Member Profiles

Alive and Picking

Kathryn Crowley, mandala in progress, 2022, leaves and flowers; photograph courtesy the artist.

I GREW UP in Ireland during the recession of the 1980s, when workers lived in poverty as beef and butter mountains sat in warehouses. At the same time, millions of Ethiopian people were dying from starvation and drought. Confusion, injustice, famine, and war were central themes in my paintings.

My family managed a pub for many years, so I worked there at weekends. A working-class background served me well in the formation of the discipline needed to sustain a lifelong practice as a visual artist. Home was near a cluster of oak trees, inhabited by acrobatic red squirrels. The River Suir, an orchard, and an overgrown Victorian greenhouse were also close by. I worked with layers of paint, collage, and found objects to make nature-inspired works. Commercial galleries did not interest me; they felt elitist and most retained 40-60% on sales, so I avoided them and opted instead to sell my paintings in cafes and libraries.

Becoming a mother had a massive impact on my practice when I woke up to the realities of pollution. The internet was new, but it would be many years before Ireland would have reliable online sources for ecological research. When the dangers of Chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) were publicised, I stopped using oils, thinking (wrongly) that acrylics were less polluting. My ecological curiosity grew throughout my son’s childhood, and by the 90s I was mostly using watercolours. Then I met a childhood friend who introduced me to mandala art.

I moved to Galway and added rich layers of movement, poetry, theatre, drumming, and singing to my visual arts practice. In 2005, in protest at the refusal of a certain institution to stop using polystyrene cups in their canteen, I created a mandala over ten hours, using hundreds of plastic bottle tops. That was followed by ‘Planet Palette’ – an environmental art exhibition that featured over 55 artists, students, and school

children.

Throughout the next 15 years of activism and socially engaged art, I reduced my production greatly, then studied sociology at postgraduate level in 2019. Other recent projects include ‘Magical Moments’ (music-inspired writing by a mutigenerational group), ‘The Pollen Pages’ (a collection of my short stories and poetry) and ‘Fur, Feather, Pen’. This latest collaborative chapbook of photography and writing was printed on recycled paper using plantbased inks, and I continue to learn about sustainability. This year I was commissioned to write about my art practice by the Netherland’s Ministry of Education, Culture, and Science, and I reflected on my work for the first time in many years.

Creativity is part of everyday life for me, and I aim to continue sharing as I learn, while maintaining strong boundaries between my private life and public life (I also work as a tutor). After wading through lots of greenwashing while seeking Earth-friendly art materials, I wrote Alive and Picking, a book about making art in a way that is kinder to the environment. The idea came to me while making art from old PVC yoga mats. Currently I cut up old clothing and sew it by hand as an anthesis to fast fashion. This work highlights the toxicity of the industry and the plight of textile workers globally. I also make mandala and nature art, which I first began to explore in 2001. Fuchsia flowers fall from the shrubs in our garden, and they are incorporated along with rose petals, twigs, weeds, and leaves. Season to season, these meditations help me to feel grounded, calm, and limbered up. The work is physical, and it also provides me with fresh air and an intoxicating dose of colour on grey days.

Kathryn Crowley is an artist, writer, and tutor based in Kerry.

artyshe.com

Remotely Radical

ARTISTS CHARLOTTE BOSANQUET, Sally O’Dowd, and Grace McMurray (all VAI members) came together through a shared interest in contemporary drawing to give us ‘Remotely Radical’, an exhibition of new work in Vault Artist Studios in East Belfast. The artists visited Rathlin Island on the north coast, where Bosanquet is Harbour Master, to rekindle their emotional and artistic ties, and create drawings in response to the wild times of the last two years – Covid, insurrections and more.

There is a lightening of spirit in the show, that may have come from their collective relief at not co-creating via Zoom, the joy of interpersonal interactions, or just the experience of making spaces together that can elicit new considerations of patterns, of place and of time. Each artist experienced the grind of the pandemic’s induced isolation and the invisible labour of caring and planning for an uncertain future in their respective families, and each has a unique link to the rural landscape and culture of the North of Ireland.

