ISSUE 4 DECEMBER 2014

Art started as a way of avoiding homework. I remember drawing a ship at the table when I was about three or four. When I was older I did a wonderful old style foundation course. We built stuff and spent every Friday, all day, doing life drawing.

I completed a degree in design and spent a period concentrating on the human figure, then the portrait, condensing down to form and space and its parallel in language. That lead to a very different consideration of the action of making, to the improvisational collective London Under Construction and a thesis on ‘Physicality, Doubt and Action as articulations of the contemporary poem’. That lead me to tattooing. Who knew? I work mainly with improvisation and collaboration so there is always a lack of control; a sense of a tipping point, where the real danger is not going far enough while still remaining connected. It is one of the few things I remain sure of even as it finds its centre in ‘doubt’ as a vector. The work for me is an investigation; not one that presents a conclusion but one that remains within the action of doing. Frank O’Hara said ‘you go on your nerve’ and that has remained true for me, has remained vital. Often now this involves language but writing and drawing and the use of the body are all one and reading is as active a performance as any. I create most often live in a space, any space and lately as a consideration of the act of reading it has lead to putting it on skin. My thesis also considered how the poem might be located in and of the body, for instance the sounding demanded by the work of Maggie O’Sullivan places the poem within the voice box, the jaw and throat as a chamber for sound so that meaning remains in and of the body. It is neither metaphorical nor adjectival, those are removals from the action that is the poem, it is always in the midst of the forces, in action, otherwise it is not a poem, not art, not even now.

PerformanceWriting Aodán McCardle

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I taught art in secondary schools for eight years throughout Northern Ireland and at evenings and weekends I facilitated art workshops. I was so passionate about making art a part of the wider community that I hardly had any time to be creative myself. When my mum passed away in 2006, I dedicated my own creativity to her and I held an exhibition of my work in honour of her memory. In 2009 I moved to Donegal with my husband. Donegal is such a creative county, I knew there would be endless possibilities for continuing with my passion of bringing art into the community. It was then I set up ‘Art Farm’, which had an ethos of ‘Making Arts & Crafts for everyone’. Still wanting to focus in on elements of my own creativity I held another exhibition in 2011 at Ross Fine Art, entitled ‘Hidden Treasures’, which was full of colour and expression and it held both excitement and new horizons for my future. I paint as much or as little as I can when I have the time. I often have three or four unfinished pieces sitting in my studio. A successful piece of work does not need to be complete or even be completed in a certain amount of time. The longer it sits, the longer I have to enjoy the process. Art is not just about the finished piece, it is also about the ongoing process and the experience and feelings that you become engaged with that are equally, if not more important. When I paint, I automatically become relaxed and I start to feel better. I can spend ages mixing up colours for my palette just because I find it so therapeutic. Slowing down and enjoying the colour process before the paint touches any surface is my priority in building a successful piece of art work. When my students are happy with their progress, no matter how small, it makes me happy. To me, that is all that really matters, that is why I love doing what I do. Creativity should be shared and should be enjoyed. For those who are still a little shy about their inner creative self I always say ‘If you don’t feel like doing it, appreciate it’. We are all learning, we are all artists.

VISUAL ARTIST Bernie Wilson

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It all began when I was wee, my Mum has always encouraged my creativity and quite a few teachers I had were great and influential. Now my family, my princesses and my queen, are my inspiration. I studied art in secondary school, scraped an honour and got into the wonderful tech in Derry. I gravitated to Computer Animation in the Senior College in Ballyfermot, another great place with wonderful teachers.

When I finally came back to Buncrana in 1999, I did very little creative things for myself for almost 10 years. One day I swapped a business website design for an old Canon D60 6 mega pixel camera and I was hooked again! In the last number of years I founded Buncrana Camera Club with Donal Kearney and perform photographic efforts as often as possible.

