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Celebration And Happenstance: A Way of Working 2011 My work, in its various forms over the years, has always been made in a spirit of enquiry. It has evolved, and continues to evolve, in a gradual, tentative fashion, as a natural response to changing circumstances and shifting values. Pleasant surprises and unexpected connections are sought and given privilege over any kind of planned programme or signature approach. My recent paintings, works on paper, sculpture, and installations would suggest a way of working that places a high value on contingency, while, at the same time, creating evident strands of correspondence. Layers of association and patterns of reference are used to implicate the familiar with the novel, the old with the new, the given with the invented. In other words, this is not the type of work that discloses itself immediately, but requires a certain degree of excavation. Many references have been employed, or, more accurately, entertained, not for the purpose of overcoming the work’s ‘anxiety of influence’ (in Harold Bloom’s most famous phrase), but almost as the opposite, as a gentle tribute or a celebration of common ground. For example, many of my works have referred discreetly, though not exclusively, to a number of painting tropes that can be traced back to the 1980s, perhaps to the beginnings of something that is now loosely referred to as post-modernism. There are other sources of reference in individual works, but the 80s influences seem to be the most pertinent, and the most discernible, and would include the work of Terry Winters, Donald Baechler, Thomas Nozkowski, and David Salle, among others. Generally, these artists employed various kinds of what might be called a ‘corrupted figuration’, and, individually, each demonstrated a unique and somewhat ironic approach to subject matter and the use of figure-ground relations that I find very compelling. More recent influences would include the work of Ellen Gallagher and Juan Usle, especially Usle, whose development as an artist intrigues me in terms of his resolute independence and commitment to formal freedom. However, it must be said at this point that any visual connections or stylistic references in my work to the artists mentioned above, while they do occur, would tend to be implicit. They are certainly not deployed as direct quotes or appropriations, and would generally be subject to some sort of re-adjustment if they were too obvious. The possible associative range within each piece and within each exhibition, the implied ‘cultural memory’ or tenor of the works, and their sense of claiming new ground, is what matters. This has generally been the case since I started exhibiting. My work has always relied on some notion of ‘cultural memory’ as part of its momentum. There has been a regular use of oblique references to things known and half-known that condition our thoughts and feelings in all kinds of ways. This was probably most obvious in my paintings of the late 80s. Some of them were seen as ‘political’, but they were intended rather as a form of cultural critique. They posed well-known or iconic images, like James Connolly’s hat, Easter lilies, Edward Carson’s statue, Paul Henry landscapes, and Celtic effigies, on variegated backgrounds or fields of colour. The displacement of these images from their usual context and their re-positioning within the shifting metaphorical space of the paintings served to open them up to new readings, much more ambiguous and intricate than before, thereby expanding or reframing their ‘cultural’ possibilities. There was a certain degree of iconoclasm involved, necessarily so, combined with an ambivalent mixture of irony and genuine celebration. Since that time, the paintings have ranged over various inter-connected themes and subject matters, while continuing to employ similar concerns and formal structures. The process of opening up well-known images, together with some not so well-known images, to new readings began with the so-called ‘political’ paintings and continued through the “Belfast Series” of 1992, in which there was an attempt to deal with a sense of public grief through charged imagery. The expansion of possible readings then became more important in its own right and led eventually to the “Reflex Series” of 1997-99. These large-scale stain paintings were used to generate images loaded with Rorschach-type ambiguities that were relatively challenging (and often humorous) in their wide range of associations, but were still transparently available to an attentive viewing. The more recent paintings have moved into a slightly different area of ambiguity. They have now progressed to the point where they can be said to manifest an attitude towards their making that corresponds to John Cage’s ‘music-as-weather’ analogy, i.e. they are put together through a process that allows a substantial degree of randomness and circumstantial influence to come into effect, while still maintaining a strong sense of structure. Cage said that he wanted to create ‘music-as-weather’, meaning simply that he didn’t want to control what was happening in the production of his music; that it should unfold by its own means, just like the weather. Thus, he often relied on random processes. I don’t subscribe to total randomness. It doesn’t make sense to me. But giving up a large degree of control and allowing images to develop as much as possible according to their internal associations and the circumstances of their making provides some sort of release from the neurotic ego, and makes, in my opinion, for a more interesting practice. Accepting the contingent nature of representation was the key for me, especially in terms of freedom of style. This was combined with a growing awareness of what the everyday world had to offer by way of fresh observation as well as by way of already available visual information, in the form of adapted images, objects, or patterns. It wasn’t a question, however, of using everything and anything, of simply ‘going with the flow’. Instead, it involved a series of choices to be more inclusive of my own daily activities and surroundings, and to be more flexible in referring to them. It also meant avoiding any unnecessary restrictions, like a fixed range of subject matter, for example, or anything close to a signature style. A readiness to switch media was also useful. I have worked with drawings and photos, sculpture and installation, as well as painting. I occasionally write fiction and short prose pieces when time permits. There is nothing unusual in this. Lots of artists work in different media and different areas of expertise, and their practice is often enlivened because of it. I’m not sure how the process of writing might impact on the paintings, if at all, except possibly through a shared sense of play. The paintings certainly play games with the received ‘language’ of painting. They often have a hybrid look to them, employing different vocabularies or different media within the same work, while trying self-consciously to remain uncluttered and unburdened by a surfeit of irony (Jasper Johns springs to mind here, as a distant influence). I employ both abstract and figurative images, often at the same time. For me, there is no opposition between them. Both are representations of something beyond themselves, and they induce similar feelings by similar means. This subtle prompting of feeling is generally my first concern. Their meanings, or their possible gamut of meanings, can be readily deferred, as all meanings should be, until an available and appropriate description comes along to put them into context. So, importantly for me, the images, whether abstract or figurative or in-between, now come into being largely as the result of a kind of happenstance. They originate from everyday observations, spontaneous reveries, casual connections, and commonplace events. I have started some paintings, for example, after noting unusual combinations of form and colour in a garden, or in a shop window, or on the studio floor. The composite forms are nearly always introduced into a work with some kind of stylistic or painterly reference in mind, but are then allowed to develop and take shape in their own way. Their intentions change as they go, allowing ready improvisation. While accepting a wide range of sources, my art practice is firmly embedded in the practice of everyday life. For me, making art has gradually become more and more enmeshed with my reading and writing and gardening and travelling and cooking and listening to music. It has become an integral part of an overall way of living -- part of an open and attentive accommodation with the world, largely sufficient onto itself in its own emotive engagements, its own sensuous pleasures, and its own intellectual rewards. It has taken on the mantle of something akin to an ‘ethical, cosmopolitan paganism’ (to borrow an apt description from Dave Hickey), an ethos that accommodates the whole range of human feeling and relishes the arbitrary nature of events. It attempts to provide a rejuvenating antidote to habit and the dull rhetoric of repetition. This loose, largely undefined aspiration, aiming for what might be called a ‘jouissance of seeing’, a heightened joy in the visual, enables both a grounded and a highly imaginative contact with things as they are and as they might be. I try to keep the content of the work subtle but relatively simple and accessible, if at all possible, without sacrificing range, intimacy, and complexity of feeling. I like to think that simplicity can be a form of aesthetic honesty, and does not have to rule out deeper levels of complexity or nuance. Somewhere within the work’s increasingly celebratory agenda there may exist suggestions of things too complex to discuss here. Issues of openness and freedom, of visual democracy, of delight, or even happiness, are certainly not precluded. For the viewer, any such sense of intimacy and suggestion, and, possibly, a sense of ‘becoming’, can only begin with a personal and unmediated engagement with the work itself. |