“Resilience is used to describe people making their own histories (and geographies) but not under conditions of their own choosing.”1 Our present cultural and political terrain is seemingly always urgent and reactive, leaving little space for rumination, for careful looking, or even for the kind of daydreaming that can make another world seem more possible. ‘Remotely Radical’ is a reminder to engage in a purposeful construction of meaning for places that might prefigure a feminist/queer intention to abandon chronological time and ordered space. The work invites wildness.

“Wildness is where the environment speaks back, where communication bows to intensity, where worlds collide, cultures clash, and things fall apart.”2

Through pencil, charcoal and paint on paper and cardboard, ‘Remotely Radical’ requests our interaction with the psycho-geography of sites of care and of rural space, with the invisibilisation of continuous unpaid labour. The wiggle of lines, twisted curving paper, and the freedom of cardboard and paint, bring an energy, the force required for radical resilience. There

is the lively contrast of Bosanquet’s colourful boats from open, family-friendly drawing sessions, alongside the monochrome but windswept large-scale drawings of O’Dowd, against the modernist optical ululating of McMurray’s surfaces. In all three, we encounter a playful resistance through an emergence of unpredictable identities. Against the backdrop of the rural idyll, the shadow of which is remote alienation, we can sense the self-determination of three people remaining expressive against some odds.

There is a simplicity to all of the works in the exhibition which harnesses them together, a deft touch to the overriding feminist psychogeography and subjectivity that leads us towards what American geographer, Cindi Katz, refers to as ‘counter-topographies’.3 An important addition to resistance and resilience is the re-working that art offers us. In the space in Vault, itself an urban island of resistance and potential, we are included in their dialogue of reimagining.

This exhibition was supported by Cavan County Council Arts Office, the Esme Mitchell Trust, and Vault Artist Studios, Belfast.

Emma Campbell is completing her practice-based PhD at Ulster University, addressing photography as an activist tool for abortion rights. Emma is a member of the Turner Prize-winning Array Collective and has exhibited in international solo and group shows. Emma is co-convenor of Alliance for Choice and core campaigner since 2011.

emmacampbell.co.uk

1 MacLeavy et al., ‘Feminism and Futurity: Geographies of Resistance, Resilience and Reworking’, in Progress in Human Geography, 45 (6), Dec 2021, p 1568.

2 Jack Halberstam and Nyong’o Tavia, ‘Introduction: Theory in the Wild’, South Atlantic Quarterly, 117(3), 2018, p 454.

3 Cindi Katz, ‘On the Grounds of Globalization: A Topography for Feminist Political Engagement’, Signs Journal of Women in Culture and Society, 26(4), February 2001, pp 1213-34.

‘Remote ly Radical’, installation view, Vault Artist Studios; photograph by Simon Mills, courtesy the artists and Vault Artist Studios

Augmented Auguries

BRENDA MOORE-MCCANN CHATS WITH CLAIRE HALPIN ABOUT HER PAINTING PRACTICE AND RECENT EXHIBITION AT OLIVIER CORNET GALLERY.

Claire Halpin, The Towers That Be – Belfast, 2022, oil on gesso, 30cm x 40cm; image courtesy of the artist.Claire Halpin, The Towers That Be – Larne, 2022, oil on gesso, 30cm x 40cm; image courtesy of the artist.

Brenda Moore-McCann: I am struck by the dynamism and ambition of your painting practice in dealing with difficult content that condenses contemporary political events through multiple perspectives. How and when did you decide to address issues of war and conflict in your work? Claire Halpin: Around 2008, I made the shift from using family photographs as source material in my paintings to newspaper photographs, particularly sites of conflict. I was drawn to media images that echoed the composition of biblical, Renaissance, and Byzantine painting. In 2010 I did a residency in Georgia where my training as an icon painter solidified this new direction in my work. I was visiting sites of the Russian invasion of Georgia in 2008, which I had painted from newspaper images, and was now visiting in reality – a very real and present history. I had been concerned about personal memory; what is remembered or recorded in family photographs. However, this new work expanded to consider collective memory and history, including the ‘unknown knowns’ and asking: What is true or false? What has been left out?

