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The Unseen Shows
Visual Artists' News Sheet | July – August 2020
Neil Carroll, Rupture, 2019, emulsion paint, plaster, paper, burlap, tarpaulin, electrical tape, galva-band, lining paper, steel, wire mesh, wood, 250 × 420cm, installation view, RHA; photograph by Ros Kavanagh, courtesy of the artist and RHA
In Pursuit of the Brocken Spectre JOANNE LAWS INTERVIEWS NEIL CARROLL ABOUT HIS RECENT SOLO EXHIBITION AT THE RHA.
Joanne Laws: There was something monumental about this show, which seemed to have an art historical presence in the RHA’s colossal upper gallery, almost like some sort of formal retrospective. Maybe you could describe the shifts in your thinking, as you began to consider how you might work on such a large scale – including pragmatic decisions, such as fabrication, workspace and storage? Neil Carroll: I used to walk into the main space of the RHA any time the walls weren’t up – particularly during Niamh O’Malley’s last show, ‘handle’ (6 September – 28 October 2019) – and I’d get a shock because the space was just so big. I suppose you always feel as if you are subject to it, rather than being able to control it in any way. I was thinking that maybe I should just forget about the walls and imagine the space almost as a desert landscape, with this horizon that stretches out to infinity. I’d worked the whole thing out as an installation and had built a model, but when I started to actually make the installation, it just seemed a bit programmatic for me. The way I work is usually quite process-based and there were no surprises in this plan. So when I realised that the things I was making weren’t working, I chopped them all up and started seeing different sections. I laid them out on the floor and noticed that they were essentially two-dimensional paintings. It was at that point that I flipped over into the idea of wall-mounted paintings. I thought, if the space is massive, why not just do huge works? I had access to a large agricultural shed to use as a workspace. In terms of storage, I decided to disregard everything that might happen afterwards. I just wanted to put on the best show I could. JL: What does the term ‘Brocken Spectre’ actually refer to? NC: A Brocken Spectre is a relatively rare meteorological phenomenon that you can see up in the mountains from time to time. If you go above low-lying cloud on a mountaintop, with the sun behind you, it throws your shadow onto the water droplets below you, almost like a mirage or hologram, with a prism of rainbow colours surrounding you. A lot of the works
