Ways of Communicating : Moza Almatrooshi

Moza Almatrooshi, photo courtesy of the Muslim Sisterhood

I’m really excited to share with you the work of Moza Almatrooshi. She is a multidisciplinary artist based out of Sharjah in the United Arab Emirates. For me, the goal of Painting in Text has been not only to show artists with interesting outlooks on their practice but to create awareness of art happening outside of our own spaces and hopefully create connections through that. It was an absolute pleasure talking to Moza about her practice. She was very generous and open with her answers, which I really appreciated. The depth of thought she puts into each aspect of her work is astonishing and I hope from reading this you gain as much from the interview as I did.

How important is writing in your practice

For me, they are one and the same. I would say all of my moving image works have required writing. There hasn’t been a video piece where I haven’t written something that really framed things. There is movement to text. In Arabic, alphabetics [a practice of writing which focuses on the representation of spoken sounds by means of letters] looks like this. It is not what you would call text-based work; it focuses on what the Arabic alphabet itself can do. As much as I would like to explore language in that direction, I’m very much still in a mode of explaining my work with text as narrative driving something forward. For me, text is an element in which I can play in exciting ways, where I can use my writing in Arabic in an almost childlike way, to express myself. For example, the narrative of To Whom the Sun May be of Concern is expressed in this fable form which was evident in the video piece. It seems like something that could be read or spoken to a child but it has this kind of dark ending that’s not appropriate. I like that it comes across as very unalarming – something that takes a formal language. Arabic in its classical form is very formal. I feel like this style of story writing is disarming, and that’s why I rely on it to pair up with the other works although it can also stand alone.

There is a prominent use of subtitles in To Whom the Sun May be of Concern. Could you talk a bit about that?

I made To Whom the Sun May be of Concern at a time when I was thinking of the idea of access purely in a linguistic sense. I’m not claiming that English is not a poetic language or anything but I couldn’t exactly match the poetics of my language within English without sounding a bit off. Things get lost in translation. So, I made the conscious decision to keep the English subtitles as basic and to the point as possible. And I use Arabic in an ornate way with different colours assigned to the different characters that come into play. There is no third-person narration just characters that speak.

Still fom Moving Image - To Whom The Sun May Be Of Concern 2019 1

To whom the Sun May be of Some Concern, (2018), still

The yellow subtitles translate what I’m voicing in the film. I played with different fonts In one scene, the subtitles were symbols. In another, there is a kind of stylised Arabic font. At that point, I was making the work for an exhibition in Sharjah, and I was playing a lot with political slogans specific to the situation here in the United Arab Emirates. I thought it much more important to push forward language that the people living here could pick up on because it was made for them to view. But within all my work, there is a dense layer of vagueness. I try to find subtle ways of working ideas into my practice.

Still from Moving Image - To Whom The Sun May Be Of Concern 2019

To whom the Sun May be of Some Concern, (2018), still

You speak multiple languages. Does that affect your writing and visual practice?

I wouldn’t say that I’m bilingual as much as I would say I have this kind of duality in my mind because I think in both languages constantly. I feel like I dream in English. I was working with an editor while writing something for a publication, and when she looked at my text she said, “I could tell that you had translated from English [into Arabic] in your mind.” I didn’t know how to respond to that! It happens both ways where sometimes I might think in one language and translate it into the other, and vice versa, to see what works. This is going to sound clichéd but sometimes I feel like [the texts] write themselves. It surprises me more when that happens In Arabic because, although it’s my first language, I speak Emirati. Nobody speaks classical Arabic in a colloquial sense. It just doesn’t exist in that way. It’s used in the Quran and formal settings – on the news or in formal letters.

Your recent work, Glaze features in this year’s Lahore Biennale. How did Glaze come about?

I was doing a residency in Cairo around Autumn 2019, while working on a commission for a five-minute film as part of the BBC New Creatives scheme. I went to a bakery that makes Western pastries. What is fascinating about them is I don’t know how to explain this better they make Western pastries in an Arab twist. For example, the croissants were rolled differently and their éclairs are really huge. The resulting work [Staff of Life] is my experience of not only documenting that but working with a sound designer and other artists who lended me their voices for the narrative. It was so amazing but I had that restriction of five minutes. From that, I wondered how I could do that again but in Sharjah. That way, I could take my time with the process. So with Glaze, I focused on the different kinds of spaces in Sharjah that make desserts.

Staff of Life, (2019), still

What was great about this project was that I was working with a sound designer to create noise as a form of language that went along with movements similar to those in Staff of Life. The focus of Staff of Life is on the hands of the bakers as they make or decorate something. Usually, they’re using big machines to do something very traditional, which was interesting to see. The way they move their hands while preparing or pouring; I thought, why don’t I translate these movements instead of narrating in my usual way? Why don’t I translate these everyday gestures into sound?

Glaze, (2020), still

Glaze has arrived at a version which very much fits the teahouse in Lahore, Pakistan where it’s being shown. The Pak Teahouse is one of the locations of the Biennale, and it’s supposed to be a significant space for people to gather and discuss politics. I felt that the location worked well and that whoever goes to see the work will be able to absorb everything that is said. It is very much a version that I would like to revisit and do something a bit different with down the line. But at the moment, it’s a moving-image work with sound created for the visuals that tell a story. Using the Tea House as a venue allowed for additional elements to the work such as a menu which itself was a translation of the story. The staff of the teahouse helped with what they could access within their work limitations. With a few adjustments, the work can be consumed as a meal or a tea, or a coffee.

Glaze showing in Pak Teahouse Lahore, (2020), photo courtesy of Lahore Biennale Foundation

For me, Glaze was about these visuals that lure the viewer in – the fuzzy feelings people get while watching sweets being made. All of these things that are so beautiful to look at. Even without all the layers I’m injecting into the work, on an elementary level, these things being made are bad for you but it is so easy to be seduced by them. That was basically what I was trying to do.

Food is a common theme in your work. Could you discuss the motivation behind that?

All the food that we eat has heavy symbolism within Arabian culture. Foods like pomegranates, dates, honey, flatbread all have symbolism associated with them – not just in what they represent but also how they are consumed – and this is just as important in pre-Islamic Arabia. Some of my work is about how these rituals in Islamic culture have been appropriated from Pre-Islamic times. That knowledge is important.

Moza performing Evergreen, (2018), photo by Meera Alqasimi

Evergreen was born out of the frustration of having to translate everything I did. This realisation that when I write or communicate something through any of my works that use text, it must be in English – even here in the UAE. Obviously, it’s because it is the dominant language and there has to be a common language but I couldn’t help but think about this in terms of access. Why does art have to be English to be accessible? That coupled with the experience of being asked really frustrating questions in art school like, when I would be working with ceramics: “is this a response to ISIS?” Completely out of nowhere! As if I’m supposed to have these prepared answers about something because of my cultural or religious background.

