Fragile Fluctuations. Els Borghart, Visual Artist

Fragile Fluctuations

Els Borghart Visual Artist

Pixel Sorting and Diffracting Gestures

EL Putnam Visual Artist

THERE HAVE BEEN many turning points in my artistic development, but November 2008 was key. Almost 12 years ago, I started a new life in a wild, windy and, of course, wet country named Ireland. I moved here from Belgium. How this came about is essential to understanding the thought processes behind my artistic practice.

Just before I moved to Drogheda, I was trekking around Mexico with my now husband who is – of course – Irish. It was during that journey that I realised that the rat race HR job I was stuck in had no room for art and was no longer the life I wanted. I completed an MA in Fine Art and an MA in Cultural Policy & Art Management before I started working in HR, and Ireland is known to be widely supportive of the arts. Perfect timing, I thought… And then the recession happened. Somewhere between resigning from my job and my arrival in Ireland, the land of plenty turned into the land of panic.

These events had a huge impact on my world view and my artistic development. I realised that both travelling and moving away during a worldwide crisis had shaken up all my beliefs about the world we live in – everything I knew and relied on – no longer applied. Roots and ties were also cut, which in turn allowed me to become a citizen of the world, first and foremost. This mindset provides a psychological distance from where you live, a way to see things more detached and from multiple perspectives, almost as an outsider looking in. I also realised that nothing is fixed; our world is in flux, both literally and figuratively.

Ever since then, my work has been concerned with this fragile fluctuating nature of reality and memory. Through Charles Baudelaire’s ideas of the detached observer, I explore the significance of wandering and how this influences our perception of the world. This results in drawings, paintings and prints; creating a series of pictorial encounters that are puzzling and reveal a hint of intrigue. They are based on reflections and musings about the world around us, with a current focus on a series called ‘Choir of the Mind’. My work offers curious glimpses and perspectives, overlooked moments, figments of memories, open questions without answers. Sometimes the works are dark and gloomy, but more often luminous and hopeful. Just like life, there is always a subtle edge that is slightly unsettling.

In recent years, I have exhibited nationally – at Courthouse Gallery & Studios, Ennistymon; Toradh Gallery, Ashbourne; and An Táin Arts Centre, Dundalk – and internationally at Zebrastraat Galerie and Galerie De Wandelgangen in Belgium. In 2019, my painting, He is not here (2017), was selected for the Zurich Portrait Prize at the National Gallery of Ireland. Seeing my work exhibited in the same museum where many of my artistic heroes reside had a profound impact on me and my practice. It has been a joy to see such keen interest in my art from Ambassador of Belgium to Ireland, Mr De Bauw, who visited both the exhibition and my studio in recent months. This has led to the acquisition of this painting by the Belgian State Art Collection. I am truly honoured that this artwork has found a new and permanent home at the Belgian Embassy in Dublin.

As much as I am passionate about my individual practice, I also have a desire to work with other creatives. Declan Kelly and I now work as an artistic and curatorial duo under the name ELS + DECLAN (elsanddeclan.com). Over the past 10 years, this has led to co-curating a range of exhibitions, programming for festivals, developing creative concepts and commissioned projects, while also making art installations within the realm of theatre in Belfast, London and Drogheda. Intense periods working with other artists alternate with stretches of studio time, where I focus on my individual practice, is an ideal format for me. 2020 has brought the completion of a theatre project with Quintessence Theatre Company, for which Declan Kelly and I designed a light installation and the costumes. I am currently working on a Creative Ireland project, while looking forward to a month-long artist residency with Arteventura in Spain during the summer, where I will further develop a new body of drawings and paintings that will be shown in upcoming exhibitions. Exciting times, as always in the life of an artist!

elsborghart.com

Els Borghart, Choir of the Mind VII, 2018, oil on board, 20 × 30 cm; courtesy of the artist

EL Putnam, Quickening (video still), 2018; courtesy of the artist

AS AN ARTIST, I explore diffractions and entanglements, creating events and situations where difference and interconnectedness are brought to the fore. I generally use performed actions and technologies, including video, sound and other digital tools. As a US citizen living in Ireland since 2013, art is a means for me to connect to my adopted home. I have been living in Rassan, Hackballscross in County Louth since 2017, located metres from the Northern Irish border. Most of the work I have created since moving here engages with landscapes as more than representations of an environment, inviting insights into a dynamic and complex geographic milieu. I create a situated entry point that emerges from my knowledge and experience of a place, as an invitation to pause and think differently about what is being presented.

For instance, shortly after moving to Rassan, I was looking out the window of my home studio, when I realised that I was facing the border and began to wonder how this demarcation was situated in the environment. For the most part, there are minor indications of difference – a change in the road surface texture or street signs indicating that speed limits are in kilometres or miles. I regularly receive text messages while sitting at home, welcoming me to the UK as my mobile service switches between nations. I am also aware of another, non-cartographic border; my family and I are ‘blow ins’ as we only recently arrived to this area. As a non-local and non-native, I am removed to a degree from the history of the area. I turned to the camera as a means of creating a connection with the place around me. Using over 200 of photographs shot around the border between Counties Louth and Armagh, I created Quickening (2018). For this artwork, images are cycled like a slide show; however, when a motion sensor is triggered, the cycling stops and the image begins to ‘glitch’ in realtime using a ‘pixel sorting’ algorithm, with input based on the person’s distance from a motion sensor. Instead of trying to represent the region, I play with the liminality of the unrepresentable – unstitching images through the slippage of recognisable forms, until they become static.

The title Quickening refers to the sensation of quickening in pregnancy, or when a pregnant person senses foetal movements in early pregnancy. These sensations can only be experienced in the physical state of pregnancy: they are internal, haptic and phenomenological, making the pregnant person the communicator of experience. I use this physical experience as a metaphor for the border in Ireland, which has gained renewed attention with Brexit. The title also references the fact that I was pregnant while creating this work, which also happened to be during the campaign to repeal the Eighth Amendment (in which I was unable to vote, as I am not an Irish citizen). Moreover, in addition to being an embodied, photographic response to this particular landscape in Ireland, I also reconceptualise pregnancy as metaphor in creative practice, with an emphasis on in-situ experience, as opposed to anticipated outcomes.

Digital photography and video have certain affordances, granting these media a flexibility I play with through editing and post-production. Dissolution (2019) is a performance-to-video series I have been creating at Castle Roche, close to our home. Incorporating documentation of performed actions, along with macroscopic footage shot from the site, the gestures of Dissolution allude to the gentle caress across a computer’s interface, as the body melds to the remains of the castle, which is slowly being reclaimed by its landscape. I craft a meditation that layers video as bodies; built structures and human actions dissolve and emerge through techniques of image manipulation.

Throughout my practice, I employ the aesthetic and material possibilities of digital technologies. I expand projected and moving images beyond the monitor and the screen through engagement with performed actions, whether my own or those of others. These entanglements of the body with the technological sit at the heart of my creative explorations, made manifest through works that reveal how we mediate and are mediated by the technologies we use, expressing how we are part of broader milieux that are geographic, machinic and embodied.