This interview was made possible by the Sligo Arts Service, Sligo County Council. To Celebrate the opening of Realm the accompanying exhibition to the Primary Colours Residency I sat down with the exhibiting artists and recipients of the residency Jo Lewis and Aideen Connolly to discuss their work and exhibition.

This exhibition developed from the Primary Colours residency, where each of you worked with different primary schools to create work. Could you talk about that?

Aideen: We were both assigned schools to work with, and I was lucky enough to be assigned the national school my children attended. The school is just out in rural Sligo near the Gleniff Horseshoe. There was a lot of flexibility in what I could do with the children. I had them make ink using natural materials, and on other days, we just spent the time up on the mountain (Gleniff Horseshoe) building shelters, drawing and foraging for plants to make ecoprints and cyanotypes. They didn’t see it as art, they saw it as play. And it was very connected with the landscape.

Jo: I was excited to get the residency especially as it was linked to an exhibition. Working with the children, it was so liberating to try things that were ephemeral. We would make works in nature from nature, work not made to last before being taken back by the landscape. It was great how the kids embraced this way of making because, so often they can get tied up with the concept of ownership. ” I’m taking this home; this is mine”. They really embraced the temporary rather than being very precious about the works they made.

We’ve talked a bit about the residency, but let’s talk about your studio practices. When you are in the studio, what are the first steps you take in creating a work?

Jo: The materials I use inspire me. I might have the urge to work with clay one day; or for example, at the moment, I’m working a lot with roots. Roots have influenced the work I’ve been creating for this exhibition.

In general, the materials I use are materials I’ve found. An important part of the process is finding the materials, bits of wood in skips or scraps that are left over. You see so much being thrown out. It always upsets me to see stuff being thrown out and not being used again. My partner is a builder, so he always has pieces of wood or other scraps hanging around that I can put to good use. I collect a lot from the garden as well. I’ve been collecting roots and seed pods and things like slices of cucumbers and leaving them out to dry to see how they end up looking. Where I’m at, at the moment, I’m using a lot of that garden waste. I wash the waste, like the cucumbers and roots. I think the act of washing them is so important because it gives you a chance to look at them. You get to look at them from a different perspective. 

Seeing them from a different perspective has really inspired me to, in a way, play with the materials. Ideas have come from that, and I can push the materials in my work. 

In the studio, I start by playing with different materials, and it is from that play that ideas will emerge. I develop by adding more structure to those ideas.

 Aideen: If I’m starting anything, I will sketch first. It’s part of my research, how I’ll make the first mark. And I really like doing that, even if it’s only in one colour; I can get an idea fairly quickly and fairly cleanly. Sometimes they become the piece, but sometimes it’s just the practice of getting there, and both are equally valid outcomes. That’s the fun of it.

For this exhibition, I’ve been combining a number of processes: painting, drawing, felting, cyanotypes and my Eco-Prints. When creating ecoprints, I try and slow things down. You have to look at the plant and acknowledge it, know a bit about it. Is it poisonous? What colour will it be? I find that research, especially the practical research, is so important to my process.

Usually, I have to think how I will communicate an idea, whether it is going to be a painting, Eco-Print or Cyanotype. I explore, experiment and see where the process leads.

Have you had challenges working with natural materials, since they can change over time?

Jo: My work is very much about the experience anyway. An installation, no matter how big or small, will only last the amount of time you’re in it. With the materials I’ve been using, you could come into the exhibition one day, and a few weeks later, you might have a slightly different experience because something may have drooped, and in a way, noticing that change is an experience in itself. Those individual moments are important.

I’ve had some practical challenges as well, as you might expect, considering the organic nature of the materials. Pieces going mouldy, or things not changing in the way you expect them to, and to be fair, other things also dry out well. One funny challenge I didn’t expect was that some materials could look really well in the skip, but once you get them home, they aren’t so good. It’s very much about how you put things together and where they are positioned. But sometimes, you just have to accept that those changes are part of the work. I suppose if you want it to stay the same forever, the only way to do that is to freeze it in resin, but I feel it defeats the purpose of using natural materials.

Aideen: For me, If I want a crisp cyanotype, I have to work quickly with the plants, or they will wilt. The time of the year can provide its own challenges. There is plenty of greenery in the summer and spring and autumn, but practically nothing in the winter. Acquiring materials can be hard that time of the year. There are ways around that, berries can be stored in the freezer and plants can be dried.  

When it comes to eco prints, the image is made using plant material as both image source and ink. The natural dyes and forms of the plant are transferred/printed on to cloth or paper through a process of wetting and heating. You have very little control. Yet, you are driving the process by putting the plant under pressure to release the pigment. I find it fascinating, as the plant can only do what it can do, so you are learning the plant’s limitations as you experiment with it. All plants have different compositions. I loved the exploration that comes with that. I had been making my own ink for many years. Combining my love of print with eco or botanical printing was a natural progression in my practice. Eco prints are mono prints!

Maybe we can finish by discussing your plans for the exhibition.

Aideen: My Realm journey is a linear map in a way, starting in my own townland of Cloonty (Meadow in Irish) through Edencullentragh/Hollyfield where St Aidan’s NS is located and up through the Gleniff Horseshoe Valley. The road passes through 7 townlands. Each townland once supported many families. Not even stones remain to mark each home. The flowers they planted fado fado do appear year after year though. I chose to forage at different times and places along the road for flowers, native and otherwise. Using cyanotypes (an early form of photography) and eco print techniques on paper, wool and silk, I have created work that gently echoes the ephemeral nature of its past. 

Jo: Catherine Fanning will curate the exhibition. Whilst our work is separate we have elements in common, they will definitely complement each other. The Hyde Bridge Gallery has a lot of history. It used to be residential; the rooms still have the fireplaces from that time. I see recycled materials in a similar vein as they are objects that also have a history. Objects and spaces have embedded energy, and I plan to tap into that for the work.