When picking materials, I choose foods well known for their symbolism. The pomegranate is significant to a lot of cultures, and both Eastern and Western cultures. It could be something for everyone, regardless of what it means to me. From that starting point, the performance then became about an interaction with a guest through a gestural rather than. To eat the pomegranate after I had sliced it in front of them and went through all that labour; how do they respond to that? How much do they take? Some people just ate one little bit, some took a handful, some people shared their plate, and that was the idea behind it. I found that after that, everything I wanted to say could be said with food – whether a cooking method or a [visual] element. That is why I’m now going to culinary school. I feel I can actually use that, integrate it into my practice and also create some sort of financial stability for myself.

Evergreen, detail, (2018), photo by Meera Alqasimi

Evergreen was a performance within a larger performance from a group that the Arab Art Salon formed with friends at the Royal College of Art. Basically, we decided to use a domestic space to do a series of performances for one night and invite everyone from the neighbourhood plus our course mates – everyone we could fit. So, it wasn’t just the typical audience you would encounter in white cube spaces. I think as much as I’d love to say the space was very considered, it wasn’t. We were all pleasantly surprised by the way in which people absorbed the performances in a domestic space. That was what the Arab Art Salon was all about; we were just together at a particular time expressing our concerns to one another. We all more or less came from the Gulf States and there are certain things we can’t discuss in these countries (and in London, to a lesser extent). So we felt that it was so important to have this kind of space. It wasn’t about critiquing each other’s work as much as it was about sharing. We thought that a domestic setting would be the best place to accomplish that. These kinds of initiatives that bring people together in person are so important because I don’t think it can be achieved in the same way online.

Your practice involves so many different processes, it would be interesting to see what a day in the studio looks like for you.

Most of my work is research-driven, so you would see a lot of research. I’m still trying to excavate knowledge that has been lost, particularly around pre-Islamic heritage. Much of that information has been destroyed or was never really recorded well enough to begin with. It’s tough to identify how reliable the sources actually are with the very little information that is out there. The past few months have been like a loop of trying to find reliable information or important myths, and figure out how these can also feed into works.

When I’m not researching, I’m just really reactive to what is going on here in UAE, and that drives a lot of my thinking. In the meantime, I’m graduating from culinary school in autumn and I will hopefully have my new studio set up before summer. I’m going to have a kitchen where I will host artists and create exchanges around how they work with food or other materials. The artistic community is really small in UAE; it would be nice to have a space here that is outside of any institution. When we gather and organise ourselves as artists, and really talk about things that matter, it’s much more organic. It’s not trying to be anything other than what it is. I’d like to cultivate that.

You can find out more about Moza Almatrooshi’s work through her website link below

About

thank you Meadhbh McNutt for your work editing

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Installation, Interview, Video

Taking The Right-hand Path: Ann Maria Healy

Ann Maria Healy

The work of Ann Maria Healy was recommended to me by a friend, and I’m glad that he did because she really exemplifies what Painting in Text is all about. A visual artist based in Dublin, she is a thoroughly imaginative artist – someone whose influences are so distinct, yet so deftly presented within her work, that they have been transformed into elements unique to Ann Maria’s work.

You’ve spoken in the past about using text as a kind of landscape for your art – could you elaborate a bit more on that?

The text is very much part of the materiality of the practice. I think of text as a sculptural object and it comes into contact with the work in various ways – I always write around whatever objects I’m making, or video work, and I guess it is a way to understand the ideas running through a project. It’s a way to channel what is happening, what I’m doing with the materials. This is what I meant when I said the text acts as a landscape, it’s another context for the work to play itself out through, another place for me to figure out what is happening in the work.

Over the last few years, the way I have usually worked would be to bounce around

How To Be Other Than A Body, (2017), Detail

between different elements in the same project. I’ll spend, like, a year or two maybe, making one body of work, and with that there may be various sculptures or video or different things happening. I might make sculptural works, and the sculpture might end up in the video, and it’s usually happening all at once. But this year, the work I’m making at the moment, I’ve kind of segregated it out a bit more.

On that note, let’s talk about what you’re doing at the moment.

The work is called When Dealers are Shamans, which is the work I have been kind of conjuring up since I’ve been here in Fire Station – I’ve been here now for over a year – and I suppose there are a few different threads to it. I’ve just opened an exhibition in Pallas Projects about a month ago, where I showed a video installation, but I’m here for another year and a half so I will continue making within the project for the rest of that time. I’ve been working on it here in Fire Station but the idea for the project originated when I was down in Cow-House Studios, where I was teaching last summer.

Usually, I have a few different threads to a project. For this, it started with my sister, who has been a shamanic practitioner for many years. About two years ago she started a shamanic counselling course and she needed a guinea pig! I have heard her talking about it for a long time and I was interested in it. Anyway, she needed someone to take a journey with her, and so I said I would do it.

Shamanic practices have happened across the world, in various guises and across different cultures, for hundreds of years. It involves practitioners contacting spirit worlds through altered states of consciousness. The way my sister practices is by listening to specific drum beats which bring you into a relaxed state. We designed a framework before I made the journey, she described to me the steps for how best to get into it and for the purpose of this session I spoke out loud, and we recorded it. It was kind of stream of consciousness – an imagining, while you’re listening to this drum beat. So we had this framework of dropping down into this specific space, imagining and following the dream state. We recorded it and she gave me the recording and it became a kind of significant thing for me I guess, it was an unusual experience which I continued to think about, it stayed with me for some time.

So, tell me a little about George the peacock.

Well, my journey then took me to George [Cow-House’s pet peacock]! And it was mating season. I had seen George do his tail feather display before, but I hadn’t observed him so closely during the mating season, and they do a few different kinds of movements – one of them is called rattling, where he vibrates his feathers twenty-five times a second, and it sounds almost like a snake. It’s quite incredible. I got very interested in this, so I started recording him, and I realised this connection in my mind between the shamanic journey and this peacock vibrational rattling… and he doesn’t actually have a mate, so he does it to the other animals on the farm – they’re really beautiful birds but they are not of this landscape.

When Dealers are Shamans, (2018), installation view

After that I moved here [into Fire Station], and again that was kind of a significant experience. I don’t know how well you know Dublin but there are a lot social problems around here. You can hear and see people dealing drugs on the street frequently. Drugs is something that has come up in my work before, I’m already kind of attuned to it, and one of the things I noticed was there were medication trays all over the streets – I noticed these trays and started to collect them, because I wanted to see what people were taking, I suppose. In a way I was mostly interested in where I am and my environment. When I started going through the trays I had collected, I noticed that a lot of them were this drug called Zopiclone which is a sleeping pill I already had previous experience with. It’s quite heavily prescribed, I know quite a few people who take it. But still, I was surprised – why is everyone taking sleeping pills? And so I started thinking about this, and why so many people in this area in Dublin were taking this. I’m interested in the polarity, between it being prescribed by your doctor on one end, and then the other end being it being sold on the streets. That’s partly why I called it When Dealers Are Shamans. I was trying to abstract this idea of dealers, of what a dealer could be. Like, there’s a whole conversation around pharma capitalism, places like the United States where there’s a massive industry dedicated to selling medication, and what that can do to communities… I was thinking about this term used to describe Zoplicone – hypnotic agent. I was thinking about George, and how what he’s doing is a kind of hypnosis, bringing you into this kind of trance state with these rhythms. As human beings, we desire these dream states, and maybe that’s something you can attain through spirituality and just asking questions around that.

