HILLYER

GREATER SENSE OF INTER-CONNECTIVITY: MARYANNE POLLOCK

Artist, “Repression, Resurgence, Reemergence”

In your artist’s statement you mention that you went “to Donegal to retrieve something that was lost. Perhaps it was a pride that had been crushed by poverty and starvation”. What role has your art played in retrieving this “something”?

I found a rich artistic and oral history that was never shared with me since my grandparents schooling ended in the third grade while they were struggling to survive.  I found prehistoric ruins in that were on the same meridian with Morocco, and ancient castles from Medieval times, and manuscripts from the golden age of Irish history. These ties to an ancient past gave me a greater sense of inter-connectivity given my teenage interest in art of the middle east, particularly Samaria and Egypt. Islamic art has its roots in Celtic art, a fact that i had intuited during that trip.

I think that each of my paintings are a type of archaeological dig into the ancient past, a collective unconscious where all of humanity comes together.

Since I lived in Egypt for six years and also traveled to Spain recently, finding that interconnected-ness of common histories, centered in southern Spain in the ninth century has helped validate my intuition in a search for more ancient and international identity.

How and to what extent does your dual nationality influence your artistic process?

I just received my Irish passport so as of yet the dual nationality is more of a cultural experience. However, I begin each painting with decisions that derive from  a kind of passion and emotionalism inherited from my maternal Irish grandparents. The geometric structures that develop are often based on a narrative of living in cities in the US. They play between the lyrical, and the organic and the architectonic.

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UNCHARTED TERRITORY: BART O’REILLY

Artist, “Repression, Resurgence, Reemergence”

Your artist’s statement places emphasis on the present, between avoiding placing all interest in the origin of objects, utilizing improvisational exercises, and focusing on perception. Do you believe this central theme of the present should be used more when trying to understand identity?

I think that in many ways we now live in an endless state of the present. This is not to be confused with being present or mindfulness in the Eastern sense. That is something I strive for daily and attempt to integrate in my studio practice. As culture however I feel that we have lost a sense of history and we no longer anticipate a better future as we did say during the hay day of late 19th century early 20th century Modernism.

Our 21st Century sense of self or identity is very much based on how we are seen now. Right now in this present moment what image will we present of ourselves? I believe the centrality of the image is stronger than ever. How we present ourselves is rooted in now. We rarely look and when we do it is just nostalgia. We look forward in fear. Environmental catastrophe and the end of abundant resources are all becoming real and immediate realities in the so- called developed world.

As a child I read Transformer comics and the future was set in 2006. I often feel that I am living beyond the future I projected as a child. As a result I feel we are now in uncharted territory as a species. Sure I cling to old identities like Irish artist, father, husband and teacher but traditional notions of identity have been shaken and the postmodern prophecy of the fractured self is coming through. Again this has a positive counter meaning in Eastern philosophy. Things such as letting go of self and deflating ego are highly valued in this regard. This is not to be confused with the cultural crisis of identity that we see in 21st Century America and Western Europe. This is an alienated loss of self rather than one that connects. It’s the kind of thing that seems increasingly dangerous, especially here in the US.

Having said all that I do not proclaim to know the central theme of the present or anything even close. The idea that the history of the object is unknowable is kind of skeptical and I realize that. I just feel the certainties that we cling to are often used to manipulate us through the guise of ideology. Often as a group we cling to mantras and proclaim a blind certainties that I believe are very dangerous. Guns don’t kill people. People kill people for example.

How does this idea of present over history relate to the idea of an inherited or contemporary national identity?

My peers and I came of age in a very different Ireland to any generation that preceded us. We had the Celtic Tiger. Dublin was by the late 1990’s a bustling worldly city. Trade with the EU and the United States really seemed to be lifting the entire country out of difficult economic circumstances and I remember growing up feeling that being European rather than just Irish was ok. With a certain naivety I felt that Globalism was a good thing and something that should be embraced by a small country.

Of course we have all seen the downside to this. My interest in improvisation kind of comes from a desire to rebuild things at a small level and navigate uncertainty with a provisional approach. This might work today it may not apply tomorrow. This is the way I operate and it seems to work. What’s happening today? What does it require? How can I reassemble the parts just for right now? Frederic Jameson’s essay the Aesthetics of Singularity was very helpful to me in this regard.