Photography clears my head, I need to do it; the act of preparation, the travelling, the setting up and the waiting is utterly sublime. Processing the images in the digital darkroom again is sublime, time just slips away. Choosing images is a whole different ballgame. It is tedious and incredibly difficult, possibly the worst part of the whole process. I cannot say I have ever been utterly sure or 100% confident about one of my photos, perhaps 30% and thought of something as passable. My wonderful queen is exceptional at helpful critiquing and I have the odd mate who helps me choose.

The process of taking a photo is typically quick; I pull in and snap. The odd time I get to stand for hours on end under our spectacular Donegal skies. I do it wherever I can. With a young family it is typically close to home, Inishowen, County Donegal, Derry, Fermanagh and Tyrone.

My favourite places are ancient archaeological sites. I feel a strange connection with these almost timeless monuments and artworks as my life whizzes by in a blink of an eye. Under dark clear skies, gazing at the Milky Way or the Big Dipper, or in a hurricane at the edge of the sea with crashing waves and driving rain.

Photographer Adam Rory Porter

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To draw or create for me was always and still is a form of escapism. Life is complicated and hard and I found myself from a young age being drawn towards art as a place to go to get away from things that were happening in my life. It is this incredible place where the ticking of the clock, thousands of thoughts and confused feelings are temporarily suspended in mid-air; paused. I am enthralled for hours, happy to be lost in a world where time stands stills. When I emerge, I am have in my hands a drawing that holds my moments peace on a small bit of paper. I draw in a sort of organised chaos, usually this happens on the floor surrounded by a papery mess. When I am drawing it just takes over the space I am in; physically it feels like there is simply no table big enough, or room wide enough. I would love a whole building to just let loose in.

Trying to consider and explain why I create makes my heart race, it makes me quite anxious and I avoid thinking about it but I believe as a humans, in order to move forward and develop, we must face things, specifically the scary things, in order to grow.

I have an addiction to buying paper but not drawing on it, which pretty much defeats the purpose of having paper. When I am drawing I use dots, lines and watery paints and sometimes other stuff. I draw things that I think are interesting and as a quiet homage to the beauty of evolution.

I really enjoy dot work; out of chaos, a thousand tiny dots coming together to create an organised form, like how the universe somehow arranges itself, in order for our hearts to beat and our bodies to feel the great complexities of love and emotion. A friend told me art is a positive thing no matter where it comes from or how it began, it is a positive expression. I wholeheartedly agree and without it I would most certainly be lost.

VISUAL ARTIST Siobhan Mc Bride

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Sculptor

It was during my time in India in the late 1990s, that I was first inspired by sculpture, and street sculptors, but it was only later on when I went on a trip to Australia that I worked with stone for the first time. I graduated from Leitrim Sculpture Centre in 2001 and I went on to work in Carrara, Italy, where I developed my craft. It was here that I began to master the ancient techniques of marble portraiture. From classical portraits to modern sculpture, my work spans centuries.

I work from my home in Letterkenny in County Donegal, but I have travelled extensively, creating private and public commissions. Stone carving takes an enormous amount of time, especially marble portraiture and figurative work. Being up before dawn to get started tapping, chiselling, drilling, filing, polishing is no sacrifice, since the work I create is both my art and my pleasure.

I am fascinated in the paradoxes of softness and hardness that are created when pliable materials are “turned to stone.” For example, pieces of stone which appear to have been indented by the pressure of a finger or scraps of metal and folds of soft fabric, turned into unyielding marble; often so realistic as to fool the audience. Marble, of course, cannot twist even a micron without cracking or shearing off, and the ambiguities of representing the soft with this hardest of sculptural materials has always fascinated me.

Recycled Stone, which is my most recent project, represents a conversation between past, present and future. Using stone, the most immutable of media, I have fashioned a conversation among some of society’s most disposable items – the tins and plastics that we use and recycle – while recalling the ancient stories passed on to us across the millennia using the same medium. The ancients carved their gods, left as a story for the future. In this new project, at once playful and provocative, I want to ask what we are leaving for the generations to come. Is disposable consumerism our god now? But while plastic rubbish takes away from the beauty of our natural surroundings, my work in marble and limestone uses that organic and timeless material as a stark contrast to the damaging disposables it is used to represent.