So I had a few threads, and then I first started making sculptural work and some little kind of video sketches… I wouldn’t even call them pieces, just looking at how things are. And at some point I said right, I want to make a video work – that is, a sculptural video work of George vibrating and rattling. But it needs to be filmed on a high-end camera, so it can be crisp and clear and beautiful quality, and I also wanted to slow it down so you can see the movement clearly – more hypnotic.

PP-S_A-Maria-Healy_When-Dealers-Are_install_0021_web_900_600_s

When Dealers Are Shamans, (2018),

I first spent a week following George around with my own camera figuring out what shots I wanted and how best to get the shot of him rattling his feathers. I then worked with videographer Kevin Hughes and he shot the work on his Red Epic. So I took the visuals from that and I spent some time editing. And while that was coming into being, I started to consider what I should do for sound. So I talked to a friend of mine, Karl Burke, who’s an artist and I asked him would he be interested to make some sound for it. We talked about the work and what it was about, and he pulled out some of his work and said, what about this? And it was perfect! So he gave me a lot of raw material which I took to the editing suite, to combine with the visuals. I used a similar practice with the actor doing the voiceover for the video, in that I was conscious that he would be bringing a particular set of skills and to allow him freedom to use those skills. When I wrote the text, the framework that I used was a hypnotherapy session. When I was recording the voiceover, I asked him to think about how there are different stages of dreams. The first half is where he’s trying to bring the audience into this kind of dream state, and there’s that edge where it becomes slightly more sinister. Sinister is too strong of a word, but a sharper vibration, I suppose, or an edge.

Kris Dittel, I met here in Fire Station studios, and she was my writing editor on the project. Kris is a curator based in Rotterdam, she had done a residency here around last May, and we had a studio visit where I talked to her about the work, and she understood all the things I was trying to pull together. We had some interesting conversations, she sent me on some texts that became influential to the work. So I asked her to edit the text that I was writing, because I knew that she knew what I was getting at. So it is a poetic text, and the writing itself has become clearer with time. That was the conversation I was having with her, and it’s what I asked of her when she was editing it.

There is a kind of spectrum, I suppose, between sense to nonsense, that I think about. I wanted the audience to understand what I’m talking about and for it to be clear, but then I still wanted it to dissolve back into a kind of nonsense at points. There’s a kind of rational and irrationality that I’m interested in, and there is always an absurdity in the work I think, yeah.

So initially I had been trying to motorise the peacock feathers and use arduino boards to programme the motors. And while I was doing that I was thinking about technology as something like taking drugs like zopiclone, how you absorb it into your body, and how that affects our body. How it affects your memory, how close we have it to our bodies. And then there’s smart objects, like, lots of people have smart homes where all your devices are connected into your phone, what something like that does to your psyche. That links back to the core idea to the whole thing for me, which is this idea of the collective unconscious, using dreams as an access point into your own psyche and the collective unconscious, and what drives communities. What are the drives of our present moment?

Let’s talk about the project How to Be Other Than a Body.

My sister and I, we did a Tarot reading, on the Eighth Amendment, that I video recorded– what the political landscape was, and what was going to happen with the Eighth Amendment. So this project happened between 2015 and 2017, and it became How to Be Other Than a Body.

Beating To Be Real, (2016), still

An important part of the artwork came about when I came back to Ireland, after doing my masters in the Netherlands. Gender is something that had come up for a lot in my work, and this movement around access to abortion in Ireland had been growing and growing. I was conscious of that movement

when I was on my way back to Ireland, and I was inspired at the time by Sun Ra, the jazz musician from the 70s – he was also a performance artist, and he made this film called Space Is The Place. It’s quite out there, it’s explicitly political about race in America, but is also spiritual and esoteric. It projects black consciousness into space, as an alternative reality, using space as a context to imagine a different reality. The overarching motif of the film, the framing device for the narrative, is that he’s having a tarot reading, a kind of futuristic tarot game with the Overseer.

I was influenced by the aesthetic, and by the pairing up of these political elements and the spiritual elements. The tarot is a traditional site of female power and is connected to witchcraft, which would have been knocked down over the years by patriarchy – I really wanted to utilize that space to have a conversation about the eight amendment, and to do this around the kitchen table. That’s where my sister sometimes has her tarot readings, at the kitchen table, so there’s that sense of it being both a domestic and political space.

How To Be Other Than A Body, (2017), Installation

The main sculptural work of the project was what I called a holy well, and I describe it as a contemporary version of a holy well. It’s made out of domestic objects – attic water tanks, a child’s paddling pool – and it’s plumbed together using copper piping. The paddling pool is resting on a wooden structure that takes the form of a six-pointed star, which is used in witchcraft for conjuring. I’m interested in the holy well because they’re very prolific in the landscape here, and they’re embedded into the Irish psyche; initially they were pagan sites of ritual, and then they were co-opted by the Catholic Church. Each well has a specific cure that’s attributed to it, so if you have warts you might go to a particular well in Dublin, or if you have hearing damage you might go to a well in Cork or something. And people wash there, they pray and they go to masses there. But some wells are more active than others.

Of course at the time I was looking at the female body, and the Eighth Amendment, and the access to abortion in Ireland. So the cure that this holy well provided, was access to abortion. This was the central object/sculpture in the work. In the background, you can see this video work, which is a kind of a fictional ethnography, an imagining of the people that would have used this well. I exhibited it in the RHA as part of Futures, and I’d also shown it in the Wexford Arts Centre.

How To Be More Than A Body, (2017), still

So the video work is set in this kind of 3D-rendered environment, an empty city. It was an open source file that I accessed online, someone else made this city and then I took it and animated it through an open source programme called Blender – I green screened the sculptures and then put them into the environment. There are a lot of elements of collaging going on. Sometimes I think of the the sculptures themselves as 3D collages. Even the voiceover, in the end I recorded it using one one voice, that of academic Zelie Asava but I wrote it as coming from a number of different viewpoints/voices. An ethnography would usually be to go to the community and live with them and study the subject from the view point of the subject, so one or two viewpoints are like that, and some of the other viewpoints are more distant – looking back and trying to understand, through these objects, who these people were, I did this to think through and complicate the act of really trying to know another being(s), which I think is inherent to a discourse around something like the eight amendment, when one group of people are campaigning for change and their voice is going unheard, which it did for many years.

You might see there are no bodies and no people in the landscape, so there’s this sense that the people have disappeared and we’re just learning about them through the objects and this voice over.