You can find out more about the Primary Colours Residency through their Facebook page and website, links below

https://m.facebook.com/people/Primary-Colours-Sligo/100064312197104/

https://primarycolourssligo.com/?fbclid=IwAR00uWFRKXvKAyr7RDVf-U_ZqO7tMwQWx6CICWJLQDfMwlhRWx2mb-5534M

thank you, Anne James & Adrian Mc Hugh for your work editing

This interview is an edited conversation between myself and Yvette Monahan, for the purpose of the website.

Yvette Monahan is a photographer and curator based in Dublin, and lectures at the University of Ulster. I sat down with Yvette to discuss her practice the changes in that practice that have occurred over time and how she approaches art. In this interview, I hope to get across how deeply she thinks about her work. It was a fascinating conversation and I hope you enjoy it.

What’s a day in the studio like for you?

For me, it’s different every day. In general, there are three stages when it comes to a project. The first stage is research, then the making, and then making sense of what you have created. It’s all-encompassing when I’m in the making stage, but I like to spend a few months researching before I get to that. So that involves a lot of reading.

In contrast, the making stage is about getting into a place of flow and letting it happen. So I start with some elementary repetitive tasks to access the unconscious space. Then, I experiment with different materials and begin to explore. The exploration tends to last a few months. Then you have to step back to get a sense of what work is emerging.

How do you start your research?

Research is never a planned thing.   An area of interest takes hold, and often the right book will fall off the shelf on the right page, there is a mystery to it. Talking to peers and friends about ideas will lead to a book that progresses the project. Before long, there are piles of research books all over the studio. It’s important because the more you know, the more you can bring the idea closer to the work.

The Time of Dreaming the World Awake would be an appropriate example of the relationship between research and landscape.

With The Time of Dreaming the World Awake, I researched a region in Southern France called Aude, particularly Pic de Bugarach, or the “magic mountain”.

I was interested in how the landscape can hold the intangible such as history and mythology. For example, a friend was writing a book on the Cathars concurrently, so I went on several of her research trips.  The Cathars lived in the 12th century, often in hilltop castles littered throughout the landscape of Southern France until the final stand-off at Montsegur in 1244. So, you know, that becomes relevant, how that fits into place and the atmosphere of the land. The Cathar history really informed the work.

One fascinating aspect of your work is the exploration of macro and micro, especially in the series A Revolution of Stardust.

With A Revolution of Stardust, the relationship between the micro of the domestic setting to the cosmic macro became compelling to me.

It started with these gorgeous Phaidon books, Universe and Sun and Moon, which look at, how the cosmos has been represented throughout Art-History and Science. It’s fascinating as they have images from the Hubble telescope alongside seventh-century shepherds’ maps. I have been looking at books about space and cosmology for some time, and it’s an idea that has been constantly in the back of my mind – something that might be referential in subtle and unconscious ways over time in other works. Perhaps, it is no surprise that I started to see those images photographically in the domestic space.

At the time, I watched a tribute to the cartographer Tim Robinson by the writer Robert Macfarlane who talked about Tim Robinson’s ‘radiant attention’. Tim could talk about the tiniest corner of a field, yet, he could encompass the whole landscape through a story of this micro part of the landscape. He could then zoom out and say more about the grander sense of place. If you give something radiant attention, you enliven it, you give it a sense of importance.

With A Revolution of Stardust and other projects, you’ve expanded your practice beyond landscape photography. How did that come about for you?

They are almost two different processes now. The landscape work was about walking and being immersed in a place, spending quite long periods outdoors. Recently, I’ve wanted to be in the studio more, and I’ve wanted to make more with my hands.

This coincided with other changes in my life: since I became a parent, it isn’t feasible to head off for six weeks to wander the hills. I don’t know if I would have made the change anyway, but I definitely wanted to start more of a studio-based practice and use images as a jumping-off point, making interventions on prints etc. Before, it would have been the print itself that was the end product.

At the same time, I’d gone back to study at NCAD in the evening, which gave me an environment where I had to produce projects and work regularly. So I used that time to experiment with different materials and mediums. This shifted from my old way of researching, making images in the landscape, and only using the studio to edit to a more all-encompassing studio-based practice.

It’s telling that you say you want to make more with your hands, because even in your landscape works, there is such a textural element.

That is interesting that you see that. I try to use a very intuitive approach. With landscape, you realize that the small details are as important as the broader shots because they help people understand a place more. It’s hard to take in large landscapes visually because we experience them in very different ways.  However, when you experience a place in textural ways, for example, the feeling of rocks beneath your feet and the weather on your face become important. I was trying to find more of a felt space rather than just a sublime, distant view.

Landscapes are more than the sublime. There’s a harshness, too, that is relentless and unforgiving, especially over long periods. And as we discussed, I’m always looking at the micro and macro of timescales. Landscapes are just so ancient compared to our brief lifetimes.

I’ve heard you talk about “living the landscape”, when you were making those works. I thought that was very interesting.

Yeah, I need to understand a place by being immersed in it. When I’m in a landscape for the first time, I go swimming in whatever water body I can find, which helps. Landscape work isn’t easy. I’ve found with photography that sometimes it can be so abstract and unfeeling because there is a mechanism between you and what you are photographing, and you’re not getting in there.

You need to ground yourself into the place and start understanding it. For example, Donovan Wiley from the Belfast School of Art once said, “Make sure you only photograph when you feel moved to.” That was a significant change, moving from the head into a felt space.   Rather than before, when I’d make a list of shots that I thought would be interesting, I had to find a new way to understand that sense of place. It was a way to try to understand concepts around memory and time within a place.

What is your print process?