Redmond Herrity

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Creating for me began with childhood play, curiosity, nature and imagination. I have always had a sense of wonder and awe at the natural world. My parents did woodworking and my grandmother made tatted lace and taught me the basics of needlework. My son Steven really reinforced for me the value of creative play.

In 5th Grade, I lost artistic confidence. My teacher told me I could not draw because I was unable to do perspective well. After that, I did not do art in school, but that creativity was still present in my life - I made my own clothes and dressed anyone who would let me. Textiles were a safe ground for me. My mother encouraged me to do origami, kirigami, and Ukrainian pysanki eggs and any cookies I made were always elaborately decorated.

When I was 38 I read a book that kick started me back into drawing and painting. I took night courses in drawing and watercolour and along with some friends, started an Artistic Support Group. I took lessons in watercolour and put together work for the National College of Art & Design. I left the college the day I submitted my portfolio with a strong new sense of confidence that I was an artist and would be consciously engaging with creative arts for the rest of my life, whatever the outcome of the selection process was.

Creating is like a shift into another focused, whole and meditative state of being; one full of energy. I can easily get lost in time. It feels like I am working on a puzzle, though I usually fall short of fully realising the vision in my head, which only pushes me keep trying to do things in another way.

In more recent years I have started to write poetry with a more serious intent. I am really proud of a poetry CD, Fragile Heartbeats of Light, made recently in collaboration with Seoirse Ó Dochartaigh. I could never settle on just one medium. I cannot bear to be without a notebook or a camera. I love doing collage, photography, origami, costumes, painting, pastels, charcoal drawings, prints, tapestries, quilts and pear-apple butter.

To stop creating for me would be like to stop breathing.

WRITER Kathryn Daily

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Creativity is an energy. It is not born, it does not die, it only transforms. The sixth artist featured in each issue will be a writer. Writers craft images, words which inspire images within us. The visual form is deeply connected with all other forms of creativity, it grows from the same tree, is rooted in the same terra and gains energy from the same earth. It reminds us how everything we create is inspired from the art that we adulate, the art that we revile, the art that is imprinted and the art that we forget.

Featured Art Form The Poem

Let us speak now of extraordinary things.Of how the moon transcends all fencesturns scattered puddles to watery lanternsas it moves in storied cycles of myth and magic.

Speak to me of Galileo’s telescopic lunar sketches,of Canterbury witnesses who wrote of fire-plumesrising above the plateau of Aristarchus in June 1178and how the horned moon throbbed like a wounded snake.

Let me tell you of three years in Arizona when rain fellonly on a single afternoon nearly drowning the tangerinetree in our yard while Coyote danced to Kokopelli’s flute,and I met a rattlesnake on the ridge behind our house.

Let me tell you how, on another day, after sifting sugar-whitedunes beneath an endless cornflower sky not farfrom Truth or Consequences, relatively speaking, we rushedhome just in time to see that first televised lunar landing.

Let us discuss miracles of international collaboration. Rosettaand Philae travelling on a ten year deep space one way ticketacross 509 million kilometers to settle silently on Comet 67Pand send home picture postcards of possibility and peace.

I will, perhaps, bring to mind the journey that every syllablehas taken through centuries and geographic distance,how each word you utter, however carelessly, was givenas a gift of understanding from someone else’s lips to yours.

You may argue against this classification of wonders.Take them in your digital stride, but not to heart.Quote facts, statistics, raise serious and pragmatic questionsof semantics, logic, or conformity with the Laws of Physics.

You may tell me the moon is a cold satellitepassively reflecting a more vibrant star.You will, perhaps, gift me with your certainty,your science, and the limits of your patience.

I offer you the sacred gift of myth and doubt, whisperedin firelight and moonshine until only you and I can hear.Ask you to stop fearing lunacy. Remember the extraordinaryin ordinary things. Ignore them at your peril.

Selenology

Kathryn Daily has composed a piece of poetry inspired by Siobhan McBride’s image from this issue’s submissions.

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