Going back to what I was saying about the text and the materiality of it earlier – here the text is written onto the holy well. I wanted to reference the kind of way you see people writing on the back of toilet doors, because at the time you would always find it in those places in bars and restaurants – information about the Eighth Amendment, how you get access to abortion pills, where you can go for support, things like that. It was a way to communicate with each other and form a community, I guess, so I wanted to mimic that somehow within the sculptural work, but that is would also reference the way people tend to leave things at holy wells, talismans like religious statues and rosary beads. So for me, these words are the talismans for this holy well.

You can find out more about Ann Maria’s work through her website link below

http://annmariahealy.net/

thank you Adrian Mc Hugh for your work editing

Interview, Painting, Video

Real & Imagined: Cléa van der Grijn

Cléa van der Grijn

Cléa van der Grijn is an artist based in Sligo. Her deeply personal work has often delved into matters of mortality and memory, and her latest touring exhibition JUMP is no exception. I recently got a chance to sit down with Clea to discuss the new exhibition, her influences, and the variety of media she works in.

Why did you call your recent exhibition JUMP?

I called the exhibition JUMP because there is a sense of suspension in jumping where time can hold still, since you are neither here nor there. Jump is a place in between.

The exhibition is a combination of my paintings and a film that I’ve written and directed in collaboration with a soundscape creative called Joseph P. Hunt and cinematographer Ciaran Carty. Michael Cummins designed the pod which it’s viewed in. The pod is really important because I am in control of each person’s experience – so I know that if you see it in Sligo or Dublin or America or wherever, you will all have the same experience. I think the word is immersive; I wanted it to be an immersive experience. Experiential.

JUMP, still, (2019)

How do the paintings relate to the film?

The paintings are like instants of the film: very beautiful little flickers. Stills, which hopefully give one, time to reflect back at what was experienced. The smaller are like moments, flickers of the film.

JUMP #5, (2019), oil on board, 56x56cm

[The paintings] were painted alongside the making of the film. I have a fairly big studio. This was where we did all the editing and tech for the film. I wanted Joe, Ciaran and Michael to see my process while working on the project, and allow them to respond to it in some way.

I know exactly what I want. So, I strive to act on that vision. Professionalism is important when working with others. Even though I can be exacting, it’s the same expectation I lay on myself.

Can you talk a little about the film?

What I hope to do with the film is put forward questions to the viewer. I want to create a platform for a narrative, for a dialogue. I want people to engage, and maybe to keep still for a little while. To gather their thoughts and reflect: what is death and what is life? What are memories, real and perceived? What about false memories? Can they become real memories? I really just want people to stop and think about mortality and life.

The film does not intend to be disturbing. But it is, meant to make people consider what death is. It gives us a little moment of reflection, where we can perhaps almost project our own feelings onto the film. Yes, it could be about death but that is only a very small thing, and the culture around death is a very large conversation. This is something I’m personally trying to unravel.

Reconstructing Memory presented in The Model, (2015)

Death is a subject you have touched on in the past.

You’re talking about Reconstructing Memory which was a rather huge exhibition I did in (The Model Gallery [2015]. Limerick City Gallery, Rochester Arts Centre USA and Solomon Dubli) It was a real in-depth investigation into culture’s relationship to death, in particular Mexican death traditions and how they compare to the Western sense of mourning.

When I started the project, my whole family went to live in Mexico to understand the culture of death. It was quite a lonely experience making a show by myself of such size. When working on that, my only direct involvement with other people was with my family. And god love them, they spent two years growing and cutting marigolds!

Reconstructing Memory presented in The Model, (2015)

Elements from Reconstructing Memory like marigolds appear in the film. Can you go into that?

Within Mexican culture on Dia de Muertos, dead souls are drawn back by the very pungent smell of the marigold. Marigolds play a strong role in both Reconstructing memory and JUMP.

Repetition is also really important to me: I don’t know if it is my rhythm or if it helps my mind to stay clear. Even though my paintings are different to one other, there is still a form of iteration to the paintings. Even if you go back, back, back, there are elements which are reused continuously in my practice.

The death mask was another element from Reconstructing Memory. I have three death masks made. The masks were made because I think that people are celebrated when they die but not while they are alive, and I find that quite interesting. Why? Why this way and not the other way round? Why does Irish culture or culture generally prefer to celebrate the dead and not the living. This is what the death mask asks.

When it comes down to it, there are similarities between Reconstructing Memory and JUMP. As I continue to develop this state of “in-between” in my practice I am aware of things becoming simpler, of a paring back. Of allowing the essence of my subject to be more … perhaps subtle.

I am also looking out more for references whereas before I always looked within.

Going back to what you said about eyes; one of the paintings literally depicts eyes. That has to be deliberate?

The eyes in the painting are a reference to the hand-blown glass balls from Reconstructing Memory. They are direct replicas of my eyes. I should say that the painting is called Ways of Seeing (which is based on the title from a book by the writer John Berger). I believe that, as the title says, you don’t necessarily need your eyes for seeing. If you just remain still, you can see with your heart or your emotions. There are so many different ways of seeing without your eyes. And when you die, the first thing to go are your eyes. I have a lazy eye myself, and eyes have always been important to me. I’m aware of the many other ways of seeing.

Ways of Seeing, (2019), oil on linen, 152x152cm

I love titles, but I think that once you title something, that’s it. It can often close ways of interpreting a work, so it can be a delicate balance.

Clea+van+der+Grijn,+JUMP+-+Mermaid+Selects+-+Pool+300dpi+WEB.jpeg

JUMP, still, (2019)

That’s interesting that the name comes from Berger’s book. There seems to be text written into the painting itself.

I have scraped the text into the painting. It says, “I dream of dead people”. And I do – I dream of dead people all the time because they are alive in my dreams.

Reading is something that is really important to me. I am a voracious reader. I have book shelves which I live vicariously through. I’ve just read Marina Abramović’s memoir.

I like to write and often write in my work, I wrote a book which is now finished. Most was done in solitude over an intense two-week residency in Cill Rialaig, overlooking the Skelligs.

I’m now awaiting an agent to find the correct publishing house.

JUMP as the book is also called is a fictional memoir. A tale of wicked truths interwoven with dream, imagination and dark thoughts. JUMP is a celebration and a curse about dysfunctional families.

It is about addiction and the search for a way through.

The protagonist is a young woman whose experiences and memories (both real and perceived) are outlined from her birth to the death of her brother, when the story abruptly ends.

Writing it has enabled me, as an artist to have more confidence in my practice.

Let’s delve into your influences. Are there names that come to mind?

That’s a hard question but I can say that seeing the work of Francis Bacon when I was either ten or eleven had a huge impact on me. It sticks with me as the first time that I really became enthralled in a work. Because I was brought up around art, I didn’t notice it most of the time but I remember seeing Bacons painting well. We were visiting a little chapel in the south of France and the Bacon painting was there. I remember just going, “woah!”.

What’s next for you?