When shooting film, it is developed here and then handprinted in London by John McCarthy in Labyrinth Printing. He’s fantastic with colour print. You can see the difference with complex colours, such as green. John adds so much more depth to the images in the darkroom. Therefore, I can focus on what I’m trying to say but in such a subtle way. There is a quiet depth with natural dyes.

With digital, it is all done in my home-studio and then printed by Jim at Inspirational Arts in Dublin 8.  Jim and Ed are the best in the business.

There’s a painterly aspect to the way that you talk about colour.

I think that my early landscape work probably could be conceived as quite painterly because of the approach to colour; there is a deliberate use of muted tones. But the other work? That’s interesting. Some of it circumstantial. With a project like Octopolis, where I photographed an octopus, it was a really poorly lit small tank in an aquarium with a bright exit sign behind it. Hence, it was necessary to switch from colour to black and white and focus close up.

Because of the splodges, it felt like abstract paintings in a sense.

Well, there’s a lot of movement in the frame, and they’re at a high ISO, so the images are grainy. Octopus eyes are sensitive, so I couldn’t bring in additional lighting. In such circumstances, you’re pushing your camera as hard as possible. I wanted to get away from the idea of an octopus as a spectacle because they are extremely intelligent creatures, akin to mammals. They can use tools and have personalities.

I want to talk a bit about Beyond the Ninth Wave; in particular, you created a triptych with turf on lumen paper prints. Can you talk a bit about that process and how that came to be?

Beyond the Ninth Wave was for the TULCA Festival; It was a body of work around The Screamers on the island of Inishfree. At the time, I had this compulsion to make with my hands. So, I just started experimenting and researching different experimental photography methods. The process is quite simple. You place an object on paper in the sun to expose it over a long period, say eight hours, and then at the end, you fix it in darkroom chemicals. It’s a simple process, but I was trying to look at another way of expressing the physicality of the island other than photography.

There was no kindling for fires on the island, just turf on the fire all year round. It was survival, light, comfort, and all the elements for healing from trauma. While collecting turf for the fire, I realized that the turf encapsulated all I was trying to say about memory and a landscape. There are a thousand years of compressed time in one sod. When you burn it, you release a lot of history. If we consider all of the trauma within the Irish psyche from years of colonisation, the Catholic church, and poverty,  I felt this Donegal landscape reflected this as a place of repressed trauma. The Screamers believed we should re-experience pain and then release it. I imagined this landscape releasing pain through the act of burning turf.

I laid out the turf as triptychs on large sheets of photographic paper in the cottage’s sitting room. I read about scream therapy and sound waves, so they looked like raw sound waves when I looked at the resulting prints. 

I would lay out the triptychs in the morning, spend the day making photographs on the island, return and fix them, wash them in the shower, and dry them on the clothesline. Depending on the weather, each set was markedly different. If it was sunnier, they were more purple and pink. Mostly,  it was rainy, which resulted in deeper yellows. The prints were dependent on the elements of the day, which appealed. The weather was infusing them with the energy of the island. This was the island that The Screamers lived on for ten years, so I like that the prints brought this raw energy off the island with them back into the exhibition space; they feel visceral.

How do you consider the viewer when you’re installing work? How do you want people to move through space?

I remember a friend coming in to see the lumen prints. She was like, “Oh, I’ve just had a weird reaction to this.” Well, that is the ideal!

I read a quote by Josef Koudelka where he said that a good photograph should hit you in the stomach before hitting the brain. That idea that you react to something before you know what it is – hopefully, you’re taking in all the energy that’s gone into making it. Especially if you’re talking about the energy of a place, you’re hoping that the viewer can read that.

Do you keep notebooks and sketchbooks for each of your projects?

Yeah, sketchbooks have become more important to me over time. I used notebooks for research and to anchor in anything that could be relevant to the work. They’re an essential resource, especially when going back to something done ten years ago. Alice Maher talks about notebooks as a reservoir that you tap into, that are always refilling. So I have a whole shelf for them in my studio. When I went to NCAD, I got into making them more visual. Having all my experiments in them and having them at the larger A3 size allows them to become a lot more comprehensive. It primarily provides for trying out more drawings and keeping notes on everything you’re doing.

What are your plan’s going forward?

I’m looking to work a bit more materially in the darkroom. I’ve been tracing these old astral maps on tracing paper and then transferring the lines onto the negatives. So, I’ve started making my own negatives, and they’re elementary forms and shapes. Last year, I started making them while on residency at Cow House Studios in Wexford.

Once I realized I could make my negatives, I realised that I could become  self-contained in my home studio. Thanks to the Gallery of Photography, we set up a darkroom in the house during the lockdown. The idea is to make the negatives from drawings and then do interventions on the prints; it’s very open yet.

I’d like to make a series of these star maps that relate to a book entitled ‘Pi in the Sky’ by Michael Poyner. He made links to sites across the country, from Newgrange to Inishmurray, to the Pyramids and other sacred sites worldwide. It seems to be discredited entirely now, but that’s not what’s important to me; I’m not looking for the truth. For example, Poyner talks about how gold torques are related to how astral maps were interpreted by our ancestors, relating specifically to Ireland’s night sky.

It is just the beginning, I want to make my own negatives and take control of the whole process. Going out in the landscape looking for images is really enjoyable, but you’re not entirely in control…which isn’t a bad thing, but it takes time. It’s exciting to work in a way that gives me a bit more control.

You can find out more about Yvette Monahan work through her Instagram pages and websites, links below

https://www.instagram.com/yvettemonahan/?hl=en

https://www.yvettemonahan.com/

thank you, Anne James for your work editing

You can support Painting in Text through Patreon, link below

https://www.patreon.com/PaintinginText

This interview is an edited conversation between myself and Dannielle Tegeder, for the purpose of the website.