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CONFLICTING FEELINGS: COLETTE MURPHY

On your website, Bryan Wizemann describes your pieces as “haunted by a strong memory of youth, the culturally specific fantasies that one always carries as an immigrant to a new land.” Is this effect an inspiration for your pieces, or an involuntary result? 

As an artist I do not paint in response to emigrating from Ireland to America at the age of eighteen. I do not paint in response to my love of the landscape I grew up with. I do not paint directly to this or any one aspect of my life experience. I do however paint as a consequence of my experiences. With the belief that we do not choose the memories we carry with us, rather our memories are a collective of the meaningful events that transpired. The memories that “haunt” my work are in fact the memories that continue to survive. The collective of unresolved events that occurred amount to the moment in the studio when I put paint to the linen.

In order to lose myself in the work I come equipped with a skill set and a passionate response to the life I live at the time I live in and try to make sense of it all. Sometimes I wish to be free of the troubling events that caused me to leave Ireland. There was not one reason but a curiosity for a life beyond the land I lived in. I left because I needed to know more. I stay gone because I have attached myself to a new way of living but I leave behind a land and people that I love.

The Irish writers abroad (ie WB Yeats, Patrick Kavanagh), have written about the conflicting emotions of an emigrant. I do not want to abandon the great land that gave me life but in leaving it there is a feeling of guilt and of quitting. These nagging emotions interfere with my growth as an individual and in turn continue to show up and influence my paintings. It is a complex life. I am only Irish in America and in Ireland I am a Yank, I am a misplaced entity. Seeking my own identity and finding a fulcrum wherein I can find a balance of who I am between the two lands that I call home will always “haunt” the work I make.

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VISCERALLY EXPRESSING THEMES: ERIN DEVINE

Why did you choose video as your medium for your piece? What are the unique possibilities and challenges that this medium offers?

My work is performative, whether live or in video.  Typically, I enact ambiguous gestures using my own body in the video format, and are based in visual metaphors of some central theme or narrative. For me, performance art is a very politicized form, full of potential to more viscerally express themes of disenfranchisement, or loss, or longing, because of its strong reliance upon the body as the central site of these experiences.  For this exhibition, I chose to work with a video installation, because I wanted to also address issues of how we experience memorialization, as well as who gets memorialized in history. I felt this could only occur best spatially because we are so accustomed to memorialization in the built form.

From your artist’s statement, it is clear that you draw inspiration from historical experiences of oppression and disenfranchisement. How has this piece made you think about current iterations of these issues?

In conceptualizing this piece, I was able to connect histories of oppression to ongoing conditions, as in the fraught relationship between the Church and women in Ireland, and to make parallels to present global concerns, such as the role of fundamentalist religious states and the disenfranchisement of women.  Celebrating the past accomplishments of women in history is a sort of generalized feminist legitimization of those women who have been overlooked by that history, and that would be one way of giving a platform to the women who fought in the Rising and have been left out of the memorialization of its heroes.  But to connect what they did to a more recent history, making parallels between taking up arms to taking up condoms as the Irish feminists did in the 70s, emphasizes a 100 year period of struggle for rights that are indelibly part of women’s bodies.  Both acts were extreme gestures of rebellion despite the oppression of the Church, and the point was not only to give attention to those acts but to question why these patriarchal structures or attitudes haven’t changed.

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SEARCH FOR CONTEMPORARY IDENTITY: CONALL CARY

Your artist’s statement discusses a recent focus on the damage outdated conceptions of “masculinity” can have on contemporary young men. Does the theme of inherited identity present in this new focus have a connection to the exhibition on Irish identity? Why or why not?

In Ireland I think that traditional masculinity and traditional ‘Irishness’ both have roots in similar environments, such as The Church and a largely working class industrial and agricultural population. Both are transitioning to a world that is radically different, with a shift away from The Church and the diversification of the workforce to the I.T. sector and cities/urban development.

As such in many ways I think my work for this exhibition can be a commentary on both a ‘masculine’ or an ‘Irish’ search for contemporary identity.

What liberties and limitations does printmaking as a medium allow?

I often say that if I was allowed to make the piece that I initially had in my head it would always be worse than the piece that I end up making, and part of this is because the process of making a print puts its direction on the works regardless of the intentions of the artist, and to me I find this is what allows for an element of surprise and newness to emerge.

For me it is the ‘limitations’ of print that force me to be freer with the work, to let the forces of chance at work within a structured environment.

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