As the world becomes smaller with globalised media, surveillance, and efforts to control the narratives surrounding events, these concerns become ever more urgent. I have been preoccupied with major international conflicts, the wars in Iraq, Syria, Afghanistan, Yemen and now Ukraine, and the impact they have had, not only on their own populations but on ours too, and how this plays out in global politics. As an artist, I see it as my responsibility to bear witness to what is happening in our own time and to question why it occurs.

BMMcC: Your work seems to concern the inherent instability of history and how this is presented, with regard to community, citizens, and human beings. Would you agree? CH: Yes, but I am conscious that I am also following a line of enquiry. The media and images I am reading inform the content and form of my paintings. As an

artist, I am consciously questioning the history, the narrative, through the crucial act of painting and image making.

BMMcC: The great historian E.H. Carr once observed: “There is no such thing as history, only historians.” What sources do you look to in your research? CH: I look at news media, documentaries (Adam Curtis, Noam Chomsky…), podcasts on current political thinking, old National Geographics, historical maps, bible stories, and ways of relooking at history (real, imagined, or myth). Sometimes it can be a singular event or image within a conflict, or a controversary that gives me a starting point for a painting.

BMMcC: In your recent solo exhibition, ‘Augmented Auguries’ at Olivier Cornet Gallery (8 September – 9 October), you are dealing with issues closer to home, like the pandemic and the conflict in Northern Ireland. Is it your first time to do that? CH: The Towers That Be are two key paintings in this exhibition. I am really struck by the tower building for the annual 12 July celebrations across Northern Ireland – the biblical scale, monumentality, theatrics, pageantry, and effigies. Within the context of falling statues and cultural wars, we consider the futility of building a tower only to burn it down. These paintings reference Bruegel’s Tower of Babel (c. 1563) in which, according to the origin myth, a united human race speaking a single language migrated eastward to Babylon, where they built a towering city with its top in the sky. God, observing the settlement, confounds their language so that they can no longer understand each other, and scatters them around the world. So yes, these paintings bring us right up to date.

BMMcC: It’s interesting that you are drawn primarily to the Early Renaissance, adapting both the diptych format and predella panels in your work. Perhaps these formal devices extend the narrative beyond the immediate present to convey historical, political, and cultural

complexities rather than singular points of view? CH: I find Early Renaissance paintings interesting from a compositional perspective; how narrative elements from different times and spaces can converge within the same picture plane. In some ways, it echoes our current means of consuming media or news feeds across multiple screens. Within the modular format of the diptychs, there is the potential to rearrange, reconfigure, or change the dominant narrative.

BMMcC: Has the rigour and discipline of your training been deployed in your own painting? Can you discuss the shift in technique for this exhibition? CH: My training as an icon painter definitely made me a better painter of fine detail. I found that slowing down the process, and the practice of building up image and surface through fine brushwork using tiny sable brushes, helped a lot. With the recent paintings, I have attempted to respond in a more immediate way through a loosening of the handling of the paint, allowing a movement and blurring on the gessoed surface – a slight shift from the heavily worked and complex compositions of my previous ‘Jigmap’ series. The ever-evolving process of painting, applying brush to surface…mark-making.

This is an abbreviated version of conversations recorded at Talbot Studios, Dublin, in summer 2022. ‘Augmented Auguries’ ran at Olivier Cornet Gallery from 8 September to 9 October.

oliviercornetgallery.com

Claire Halpin is a visual artist, curator and arts educator based in Dublin.

clairehalpin2011.wordpress.com @clairehalpinartist

Dr Brenda Moore-McCann is an art historian, author and art critic, based between Dublin and Tuscany.

@brendamooremcann