Here’s a little bit of background about myself: my dad is a plasterer, and growing up on the buildings I used to labour with him to earn a bit of money for myself. So when Dannielle Tegeter mentioned that she comes from a family of steamfitters, it made me reflect on that – and looking back on it, I can see that experience has really shaped me as a person and as an artist. I think it made me really appreciate the spaces we occupy and how they can influence us emotionally. It’s that keen grasp of space that really excites me about Dannielle’s work, from the map-like qualities in her paintings, to the approach she takes to exhibiting her work. Dannielle has such a diverse practice it’s hard to fit it all in, but hopefully our conversation will inspire you to check it out.

You’re best known for your paintings and drawings, but I understand your practice goes well beyond those mediums.

I’m a painter, and when I say “a painter”, I consider myself a painter in the expanded fields. I’m making drawings, paintings, sculptures. I also make animations and collaborations, wall paintings. I think of my whole practice as painting. Even though I’m making things where I’m turning the painting around, using materials like glass, marble, and wood. It’s almost like a translated painting. And so for me, it’s really about the history of painting, the influence of modernism – there might not be any paint in the work that I’m making, but it’s still a painting. I even think of my mobiles as paintings. They function just the way that drawings and paintings do.

What has the last year been like for you?

This year has been really unusual in that my studio basically moved into my house for five months during the height of the pandemic. Since then, I’ve moved to a studio closer to my house in Brooklyn. A couple of projects were born from working at home that probably would not have happened otherwise, like The Pandemic Salon and Hilma’s Ghost. This is maybe a little hard to formulate, but my building in Manhattan was the largest residency in the country. It’s called the Elizabeth Foundation, and there were over 90 artists in that building. I was constantly engaged with other artists and people having conversations. Now I’m in Sunset Park in Brooklyn, which is pretty industrial. It’s pretty quiet over here. It’s much further down in Brooklyn. And I think, in some ways, being locked out of that community stimulated me to create a platform where there could be similar discussion to my experience in the Elizabeth Foundation.

The Pandemic Salon started because I was completely locked out of making physical work, so I started curating these Pandemic Salons, each based on a different topic. I’ve done 18, and that’s been an amazing project for me. Many painters and artists present at the salon, but also, we’ve had a physicist, and a psychologist, a medical historian – many, many different types of people speak at the Pandemic Salon.

In regards to painting, I also co-founded a feminist collective called Hilma’s Ghost. That was inspired by the Hilma of Klint exhibition, which became the most attended show in the history of the Guggenheim in New York. That is pretty astounding, actually. I co-founded this with the painter and critic, Sharmistha Ray, and we have been profiling women & women-identifying artists. We’ve also done workshops around painting and spirituality. We did one with a conceptual poet on death and art coming out of the pandemic. But of course, I am still in the studio, making the core of my work.

There’s almost a mapping quality to your work. Could you talk a bit about that?

The core drawings I’ve done for probably 20 years. I think of them as a utopian city or a utopian fictional space, and the elements in the drawings act like a legend in some way. And of course, you know, they can’t really be built; they are fictional spaces that intersect with abstraction, modernism, and architecture. It leads me to work directly on the architecture – for instance, my wall drawings – and directly with the constraints of the architecture in the space.

In the studio, it is visualizing and making these maps. The city plays a huge role. My usual studio before the world changed was in the middle of Times Square. And that is kind of amazing; I mean, it’s the intersection of the world, right? There are people from everywhere; it’s constantly in motion. So cities play a big role. Cities, how we think of spaces, and how we move through those cities are metaphors for moving through other aspects of life.

I think painting on its own is like a utopian impulse, right? We step into our studios to make a painting and make it the best painting we can. It’s always better in our minds. But of course, the flip side of the utopia is dystopia, and I think in some ways, every painting fails, right? I think that’s what’s kept me painting for 20 years; we’re always reaching toward the utopian state. I’m interested in artists like Mondrian or Ellsworth Kelly. They also were perfecting and paring down and taking their hand out of the work and really striving toward almost a utopian state in painting. But of course, it will always fail because there’s always a brush mark or a paintbrush hair in it, or, you know, Mondrian deleted green, that was his failure. I don’t know if he got to perfection before the end, or just close to it.

Do you have a legend that you use for all paintings?

There’s a lot – there is a cosmology of about 300 different elements. Not every single drawing has all those elements, but over the years, sometimes they appear in different ways, within the pieces and the title as well. There are elements in the drawings I’m currently creating that were in drawings 20 years ago. They can be reused and reappear in works. I work in a way that the legend kind of feeds into the titles of the works.

I put the title together after the painting is finished. Usually, I make almost a catalogue of those elements. I would say that I have another practice of writing conceptual poetry. I have a piece, for example, where it’s a catalogue of things that have fallen from the sky in New York City, and I have a piece where I’ve worked with quarantine records when I was in a residency at Lower Manhattan Cultural Council. It’s mostly found texts, and I would say very conceptual poetry. It almost verges on abstraction in language. This practice was originally inspired by my titles, which were getting to be about two to three paragraphs long. I still like to do that, much to the chagrin of my gallery. I made a title yesterday that was a paragraph, and I was very happy with it. It never quite fits on the press release. I’m fascinated by the intersection of language, painting, poetry. I like to have this text almost as an introduction to the work. The titles can be seen as works themselves in a way.

You come from a family of steamfitters, and I’m fascinated to learn that some of your tools were handed to you from family members. Did this influence your practice?

