Books Boxes Bronzes, Chester Beatty Library, Dublin 2002.
We experience life awake or asleep. These Boxes Books Bronzes are ‘Sleep Art’: the dreamlike pictures of arbitrary color collections. Inside the body of the boxes, the bronze casts are about unaware dreamless sleep.
This installation, Boxes Books Bronzes, inside the dreamy vitrine world of the Chester Beatty Library during the winter months of 2003 preceded the exhibition of the wakeful Arbitrary Color Collections at ARKEN Museum for Moderne Kunst on the island of Ishøj, Copenhagen.
White ink on black board, 18″ x 15″, 2002.
The Puck, Project Arts Centre, Dublin, 1980.
Notes on ‘Puck’ installation at Project Arts Centre, Dublin, 1980
The inkwell and the nib.
Synchronised intermittantly to the stream of words from a tape loop, rectangles of light projected on the ceiling from the carousel beneath the floor of the gallery where the river Poddle flows. This babble of words, descriptive of ideas under the ground where the river Poddle flows. I was born at the junction where it enters the Camac river.
Graphite drawing for ‘Puck’, 17″ x 13″, 1980.
Liffey, Bank of Ireland, Dublin, 1980
Idea:
To create a work of art which involved various different ways of seeing, and ironically, ways of not seeing e.g. when viewing this flowing way of seeing one cold not simultaneously view the other painting etc. in their spacial ideas.
How:
By placing things out of context, i.e. painting on the outside which would normally be inside and a butterfly, albeit a photograph, which is of the outside world, inside. Having words for the movement of a river from its source to its final entrance into the sea going from the top of a pillar down and the reverse also.
Blue Room, Orchard Gallery, Derry, 1980.
‘A tune beyond us as we are,
Yet nothing changed by the blue guitar;
Ourselves in the tune as if in space,
Yet nothing changed, except the place
Of things as they are and only the place
As you play them, on the blue guitar’.
— Wallace Stevens, The Man with the Blue Guitar, verse VI.
‘The artist has merely to be more keenly aware than others of the harmony of the world, of the beauty and ugliness of the humab condition to it, to communicate this acutely to his fellow-man’.
— Alexandr Solzhenitsyn, Nobel Prize Lectuure, 1970.
The room: between the main gallery and the 16th century city wall. The doorways: boarded up to make two pictorial ‘portrait shaped’ rectangles which could be used for entry and exit through the room. The room, painted blue inside, made a ‘body’ of blue light. The rectangle ‘picturing’ the City wall and the decaying yard illuminated by the sun opposes the other artificial and timeless space of art. The artificial light and the tape-looped sounds from my studio in Dublin superimposed acoustically over the room.
Three blue chairs in the room encourage rest and contemplation.
Indico, Triskel Art Centre, Cork, 1979.
Indico was made in the low ceiling granary in Cork. The deep wall and small aperture window, (suggestive of the ‘given’ condition of planar painting, i.e. the small rectangle on/in the ‘ground’ of a larger one) created a positive-negative-positive-negative dynamic.
The ‘marvel’ of this piece was the real ‘view’ of the city appearing; revealed as it were, by the box like painting which fitted exactly to the proportions of the hole in the wall, i.e. the window.
Cork (Indico), Triskel Art Centre, Granary Store, 1979, graphite wash.
Pillbox/Loophole, Arts Council Gallery, Belfast, 1979
Pillbox/Loophole: ‘simple form/complex experience’. Based on the army ‘pillboxes’ around Belfast from where guns were aimed at the passer by.
These photographs were taken with a Zorki Russian camera while holding my breath for several seconds.
This gallery was fire-bombed shortly after the exhibition.
Graphite wash and photograph on Waterford paper, 32″ x 22″, 1979.
V.E.I.L., David Hendricks Gallery, Dublin, 1979.
V.E.I.L., two layers of polypropylene, wood, speakers, microphones at the David Hendricks Gallery, Dublin 1979.
Using a room with two doors and two windows, I inserted a wall of fabric in the middle, dividing it in two: one side dark and unlit, the other bright and lit. On the lighter side I built a wooden floor and placed microphones underneath it. The footsteps were played back from speakers in the dark side enhancing the reflexive feeling of one’s presence.
I made this piece in relation to ‘Folded/Unfolded’, 1972, where the paint flows through the canvas weave. In this piece, I imagined the observer ‘flowing’ between the two sides of the plane itself.
Sketch for V.E.I.L., 1979, graphite wash on water color paper, 10″ x 8″.