I’d love to make a feature film but I need time to breathe first. The film has been picked up to premier at the New York independent Film Festival (NYIFF). So, I would like to let this digest. I’ve only just started painting again. Where is that going to go? I don’t know. I have to keep working in some capacity. If you don’t, things won’t happen. You can’t just switch it on and off. It’s something you have to keep active but I’m keeping my options open.

You can find out more about Cléa’s work through her website links below

Home

thank you Emer Mc Hugh & Meadhbh McNutt for both your work editing

You can support Painting in Text through Patreon, link below

https://www.patreon.com/PaintinginText

Installation, Interview, Performance

Making History: Jennifer Walshe

Jennifer Walshe

Jennifer is an extremely talented Irish artist/vocalist/curator/anything you can name! I was lucky to get to know her through the exhibition Aisteach when I helped with its installation in The Model. the depth of thought that goes into all her work is remarkable. It rewards the viewers that take the time and effort to look. There are clear lines of thought that go through a lot of her work even when she is using different mediums, and I hope you all take the time to check out the exhibition when you finish reading the Interview.

(this interview was recoded in September Prior to Culture Night 2018)

Let’s talk about your current show Aisteach is on in the model at the moment.

Well, to talk about Aisteach I feel we must first talk about Grupat. I feel the two are linked in a way. Back in 2007 up to 2009, I had a commission from South Dublin County Council – I applied for that commission in 2006. It was at the height of the Celtic Tiger boom, they were giving out public art funding to do very, very big public art projects, and I would probably say maybe more progressive and more experimental work than ever before. Simply because they had more money. Microsoft and Facebook had built campuses, and the ‘Percent for Art Scheme’ generated a lot of money for the South Dublin County Council… the council is Tallaght, and it crawls through sort of west Dublin, so it’s not a posh area of Dublin like Dún Laoghaire and Rathdown. They really wanted to do something that they felt that would put them on the map as public art commissioners, so they commissioned me and four other people, and we all did projects for two years. The project, it was the kind of art that county councils might not usually be interested in – a lot of the time with public art, it might be a sculpture that you have at a motorway roundabout or something like a poetry writing project that you might do with the library.

Grupat (2009)

I was a kid we lived Lough Line which falls into South Dublin County Council, and I had this feeling that there were loads of interesting people, but there wasn’t really an experimental art scene out there. So I thought ‘what if I just made one up?’ With the hope that kids growing up could feel, yeah I can do that. That is within my capabilities. So, I made up this sound art collective called Grupat, all born within five years of me. I was thinking, these were sort of my people – my team, you know? I could have worked with these people. If I can put it this way, for me, Grupat are alter egos. We’re very used to the idea in pop music that people will have alter egos, like David Bowie will also go by Aladdin Sane or the Thin White Duke. We’re very used to that idea.

: Turf Boon: The Softest Music in the World (2009) (Jennifer Walshe)

For me with Grupat, it felt very natural that it could be me in the same way. And for two years we did the project, and with lots of exhibitions, performances, we had two books published as well as two CDs released, and the culmination of it was in 2009 – we had a retrospective in the Project Arts Centre in Dublin, as if Grupat had existed for years and years.

From that I then had an exhibition in the Chelsea Art Museum in New York in 2010, it was a solo show called Irish Need Not Apply. I decided that I would put some Grupat works in that show, but it was also in that show when I started exhibiting works that played with the idea of created history. I claimed that some of the work was on loan from the National Museum of Ireland. The Robert Boyle alchemical ceramics that are in the current Aisteach show in The Model, they also saw the light of day for the first time in this Chelsea art show.

Alchemical Vessels (unknown)(Ed Walshe)

The other thing I showed in this show was the DORDÁN piece. It has these fake Ellis Island immigration records that claim that this is this early drone music, this idea of making historical stuff that sort of started happening like within a year of Grupat. My interest was drifting from contemporary, living alter egos. I think it’s notable that it began in New York, because I was very good friends with a drone musician called Tony Conrad – he’s sadly dead now, but he was a close friend, and he was involved in the discussions about who invented drone music and who invented minimalism. Was it La Monte Young? Was it Dennis Johnston? Steve Reich, Phil Glass? And that DORDÁN project was a way of saying ‘no no, none of you invented it! It was invented by an Irish trad musician who was doing this weird sort of music!’ For me, that was a different of way of intervening compared to having a contemporary alter ego, because it was it was a way to go back and actually question history – how we told stories about music.

Padraig Mc Giolla Mjuire: DORDÁN (1952) (Jennifer Walshe/Toney Conrad)

When I started working with the idea of imaginary people who are dead I didn’t think of them as alter egos, I thought of them as personae. That might seem like a technical difference but for me it was important, because I felt these aren’t me acting in the world right now. These are people, and I really have to imagine what they were like now that they are dead. They are a way to hack my brain to try and do something differently. I guess it’s the classic artistic way that you set yourself constraints. So in a way, all the backstories… they’re just a way of making a score, and then I have to make the music from that score. So the first person that I came up with was Caoimhím Breathnach. And that was completely organic. I had just bought a house in Knockvicer in Roscommon, and I had felt very strongly attached to that part of the country. Buying the house really made me I feel so privileged and so lucky that I could buy that house, and it sort of rooted me in a way I had never felt before. And so Caoimhím Breathnach sort of started happening in my head. He was the first person to come along, and I would have done the first exhibition of Caoimhím’s work in the ‘Roscommon Arts Centre’ in 2011. Around that time I also had this idea of this making a series of pieces called Historical Documents of the Irish Avant-Garde, which was driven by me and just my interests. I knew I wanted to start off with Dada. So by 2012, I had made this piece called Historical Documents in The Irish Avant-Garde Vol 1: Dada.

Aisteach actually has contributions from other artists – how did that work?

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Aisteach (2018)

I think of it as something like Marvel or DC Comics. I’m open to others using my characters or introducing new characters to Aisteach. It really depends on the person/people so, for example, Alice Maher said to me, ‘I don’t have any time to make something new’, and I said to her ‘well, do you have something you have never shown before? We can use it and I’ll fit it into Aisteach for you.’ So she gave me this bronze cast of the mouth, and it’s fantastic because we already have this idea that Steven Graham had come up with for Aisteach called the Keening Women’s Alliance and so it was a perfect fit for that! I had to curate the piece and create a history for it.

It was the same with Vivian Dick. She had this film, Images: Ireland. I thought ‘ok great, can we say that some of the people in it are part of the Kilkenny Engageists?’ She was great and let us go for it. And on the other hand, we have people like Mark Garry, who’s like ‘right, it’s Sister Hellen Brown and she makes these collages of her bullfinch Susan’, and he just ran with it. I do in a way have to give it over to other people. Like, when Mark Garry says he wants to do a nun who teaches a bird how to sing I have to think – okay, well, we already have a Sister Anselme who does these drone organ compositions, should they have any relation? Or do we need more nuns?