It was a huge influence on my practice. I grew up right outside of New York City, in a German Irish family that immigrated, and most of my family are steamfitters. So, growing up, I was not around any artists. But I would get up, and my father and uncles would be drawing these incredible plans. And my father was an amazing draftsman. I would go into the city with them on these jobs; they were physically making the buildings’ inner architecture, all the pipes and heating, very complex buildings. That, of course, has a huge influence; that way of drawing is a craft that was passed down within my family. It’s not something I learned in art school. And yes, many of the templates, levels, and tools are the same ones my father used; they’re hard to get now. It’s a lost craft, in a way. There were highly trained draughtspeople, but of course now things are done on CAD, you don’t need templates anymore. It deeply influences how I make my work, because I make systems and draft them. But I also go and physically make things, like the wall drawings or sculpture. So there again, the drawings are almost like a schematic for something bigger.

You mentioned that there’s a physical element in the act of making.  Could you expand on that?

Sometimes, when the work is shown in a digital format, it looks very slick and clean. But standing in front of the drawings, paintings, and wall paintings, my process of making them is visible. Meaning that, I’m masking everything, so there are tape marks, slips of the level, and sometimes little leaks of the paint. That process, for me, that’s what painting is about. It’s about the process of creating the piece. It’s important to me that it doesn’t get very slick – otherwise, I would make these on the computer completely. In a way, for me, it humanizes them.

You play with the space of the gallery, placing some works high up, and others low to the ground. How do you approach that? And as you’re planning an exhibition, how do you envisage the role of the viewer moving through the space?

When I make a traditional painting (I mean a painting on canvas), I rarely hang it the usual way right in the middle of the wall. For me, the work is informed by the space. One of my last shows before the pandemic was a show called EPISODES in Carrie Secrist Gallery in Chicago. There were these very large paintings on pedestals, with a wall painting behind them. Many times, I’ll hang the paintings deliberately lower. I did my last solo show in New York, at Yohannes Vogt Gallery. I reinstalled the paintings once a week. And these were large works on paper. Twice, I did that with the painter Peter Halley, and another with Barry Schwabsky, who’s an important painting critic and poet. There was a level of collaboration in it, but it was also about testing the way we think of paintings, hanging in a still space, in the middle of the wall every time. I do really like to test those kinds of constraints. Can a painting sit on the floor? Can it be turned around? Can it move during an exhibition to different locations?

You’ve also used music with your animations. How did that come about?

The music came around ten years ago, at a time when I was only making paintings and drawings. And I had my daughter, and I was home for the first time, where I could not go to the studio. It was around then that I started making animations. I was looking at my paintings, and I felt like I could hear sound, could see them moving. I decided I wanted to make animations from those paintings, in a way translating the works into sound. Maybe a signature of my work is the idea of translation. Whether it’s translating something into a mobile or sound, this connects to language, as well, and opens up a question of what’s lost and what’s gained in the act of translation. That’s always really fascinated me.

I have a couple of projects that revolve around music. I have a seven-year-long project called The Library of Abstract Sound, where my drawings are translated into sound. I also have a long-term collaboration with a composer named Matthew Evan Taylor. We’ve done projects where he’s used my drawings as scores. I have animated my drawings around excerpts of his music. We’ve done talks together about abstraction in sound where he’s performed my drawings live.

I remember you mentioning in another interview about having a consistency of translation with that music – that certain shapes and colours correspond with certain sounds.

Yes, that’s the case with The Library of Abstract Sound and also with a project called Constellations, where Matthew played around 80 drawings of mine. It was very important to me that they were fixed constraints, meaning that a certain shape or colour or space denoted a sound and instrument and it could be replayed consistently. It’s a language that almost became like something you could read.

How have you found the experience of collaboration?

I’ve gotten very lucky in a way meeting Matthew. We’ve had an easy, flawless collaboration, and there have been no conflicts over seven years. I’ve gotten very, very spoiled. Over the past five years, I’ve done collaborations with dancers and writers – and I constantly collaborate now with Hilma’s Ghost – and of course, there are always conflicts and things to negotiate. That’s been a big learning process for me, because I think musicians and people in theatre are trained to collaborate, whereas visual artists are trained to think that they’re going to be alone. When you step into the arena of collaboration, I think it’s stimulating in many ways, but it’s also dangerous in other ways. I think that bands know this very, very well. I have a joke with Sharmistha about Hilma’s Ghost that now I respect the Rolling Stones more because they have somehow been able to negotiate and keep a band going for 40 years. The amount of things you’re negotiating is intense. You don’t do that as an individual artist. When you’re in a collaboration, and it works, it elevates you to a place that you can’t reach as an independent artist. And in turn, when it doesn’t work, it takes you down. The potential for failure in it, I have to say I find terrifying and interesting at the same time.

You can find out more about Dannielle Tegeder work through her Instagram pages and websites, links below

https://www.instagram.com/dannielletegeder/?hl=en

https://www.hilmasghost.com/

http://www.dannielletegeder.com/

thank you, Anne James for your work editing

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Life recently has got in the way, so there has been a little gap between interviews that will probably continue for the back half of 2021, but I plan to make up for the gaps with quality interviews. First of which is the interview you are reading today. For this interview, I sat down with Róisín Power Hackett, an artist where the descriptor interdisciplinary is quite apt. We discuss her many, many practices and how she has managed to combine elements from each into different works. I met Róisín through the ARC programme we were both on between 2019 and 2021. She is someone who I have great admiration for, and her knowledge of art and wit makes any conversation a joy, and that was especially the case with this interview.

Let’s start with your work, The Tent. That piece was part of the cohost exhibition for our masters in Art + Research Collaboration from IADT.

The Tent was a video piece I made reflecting on my experience trying to find work with a disability. But it was also about times when you don’t have things in general, when you have a lack, when you’ve loads of time on your hands. That can be a great time to come up with ideas and reflect. The Tent is based on when my boyfriend and I were living in a tent while we were travelling. I didn’t have a job, I didn’t have friends or family with me, my boyfriend was working during the day, and everything I owned could be stored in a rucksack. In some ways, this piece was quite timely, because it was about having the space to actually think creatively. Surprisingly, the pandemic does not give you that space.  

