has designed for Transmission (he used the symbol of the insert of a 45” record for his inspiration)
He asks me how I am getting along in college I say it’s so brilliant to be here and honoured to be surrounded by such talented dedicated people.
“This college is amazing, know what I mean? He says in his cockney accent, the facilities are brilliant, there is so much here, the people who work here are so helpful and kind. He continues: “I absolutely love what I am doing now. I couldn’t BE in a better place I could never find what I wanted to stick at until now.”
Ali Kemal Ali had direct entry into third year in Sculpture at IADT. His whole class was away in Venice and he was the only person left behind so having worked with wood mostly all his life from making guitars to building TV sets for the BBC, Top of the Pops, Miss World, shop windows for all the major department stores including Harrods and Selfridges to building kitchens and houses with the amount of different experiences he gained over the years, he decided to take things a step further and set himself the challenge to build a UFO.
He asked his tutor Amanda could he build it and she agreed but Ali thought there must be a catch “I don’t want to build something and you say it’s a great prop so now where is the art?” He wasn’t convinced so he went to the Head of the Facility and he got the go-ahead.
That same year when it was built, Emma McKeagney from his class, suggested that he apply to Electric Picnic. Instantly they invited him to bring the UFO to the woods at the festival in Stradbally. It had a sub-woofer, played music, drove, had lazers and even smoke machines. He made a short film of it driving down Gorey main street with police chasing it. According to Anson this was on the news as far as Japan!
Ali saw a great opportunity and made a proposal to EP to include the DJs and artists he had met from Gorey and so Transmission was born. They set up a rave in the woods where aliens and humans could party together. “If we can get along with aliens surely we can get along with everyone else in the world because at that time there was a lot of negativity and talk about war and building a wall,” he says. “I just fell in love with the idea and the next year
Eimear and Ali with their Moon installation
Photography Peter Kavanagh
they asked me to expand on that so I said I would build a mothership. I didn’t have a clue how I was going to do it. I knew it had to be big.” Ali is a great advocate of anything is possible, the only limit is your imagination. “The little UFO is three metres in diameter and the mothership is eleven metres in diameter.
That year I was graduating so it was very intense” (noticed he doesn’t use the word stressful.) He shows me photos of the mothership thirty foot off the ground and I’m amazed by the scale but also that he had had time to construct it at the same time as his final year graduation piece his sculptural wooden Mind Map with a Fibre glass ball (reminding me of a giant futuristic war of the worlds wooden structure)
How did he make the mothership? “I made it at home in my garden with fellow student Lorcan McGeogh: my right hand man (Alis’ sanity) who was there from the start and Claire Burke (his tutor) introduced him to Luke Maguire who used his skills in LED (light emitting diode). He was on the creative media technologies course here in IADT . He created the most amazing light display on the Mothership and when you experience it in full it really is out of this world it’s Wow”. I see how Ali is an example of the ethos behind what IADT is about, using his alchemy to encourage students to become the best they can be.
Where does he see this all going from here? “I’ve got my own stage at Electric Picnic called Transmission and its becoming one of the favourite stages people talk about. I’ve got the little UFO, the Mothership, the Stairgate with visual projections, a five foot moon co-created with Eimear.
“She’s so talented,” he says. “It is its own entity, it’s not me anymore. Fifty or more people are involved and the more I can include people with EP the better as it gives them the platform to contribute to something that is phenomenal.” There are talks about the Transmission stage being at four festivals a year it’s taking on a new life opening up to new audiences.
What brought him to Ireland? Ali is originally from North London (he jokes that he is related to Muhammad Ali) and grew up with kids from all different backgrounds. His mum was from Cyprus but moved to England in the ‘60s to have a better life. She worked hard to bring up the five children on her own in a country where she could barely speak the language.
“It was only when my mum died that I felt like my anchor was lifted and I was free to sail. Other than that I wouldn’t have dreamed of moving away from her. I had two kids living on the tenth floor of a tower block a council flat and used to get out of the lift on the ninth because that’s as far as it went, stepping over junkies with syringes hanging out of their arse and thought: “I can’t bring my kids up in this. and Sue was of Irish descent and she used to come here as a child and she would bring the kids here for the summers. We couldn’t afford a place in London so Sue suggested we look at places in Ireland and I trusted her with my life as she always considered everyone in her decisions. We had nothing to lose. We took a chance and it is the best decision I’ve ever made.” In 1996 they moved to Ireland to have a better life.
What is his Raison D’Etre; his reason for being and doing what he does?
Ali with DJ Baw
Photography Katherine Michael
"It’s just a coincidence that I found this job when I did because I needed something for me, yes I am getting more by giving to the students…..it is in the giving that I am receiving. If I can help just one or two people it makes it all worthwhile. I came to IADT to be part of something that happens that is wonderful and I get paid for it which is even better because I don’t have to do something else. That is what keeps me going” He reminds me it’s not often someone finds something they love doing and can do it.
And his advice to students: “Follow your heart. Let it go to where it goes, just let yourself go. Don’t be afraid of doing something you are not sure about. (When he graduated he, screen printed a T-Shirt with the IADT logo with the words I did it!) Just do it as long as you are not harming anyone or anything. If you make a mistake, it doesn’t matter – it’s part of being a student.
I’m not here for a big salary or nothing like that. Purely for the love of what I’m doing. I still feel like I am a student here being paid. It’s an amazing place to be - not just the energy from the students but from the tutors. I am very grateful to Amanda Ralf (his tutor) without her the UFO wouldn’t have come about.
When I was 18 I worked for a company in London called DesArt. It was so creative I absolutely loved it.” Whenever his boss got a commission from BBC or wherever, he gathered all the staff and listened to all ideas - everyone was involved in the process. Ali loved that and in a way IADT became a continuation of that. ”I should have carried on when I left there, I should have figured it out but I didn’t until now…”
We are all glad he didn’t figure it out until now. Doing what you love is having true abundance. “Work is love made visible” as it says in The Prophet.