Vivian Dick: Images Ireland (1988)

Sr Hellen Brown Susan (Mark Garry)

Then we have Kevin Barry who made this character Benji the Rant, where I went over and recorded him to make a sound piece. And probably the two most involved in the whole exhibition Doireann Ní Ghríofa and Jack Fennell who both wrote three thousand word essays about their personae that they came up with. Jack mocked up a fictional notebook, Doireann created a suitcase. For me that is the scale. On one side we have Doireann and Jack, then close to them is Mark Garry and Kevin Barry, and down the other end, we have Alice and Vivian. I’m really happy with all those contributions – I just try and keep an eye on things. And I try and edit it well. So my role becomes curator and editor and dramaturge, just trying to make sure that Aisteach still makes sense. Something I’m really happy with is that we have loads of women involved in every level – we have the female artists and we have queer artists and it’s not just a roll call of dead white men. I had never given anyone that brief, but I think it is quite deliberate. Because people want to write into being the type of Ireland that they want to be in and the one that we hope that we will be, and that is an Ireland that’s very pluralistic.

I think a product, I think it is really interesting and one of the things about Aisteach is that every single person who becomes involved in it becomes part of the project – it’s not me. Grupat felt like me, whereas Aisteach feels like a much more collaborative effort. So everyone that worked on the project in any way becomes part of it, whether it is technicians preparing the rooms or the artist who contributed to it and all the performers. And what I love about that is it feels open. It feels that other people could step in. I kind of feel like the editor or the dramaturge. I watch what people are throwing in and I’m trying to balance the universe.

What I love about this model is that it creates fresh openings. One thing that was really sweet that happened last year: there are these sound artists based New Zealand, called Sisters Acumatica, and they just decided one of the Aisteach personae – her name is Róisín Madigan O’Riley – that they wanted to do a performance of Róisín Madigan O’Riley in New Zealand. And so they emailed me, and I was like, ‘go for it’. And I thought how beautiful Róisín Madigan O’Riley was, and Felix Ford [English sound artist who studied in Ireland] who invented Róisín Madigan O’Riley, and these New Zealand women the other side of the planet – laying out all these stones and radios on the beach doing this performance of this imaginary Irish persona.

So I’m quite happy because I think Aisteach first and foremost is an idea, that a lot of Irish and non-Irish people are very invested in, which is the idea there is a bunch of weirdos out there that we want to show a lot of love and support for. We want to find those weirdos and lift them up and let people see that there are weirdos who do weird, cool and interesting music, and isn’t that beautiful? And that idea is bigger than me.

There is more to Aisteach that just the exhibition itself. Would you like to touch on the performative element, specifically your plans for Culture Night?

I think that in Ireland it is changing, but certainly a lot of Irish people feel very conscious about their body and they feel shy – they feel like they can’t dance, or they shouldn’t dance. That shyness about our bodies is everywhere, even in the changing rooms in swimming pools!

I’m currently doing a lot of hip-hop dance classes at the moment, and I was working with the dancers who were part of the Worlding performance at the opening. They were always teaching us new tools like warmups, we did a lot that has made me enjoy life more. Everyone does two things when they’re drunk, they dance and they sing. When they feel that horrible voice in their head observing them is gone, they dance and they sing, and so the thing that we want to do is for Culture Night in The Model is try and make that space for people. And to say to people, come along and do some vocal warmups and learn just a little bit about how to use your voice. Instead of saying ‘I can’t sing’, people will think everybody can sing and people can try so many little dance things. There’s a lot of joy to be had with that.

It’s interesting to see how Aisteach plays with false history, as at the moment we have a lot of people editing their own versions of history on Facebook.

I think that you’re totally right. The thing is, with social media, even if you just think of Facebook – people are creating curated versions of themselves on Facebook. I read an article about teenagers on Instagram lately, and it mentioned how everybody has a Finsta, which is their account which is just visible to their small group friends, and then they have their ‘real’ Instagram where they’re projecting this idea of

Timeline of the Historical Documents of the Irish Avant-Guarde (2018)

the perfect life. And the thing that that I thought was amazing, was that the Finstas were much raw and honest, and far from perfect – and I thought, ‘that is amazing, it sounds so much more interesting than the real Instagram, I want to see the Finstas!’

I would hope we are becoming more used to the idea of that we go online, and we might not necessarily trust the sources of news we are getting, because there was Sheryl Sandberg and Jack Dorsey testifying to the United States Congress about Russian actors having influence, these Russian ads that have been on Facebook to try to sway the election, to sow deception… but still everybody is opening Facebook willingly, to willingly be exposed to those, and we are all having to contend with Holocaust denial, people who say climate change isn’t happening, things like that.

One thing that Aisteach tries to talk about is, who gets to curate? Who gets to choose what an artistic canon is and why? What do we say is worthy, and if we are making a combination of Irish music from the last hundred years, who should be in there? Who are the people making those choices and why are they in there? And with Aisteach, in a way we just said, ‘hey, we’re going to make those choices by just making it up!’ Because we realised a lot of the people who would be represented (and are represented) within Aisteach, those kinds of people wouldn’t have been represented. You know what I mean? We don’t know about all the people in Ireland thinking of all sorts of mad shit! There must have been. They just ended up working in the docks in Liverpool or having to emigrate to the US. Or they were barely capable to keep things together financially. So there has to have been tons of weirdos – there are so many weirdos now, how could there not have been? We genetically come from weirdos.

You have quite a range of skills, and actually you might be better known for your compositions like your opera XXX_LIVE_NUDE_GIRLS!!! Let’s talk about that.

So XXX_LIVE_NUDE_GIRLS!!! is an opera that I wrote for Barbie dolls.

Live_Nude_Girls (2012)

My sister and I always thought that I would never write an opera – I think if you go and see a well-produced Wagner opera, it can be very beautiful, but I just thought that this way of expressing ideas just didn’t make sense to me living in the time I do live in – and then at the time I was reading about marionette operas. Because Mozart and Beethoven had written these marionette operas for puppets, that they would do at the summer retreats. The second I read about that, I remembered the Barbie dolls house that my sister and I had in the attic, and I called my mum: ‘do you still have that? Please tell me it is still in the attic!’ And my mum said ‘oh yeah, it’s great that I want to write this opera for Barbie dolls!’ Through working on XXX_LIVE_NUDE_GIRLS!!!, I got to know the operas of Robert Ashley and composers like that, which I feel is closer to contemporary ways of using speech. Even a bit closer to rap music. It felt like their approach to producing opera made more sense to me, you know, in terms of how we use the voice and how to tell a story. Things like that made a big difference.

Live_Nude_Girls (2003)

It’s been quite interesting for me as an experience, because I made it in 2003, we performed it a bunch of times, we released it on DVD and that was great. But you’re onto the next piece almost straight away so I sort of thought ‘that’s fine, if it doesn’t get done again I’m extremely satisfied – it’s on DVD, it’s been performed all over the world.’ But what has been quite interesting for me in the last few years, people have become very interested in the work again, which I think is really linked to the #MeToo movement and changing sexual politics. A group in Chicago called Mocrep decided to do it. And then they did it in the Bendigo Festival in Australia and we just did it in France. It’s amazing seeing these all-new productions happening. Somebody in Columbia just wrote their PhD dissertation about framing the entire opera as consciousness – like how date rape victims deal with reality in the aftermath. Because, you know, it starts out with everyone laughing because it’s a Barbie opera, but it ends with a date rape.