There was this assumption that artists would be really creative because we’d have loads of extra time. But in fact, you don’t, because you’re distracted by the news. Or you’re working, and you’re sitting in front of your screen. Even if you’re not working, you’re always looking at your phone, emails, or social media. So, your brain isn’t free to be creative a lot of the time, and you have to force yourself to leave the house or force yourself to do an activity that’s creative.

As you know, I made The Tent for an exhibition called cohost that was the culmination of the ARC Masters that I was working toward at the time. Video was a completely new thing for me. I started exploring it because COVID-19 meant that while we were working toward cohost being a physical exhibition, it then pivoted to an online show. Hence, the work had to be made to suit that online platform.

The background noise in The Tent is really fascinating.

While I was staying with my parents during one of the lockdowns, I got interested in birdsong because while I was recording for other works, I could hear birds in the background. I’ve noticed birdsong a lot more during the pandemic. And that got me thinking about my experience in the tent, like the sound when it rained. In the Alps, the rain comes in cycles. It would lash rain like a monsoon for two or three days minimum, sometimes a whole week. When you’re in a tent, it’s kind of difficult to do anything for the sound of that rain. All you could hear was the rain, and it was very distracting. So, I felt like that had to be part of the work. So, I put up a tent in my garden and recorded the rain falling on the tent and the incidental noises that happened simultaneously.

I wanted that kind of lo-fi aesthetic of home video. Sometimes, you do hear things like the rain or the birds. With that home footage element, you can imagine yourself in that space a lot easier, exactly because it’s not cinematic.

Typically, live performance is a common element of your practice. How does that compare with video for you?

I really prefer live stuff, because when I record, I’m much more conscious of how the finished piece will sound. I love to perform. If I make a mistake, I get the sense that nobody in the audience knows I’ve made a mistake because they don’t know the script. Originally, I had wanted to perform The Tent live. COVID pushed me into film and recordings, and I think actually it’s not a bad thing. It’s not something I want to work on exclusively, but it’s a really good skill to have, and it’s really good to have the confidence to do it, you know?

There is something about performance, I think. Whether it’s in theatre, or live art, or any sort of performance, or music, it’s quite a direct way of trying to make people feel something. Of course, visual art tries to make people feel something as well. But the thing about performance is its duration. You can grab a person’s attention more directly in performance; people have to listen for that half hour or however long the performance is. Whereas the thing about going to an exhibition of paintings or sculptures is, it’s easy to just walk past them and go, “Oh, I saw that,” even if it’s not sinking in.

I still try to combine my other practices with performance. There are definitely visual elements to my performance; whether that be in the costumes or setting, it allows me to tap into my visual art background.

Yes, you’re working in several mediums now. Is that important to you?

I like not sticking to one medium. You have to think about your concept and what medium fits. Some of my concepts don’t fit my art practice, but they fit my curatorial practice. That’s why I curate, because I often feel that an idea will work with my curating, or an idea works as writing, or my visual practice, and for me, it’s important to have the tools to realise these ideas in the best format.

 I did my undergraduate degree in painting, so that’s probably the thing I’m most skilled in. I might not be painting currently, but I spent a huge amount of time painting during the first lockdown. I’m slowly working on a series. I’m not keen on doing anything fast; I could spend years working on one piece.

In the end, it depends on the space I have. I think it’s like that for a lot of artists, the art depends on the space you have. I like the slowness oil painting. Maybe you spend a day painting one layer, and then you have to wait another week or two before you can paint the next layer, but I don’t always have the space to paint.

What artists would you consider to influence your work?

For me, it’s always books and writers that come to mind first—the likes of Flann O’Brian, and recently Doireann Ní Ghríofa’s Ghost in the Throat. And there’s Eimear McBride’s A Girl Is a Half-Formed Thing. The way I write my texts is by breaking down language, and these texts break down the idea of narrative, or in the case of Doireann’s book, it’s breaking down history and looking at the history of a woman poet that has been neglected for years in Ireland. Not to go into too much detail, but it was such an interesting read for me.

I like to know the artists whose work I curate, and to have seen their work myself or talk to them. For instance, Emma Haugh was somebody who initially influenced me. I went to see their performance in The Joinery years ago. As part of an NCAD Gallery exhibition, they did this reading troupe. One person read the text, and then another person had another text, and they could read that other text whenever they felt like it, interrupting the first person. It was this weird hybrid of two different texts. And what was interesting to me was that they were two academic texts that were completely opposed to each other politically. I really loved that on so many levels.

There are a couple of curators whose work I enjoy like Rosie Lynch. She co-founded Callan Workhouse Union with Hollie Kearns. The Workhouse Union is a project that works with artists, designers, architects and craftspeople to develop projects examining housing, civic infrastructure in Callan. My mother is from Callan, so it resonates personally for me. I’ve also had a brief residency down there.

Callan used to be a busy town due to the traffic that would pass through it from Cork to Dublin, but it has struggled since the development of a bypass. Callan Workhouse Union revitalised the town and it came up with so many new ideas to involve the community in the projects that they curated, and the performances and theatre they helped organise. They have worked with a studio in Callan that is very supportive of people with disabilities, called KCAT. They and other organisations turned Bridge Street in Callan into a set to create a big performance as part of The Bridge Street Project. Their work has a tangible impact on the community, and I admire that. It really shows the impact art can have.

Since writers were first to mind among your influences, let’s discuss the importance of the written word in your work.

For a long time, I was trying to figure out ways of incorporating writing in my practice, combining the written word with visuals. It wasn’t until second year in NCAD when a classmate, Anthony Keigher, did a performance that incorporated a poem by Wallace Stevens, “The Emperor of Ice-Cream”. It flipped a switch for me. I loved the performance, and I loved that he was using a poem in his performance. That made me realise how I could incorporate poetry into practice.

Since then, I’ve been using this practice called “uncreative writing” or “cut-up writing”. I take old novels, cut up the text, and stick them down to create something very visual – and a little bit random – because you can’t always find the correct word you want. So this text is coming from a world that already exists, and the characters that I become when I’m performing are characters that generally already exist somewhere. I’m reappropriating those characters for these works.

I see my practice as this in-between space between literature and visual art. Even though it’s performance, I try to avoid making the work theatrical, for the same reason I avoid making my video cinematic. I love performing and acting in front of others, and what is great about live art is that I am almost myself in those performances. I almost become some other character; in a way, I’m not acting, so it’s a great space to occupy, the fact that I’m engaging with characters that aren’t necessarily my creation.

We have touched on it in parts, but let’s talk a bit about your curatorial practice.

Sometimes I have ideas that I don’t want to be an artist for, I want to give other artists a platform instead. I think it’s an important concept that I want to flesh out more academically, and more like my own personal ethics to give other artists the space to make their work; I do think about it conceptually as working with people. It’s not being too precious with my idea, not closing opportunities to expand on it with input from others. And for me, it’s about wanting to share artists’ work with other people and give artists as many opportunities as possible.

One of my focuses with my curating is mixing the arts and performance in a way that is not pure visual art, which is difficult. What I’m aiming for is giving a voice to a variety of different art forms. This year I worked with a band called Banríon, and I had never worked with music before. I enjoy the aspect of merging scenes.

Interestingly, your curatorial practice mirrors your art practice.

I’ve always been interested in experimenting, so in a way, it was inevitable that it would lead to combining different practices. Being interdisciplinary is so important to me, both in my artistic practice and curatorial practice.

If someone was to ask, what type of curator are you, I’d instantly say interdisciplinary. I want to open people up to the possibilities of mixing disciplines, and I am using different avenues to do that.  

You can find out more about Róisín Power Hackett work through her website, link below

https://roisinphackett.wordpress.com/tag/roisin-power-hackett/

thank you, Anne James for your work editing

You can support Painting in Text through Patreon, link below

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Kari Cahill is an artist based out of Sligo. She is a painter who has presented work throughout Ireland, and abroad in countries such as France and Brazil. Kari is also Co-Director and Co-Founder of Lay of the Land (LOTL) – a site-responsive arts organisation producing residencies and exhibitions in remote locations around Ireland, and participates as both artist and curator. In the last year or so Kari started working out of the Model Art Centre’s Artist Studios, and that is how I came across her work initially. It was fascinating finding out about her approach to creating pigments. It really adds an extra layer to her paintings. It’s important to share practices like Kari’s because some might not be aware that it is possible to creat pigments this way. It was an eye opening experience for me and really broadened my knowledge.

What does an average day in the studio look like for you?

I have a pretty healthy work routine. I always paint at least two days a week, and the other two or three days are made up of admin, pigment making, shipping, and all the other parts of my business. On my two days of practice I’m pretty loose and don’t plan too much. I like to explore the materials and let that inform what happens; I usually don’t have a specific idea in mind. If I’m working on a commission I know it will occupy that particular day. I’m a true believer in just turning up over and over again – allowing space for the work to emerge through you.

I often work on a large scale and there are constantly things lying on the floor, tacked to walls and spread all over all the surfaces. The experimental nature of my painting calls for a lot of pigments and inks at hand. I pour water onto surfaces and let it dry over time, then add more materials on top.  All of my paintings are built up with various layers. I work on horizontal planes, never upright. Having a big studio has been a game changer for me in terms of working at a larger scale. I’m generally working on about 30 or 40 paintings all at once, in varied scales.  I may be developing one painting while doing the finishing touches on another, and these works move around the studio a lot. They go up on the walls, then come back down and join the other pieces. I really like to have a visual of the overall series. 

I also usually commit around one day of the week to creating pigments from materials that I forage from the natural landscape. There is a lot of work that goes into that. All of the different processes in extracting pigments take time and energy. There are oxidation processes happening throughout the studio.I have different barks that have been stewing in buckets of water for a couple of months and jars of questionable materials – rusty nails, vinegar, plants, rocks and soils.It feels like a kind of lab to me, which I really enjoy.  My favourite thing about working with pigments is how they interact with each other on the page so I spend time modifying the colours using a range of other processes. I oxidize them or tweak the pH levels. In these moments, the process unfolding on the canvas is kind of alive. There are these alchemic processes happening that are outside of my control. I combine and layer the materials but after that, they take on their own life and movement. I love the energy that comes from that because eventually, as they dry, they’re frozen in this moment of interaction.

My practice follows the seasons, both logistically and conceptually. This allows me to spend more time outdoors in the warmer months, whereas the winter months sees me inside more.  I collect materials at different times of the year, and they feed directly into the paintings. I am spending a lot of time outdoors at the moment searching for pigments; I’ve started to do a bit more research into earth pigments specifically in areas with water and try to almost read the land with the hope of stumbling across something buried beneath it. 

That’s a really interesting aspect of your process. Where does the preference for foraged-material pigments come from?

It happened very organically. To give a brief history…alongside my painting practice, I’m one half of a project called Lay of the Land, which is part collaborative duo, part arts organization which curates and produces outdoor art exhibitions in wild landscapes. I was spending a lot of time working with the land and the elements in that role, and at the beginning I felt a separation between that outdoor sculpture work and my painting practice. Of course, over time these started to come together. In 2018 I created a couple of massive stretched canvases with acrylic paint that were strung up in a forest overlooking Knockomagh Wood Nature Reserve and I remember during that  time I kept coming back to questions about how a petroleum-based material fitted into the landscape. I was working primarily in acrylics (which were able to stand up to the elements) but there was this feeling that it didn’t really work. 