I wanted to make something that created a dialogue, and at the time I was making it I just felt like I needed to make it. To just put these things that have happened to me, and to women I know, to put it in a way that reached out to others. I think it was Louise Bourgeois who used to say that her emotions were inappropriate for her size, so she would make art to put her emotions into, so they wouldn’t overwhelm her. And I think it was the same for me definitely, with my work there is a lot of emotional stuff that gets sort of metabolised through making the work. So with the Barbie opera, it is quite amazing for me now to see a lot of productions and to see people writing their PhDs about it, really going in and doing a deep analysis of things that I had hidden away in the score. You know what I mean? Where they’re saying, ‘this part where the accordion is typed like a typewriter, but they keep crossing out their text, I’ve viewed it this way,’ and I think, ‘nobody’s ever asked me about that.’ Because everybody only sees the accordion typing, and they don’t pick up on how the accordion is typing something, but I have put something in there. So that has been really nice, just to see the pieces have a new life, in a time when people want to have conversations about these things. There are some things that other people are noticing, or paying attention to, or picking up on or trying out. Seeing people take this on is really beautiful for me, it’s like watching a new person draw your characters. And you just think that this is really beautiful, it’s not just something in my head. Whereas when we did it in new music circles, well over fifteen years ago people weren’t so open to those sorts of discussions about sexual violence and gender relations.

How do you compare making music to making art?

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Jennifer Walshe and the Arditti Quartet performing Everything is important (2016)

For me the boundaries are very sort of blurry. If you’ve seen the biggest piece that I have done recently, a piece called Everything Is Important for voice and string quartet, and that has a massive video part which I made. So a huge amount of the pieces that I write, they are very visual, and that can be in the video part or that could be in things the musicians are doing physically, or often both. So with Everything Is Important, it’s a forty minute long piece and there is video almost the entire time. And there is a piece I did called Self Care last year where I used an accordion, and the accordionist is just moving around and using their body, and then also there are video parts. So yes, those things are blurry, for me anyway.

Andreas Borregaard performing Self Care (2017)

The issue is that I think musicians are trained in environments where they are told unless they are doing an opera, that somehow they are neutral on stage in a visual way, and it is not true. it’s complete bullshit. I don’t know how much you know about blind auditions in orchestras, but one of the things they discovered in a lot of orchestras was that the only way to get more women into the orchestras was to have what they call blind auditions – so at a certain point in the audition process the person auditioning has to perform behind a curtain they even put a carpet down so people can’t hear if a person is in heels, and what they found was this actually meant that they hired more women. I think when musicians walk onto the stage, it’s a very visual theatrical situation – Prince knew this, David Bowie knew this, and even the free improv scene knows this. But classical music still tries to say that we are all wearing black so you can’t see us. You know what I mean?

It’s interesting you say that, considering the physicality you employ in the works like Women Box.

It’s funny you say that, because Women Box was an example of the sort of commission that you usually hate, which is that somebody says you have a really specific brief! In this case the brief was that it was to tie into the Commonwealth Games in 2014, it was the first year that they let women’s boxing into the Commonwealth Games as a sport, so they wanted somebody to write like an opera about boxing specifically women’s boxing . And Laura Bowler approached me to do it. I said to her, ‘I’m only going to do it if you learn to box. Because I do not want like faking it on stage, that’s bullshit.’

Laura-J.-Bowler-Photo-by-Claire-Shovelton

Laura Bowler performing Women Box (2014)

And Laura to her credit said to me: ‘I only want to do it if I learn to box.’ From there I knew we were onto something good! In that situation, it was more like a method acting approach really. When I mean method style, I mean Daniel Day-Lewis style! Laura started training with Cathy ‘The Bitch’ Brown, I even went to a boxing class with her to see what it was like. Laura really trained and Cathy really put her through her paces, and Laura ended up doing a white-collar boxing match! It was really amazing because her body changed, and she even said she was aggressive in situations she never would have been aggressive in before. Working with Cathy and working with Laura was phenomenal because they’re both really committed, and I saw the joy of committing to something that is out of the ordinary. Laura committed to trying out boxing, really ate like a boxer, she took vitamins. And then at a certain point, Cathy got a man to come so Laura could punch him, so she could get the feeling of what it’s like to punch a human being. We talked a lot about what it means to hit somebody – the difference between rough housing and domestic violence, what it means for a woman to hit a man and for a man to hit a woman, and what it means for a woman to hit a woman. All these different things. And for me it was just such a rich way of working.

And that is what I’m interested in. Sometimes in art school, research becomes very dry and sometimes students feel like they need to do this research so they can justify the work of art by writing a good essay about it, and I’m not interested in that. I’m just interested in learning more about the world, knowing more and having a richer experience so for me all the research, learning new physical things, it all comes with having a richer experience of the world.

And going forward?

What I had hoped to have for the exhibition was an AI system that wrote Irish mythology. But the thing is, that is way beyond my coding skills! So to create it, I had to rely on somebody from the States who just didn’t have time, which is totally understandable.

Aisteach introduced me to strange dead weirdos who I’ve viewed as my like great uncles and aunts, and great-great granddaddies and grandmammies artistically. I think that the AI, for me, is a way to introduce a truly other intelligence and alien intelligence in that – last year for instance, I wrote a piece that with a dog in it because I was trying to understand animal intelligence. This year I’m involved in a whole bunch of different AI projects, where I’m trying to understand artificial intelligence.

You can find out more about Jennifer’s work through her website links below

http://milker.org/ & http://www.aisteach.org/

thank you Adrian Mc Hugh for your work editing

You can support Painting in Text through Patreon, link below

https://www.patreon.com/PaintinginText

Installation, Interview, Painting, Video

Organic Evolution: Laura Mc Morrow

Laura McMorrow Exhibition The Lost Acre Leitrim Sculpture Centre

Laura Mc Morrow next to her paintings in Fragments (2018)

Laura is an artist that I’m very lucky to have gotten to know though Painting in Text. Laura’s exhibition The Lost Acre is a great example of pieces from different modes of practice complimenting each other – this interview gives insight into Laura’s practice and the influences behind her work. I really enjoyed the interview, and hope you get as much out of it as I did.

Let’s Start with you Recent Exhibition

My most recent exhibition was The Lost Acre in the Leitrim Sculpture Centre. I was doing a residency there.

The title came about from a story that my dad told me he is into hill walking. He was coming down the mountain and he was talking to a farmer and the farmer had asked him had he gone through the lost acre, my dad didn’t know what it was and asked about it. The Farmer explained that it was a patch of land that you get lost in if you walk through it. You can be lead astray and become disoriented, Places that are familiar will start looking strange and even though your close to home, you feel like your really far away.