When I went on a residency in Brazil and met an Uruguayan artis Diego De Los Campos. Even though I only spoke a little bit of Portuguese, we had some great conversations about colour and materials. He gave me this little jar of ‘nogalina’, which is a beautiful brown lustrous colour extracted from dehydrated walnuts. I started using the nogalina but it just wouldn’t work with the acrylic; I couldn’t layer the two. I love when materials do not bend to my whims. And from here I started looking into more waterbased natural colours and then began making my own.The acrylic and bio colour coexisted for a while in my painting, but, over time the process of making pigment just fed into what it was that I wanted to express. Especially how I felt about the land. Everything kind of clicked into place since then. 

You mentioned site-specific sculptural works – paintings on canopy. 

That particular Lay of the Land project was a turning point for me, as I mentioned before, this was the first piece that I felt represented the two sides of my practcie – outdoor sculpture and painting. This work was challenging.  I had imagined these large green paintings stretched out between trees, at one with the lush forest. But if you place a green painting in a green landscape, you find out pretty quickly that the colours never stand up to the natural chlorophyll hue that happens when the light shines through the canopy! Nature has its own story to tell; you can’t decide to build a fragile sculpture in strong wind, you can’t ask the skies not to rain. Lay of the Land taught me to listen to the landscape and the elements, and work with what is in front of me. I discovered through observing the site that red completely complimented and contrasted with the green. I learned a lot about being responsive to the landscape in making these works which could only really exist in a forest.

 You’ve said before that there is a more muted aesthetic to your sculptural works. 

I guess these different parts of my practice just developed at different times. I focused on three-dimensional work in college and my sculptural aesthetic had always been quite minimal and monochromatic. When I travelled to India for a residency, I put my painting practice to the fore for the first time. I don’t think I could have possibly had a muted palette in India. Now the lines are more blurred between my 2d and 3d work, and my pallets are dictated heavily by the land and the materials I find in each. Later in the year I’ll be painting directly onto rock formations creating site-rsponsive works along the coast, I think colour will feature heavily but perhaps the marks will be more minimal. 

Does painting continue to be the focus? 

My buzz is applying colour to surfaces. This doesn’t necessarily need to be as ‘paintings’ in the traditional “work-on-paper” sense. I am interested in exploring colour, and surface and bringing these ideas into larger scales and three dimensions, as well as continuing to explore on a two dimensional scale. 

This past year myself and Hazel Mc Cague, who is the other half of Lay of the Land, decided to take a step back from the project and assess where it was going, and to focus in on our individual practices. For me, this meant a deepening of my approach to painting and colour.  The time away has allowed us to regain our energy. Lay of the Land projects were massive productions requiring so much time, energy and creative input. For four years we were constantly moving forward. We created over 60 sculptures and collaborated with almost 30 artists, not to mention the crews, volunteers, locals and audiences we engaged with. My role was curator, artist, administrator, director and producer. It was amazing but very labour intensive. It didn’t necessarily allow for the space I needed to pursue painting. So since taking a break we have been able to identify which elements we want to bring forward and which ones we are happy to leave behind, both in terms of LOTL and our own personal development. This has been super empowering! Lay of the Land will still exist, but it will be different, and it will be more aligned with both of our individual practices. 

Are your pigments directly influenced by your given environment? 

My work is completely site-responsive. Even before I worked with natural pigments I always responded to site.For instance,  I made a series of work in the depths winter while living in West Cork. The colour schemes were dark and gloomy. I wanted to capture the essence of how the light suddenly burst through the clouds and hit the mountains on a dark day. Even though my work isn’t formally representational, it does aim to capture the essence and emotional of the experience of different landscapes. Colour has always been a means for that. 

Now, the pigments that make up my paintings come from things I’ve gathered in that space and the processes that follow. Let’s say I gather walnut husks in a specific spot; the colour produced will be different from the husks I collect elsewhere. So, those paintings will have totally different qualities. This creates an additional dimension to the resposnsiviity of the pieces and informs the visual quality of the finished piece. I allow the colour to direct the work. 

You work in a range of scales. Could you talk a bit about that?

The pigments I use are made up of tiny particles; I can’t just scale up in the way I could with acrylics or printmaking. When I go bigger with bio-pigments, I’m zooming in on those tiny bits of plant matter which morph the colour. I think of my work as maps, visually they often look like aerial photographs, and they trace the colour of a specific landscape.  My smaller paintings tend to be more minimal than my larger paintings; the lines and marks are somehow more delicate even when not applied in that way.

I am constantly looking for anything that will give me an interesting texture and experiment with the scale of how I present the marks. I pour, drip, soak and spray colour onto paper or canvas. I might then sprinkle pigment on top or use salt. It can all seem a bit haphazard to an outsider looking in. There are jars, pots, pipettes, syringes – all sorts of crazy stuff that might encourage the colours to interact in different ways.

I intuitively know how these colours can potentially work together because I created them. There is definitely a state of flow in how I respond to whatever is happening on the page. Experiences feed into the gestures. I often think of my paintings as drawings because they’re not really complete. Often I’ll do a drawing that feels more like painting.

Are you interested in exploring the fluidity between these two mediums?

For sure. I was first introduced to that idea by the artist Kiera O’Toole, my studio neighbour. She also works with pigments and it’s brilliant to be able to bounce ideas off of eachother. In my mind, the drawing had always come before the painting. Those conversations with Kiera kind of allowed me to be less concerned about the labelling of my works as paintings or drawings.  Now there is more of a blurred line; a work in paint can be a drawing, and a work made up of drawn elements can be a painting. Regardless of how people refer to my work, I am more interested in the process than the end result.

You can find out more about Kari Cahill’s work through her Instagram pages and websites, links below

https://www.instagram.com/karikaca/?hl=en

https://www.karicahill.com/

thank you Meadhbh McNutt for your work editing

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