I felt it tied in with this residency because Manorhamilton is my hometown.Because I’m so familiar with this landscape I wanted to look at it in a new light and revisit it and look at it in more of an artists perspective compared to how I was looking at it when I was growing up. When you’re younger you don’t appreciate how beautiful it and it’s only when you’re away that you realise that you start missing it. I had recently moved home when this residency came about. And through the residency I got a studio in the town and I was living on main street.

What was your planning for the exhibition?

I knew I wanted to have a few different elements to the show. In my studio I mostly focus on painting but in this exhibition I also have a video, collage and sculptural elements as well.

Let’s start with the painting first

Most of my paintings have come from working with archival imagery that I find online. I mostly use two archives, one is the British library collection and there is the New York Public Library. They have uploaded these huge online archives of images which are copyright free so you can do whatever you want with them and often I would use them as a starting point to trigger memories. I would spend hours scrolling through these websites looking at tiny thumbnails and sometimes one just jumps out at me. I’m really drawn to certain ones probably because they remind me of places within my memory so then I’ll start painting from the images but often I won’t include a lot of the detail from the original image. I pair it down to a very minimal composition. Most of the photographs are black and white and I’m kind of inventing the colours based on my memories. When you see the paintings together they have a strange dream like quality because of the muted and distorted nature of the colours. My painting is moving to be more and more abstract. I think they are still landscapes but they are quite paired down, they are almost empty. It’s been a natural progression of my work. I general work really small I would like to make something bigger, but I also find it difficult. sometimes if I try and go bigger I end up painting something really small onto a big board!

Orange Forest (2018)

Found Materials

Sometimes I work with found materials like old frames I find in charity shops. When I work with found materials often the first thing I will do is take it apart in some way. I might sand it down or peel away what’s there. I did an installation with the found objects for The Lost Acre exhibition called Fragments. I let the object inform what I would do to it. Another example, this one was originally a religious souvenir and the dome was made out of plastic. So, I decided I would change the image and I scratched the plastic, so it obscured what was inside it. For one piece that was a frame that originally had this twee landscape glued into it and I really wanted to take the image out. But you can see the remnants of it I couldn’t get it out completely, but I ended up really liking the texture that it created! So, I kept it. I spent so long trying to get the image out and eventually decided to just work with it. But these range from everything from things I found in a charity shops to things I find on the beach. A lot of them are coasters and old frames. Similar to the archival imagery I spend a lot of time rooting/collecting stuff trying to find objects. Sometimes it’s the cheaper one’s I prefer to work with because I can be less precious with them and don’t mind destroying them. I quite like how someone’s gotten rid of the object and don’t see the value in it, it could be the material or sometimes I turn the frame around and use the back of it because I like the shape. And create new surface for it.

Fragments (2018)

Material can come from anywhere. My parents were adding insulation to their house and they didn’t know how to get rid of waste because you can’t burn it you and it’s too big to throw it in the bin and they were like oh Laura you will be able to do something with it. It looks like marble but is actually that I’ve covered it in wax, it’s something that was discarded Its very tactile people would want to touch it. And find out what it is your reflex is to reach out at it with your hand and try and figure out what a material it is people are usually surprised about how light it is I also like the idea of putting it alongside an actual rock albeit a strange looking one I look at them kind of like drawings even though they are objects they are something to draw from.

You also do video can you talk about that?

When I first started doing video I felt like I had to have a narrative to it, so I sort of ended up forcing this narrative and it just didn’t work so I I’ve just decided to change tact, it’s more of a purely visual experience. A material exploration and I’m not forcing a narrative into it. I’m self-trained and I would approach video from a painting perspective like composition wise I’d compose it the same way I would approach a painting. And a lot of the time I would see video as a moving painting. It has some elements of landscapes. I’ve even used paint in my video, I’ve had Jelly was sitting on black oil paint on a copper plate and filmed that.

Laura-McMorrow-the lost acre-video-still

Lost Acre Still (2018)

When it comes to my video is almost a scientific process and you are experimenting you don’t know where it’s going to go or what is going to come out of it. I usually surround myself with materials I want to work with but then sometimes I might use something that I hadn’t planned on using just cos it happens to be there.

A scene from The Lost Acre video came about because I was trying to recreate the formation of an erratic rock. I was down in the burren doing a residency. I wanted to see if I froze a rock in a basin of water then melted it would the rock move. I filmed it melting then I’ve reversed the footage.

Time seems to be a factor in a lot of your work in different ways?

Time does feature a lot in the whole show even with my sculptural work I had a big green sculpture it’s actually foliage that I have shaped into an orb. And that came about because I wanted to create a sculptural work that would change over time. When I lived in japan for a couple of years I came across this traditional object made from cedar branches that they would hang outside sake breweries. When the sake was ready to be drank they would know because it would have turned brown so it’s almost like a natural timer. A really long timer! When you see them in japan they are perfectly shaped I left it a bit scraggly. It’s a more interesting object that way. it did turn brown over course the exhibition but it’s so slow you almost wouldn’t notice it. It’s gotten much lighter as it dried out a lot during the exhibition. So, yeah a natural way of telling time! A lot the found objects I was working with also have been changed through time. like the rusty frame,

Sugidama (2018)

And with my video work I have manipulated the time, sometimes I speed it up and sometimes I slow it down. Sometimes it’s not straightforward and it’s really hard to grasp what you are actually looking at!

Most of my video work is made in the studio, if I had more time to develop the work I would have liked to film in the landscape and create these experiments that I do in the studio out in the field. One time I carried with me a huge basin of jelly up the mountain and when I got there it started raining. And when I would put the basen down my dog would keep eating the jelly! It was such a disaster and I thought “what am I doing?!? this is ridiculous!” I retreated back to my studio! It didn’t work that time, but I have it in my back of my head that it is how I would like the work to develop.

your collage work is very interesting

In my collage again I’m working with archival images often postcards, I think there’s an element of humour in it, I might do something like place a buffalo in an odd location! There is something really beautiful about the quality of these old postcards though because they have been hand coloured they were originally black and white and they have been hand tinted so some parts are still left black and white and there is a parallel with the way I approach the paintings because I’m working from a black and white image but I’m adding colour.

Buffalo Man (2017)

Will we finish by talking about your influences?

I watch quite a lot of sci fi movies, more older ones because of the D.I.Y aesthetic and the practical effects they used kind of influence my work in a way. I watched one recently called Beware! The Blob and there is this red blog that attacks people, and I really want to know how they made the blob move!

Painting wise I like Fergus Feehily’s work he works with found material and often his work is just so beautiful I saw a show that he did in the Douglas Hyde and it kind of stuck with me just his use of materials and his minimal use of paint.

You can find out more about Laura’s work through his website link below

http://www.lauramcmorrow.com/

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https://www.patreon.com/PaintinginText