Utopian Spaceships

Anyways, I am coming near the end of my watchtowers-one more episode (is it an episode???) to go and that ends my four-year update into the exploration of the British Army watchtowers and their surveillance on the south Armagh border. I still have a lot of material that I want to look into but after this I am going to take you on my uisce/water journey.

So, here I am, the last blog on my journey of four year’s exploration into all things survillance, watchtowers and Irish border related things- can you believe it???

Anyways, after dissecting so many of the drone images, I came to realise that I was honing in on a lot of structured ‘shape’ and ‘design’ like qualities within the images but I wanted to simplify them more. My painting is far from that and so I wanted to know what would happen if I tried a form of print making to replicate them? I was lucky enough to be awarded a bursary from Louth County Council where I had proposed to join the amazing print studio in Creative Spark. I took an overall print course and found that the mono printing was the form that I loved the most- probably because it’s messy and so like painting…lol…I began by taking very small, simple sections from the drone images and started using a really bright, sometimes fluorescent colour palette, similar to the solarized images but yanked up a gear...lol… By now, the outcomes were completely abstracted and had taken on a life of their own. When I pulled the eleven monoprints, (that’s print jargon) I knew they weren’t finished. The painter in me knew that they needed that ‘je ne sais quoi’. I added oil bar, oil pastel and some final hand painted bits and they were done!!!! They were bright but very done…

I had also experimented with cyanotype and screen printing, again for me some of the easier and more painterly of the printmaking processes.  As a painter, I find the process very hard and very ‘clean’. My brain doesn’t seem to compute with technical stuff but I persevered and I really liked the mixing of the printmaking forms with my added paint work and mark making on top. I call it structure with a bit of a chaos or a ‘hybrid print’ if you’re in the know…

The original concept, of Próiseas, was the intrusion, surveillance and presence of the Army watchtowers. The colour palette was very sombre and muted (until I discovered Micheal Harding’s Cobalt Teal and Magenta) and dare I say it, ‘teetering on realism. This new body of work evolved into complete abstraction and masses of bright colour!!!I wanted the viewer to be immersed in the bright, sometimes fluorescent colour palette and be submerged into another world. A world of beautiful shape, design and colour palette… ‘Utopia-an imagined place or state of things in which everything is perfect’.

The watchtowers had been called Martian Spaceships by a journalist many years ago and when I saw the work I knew they had to be called ‘Utopian Spaceships’ plus I couldn’t translate that into Irish…lol…

So on that note I will say slán until my next blog on my my current work Uisce Salach/Dirty Water…Hope you enjoyed it all and if you have any questions don’t hesitate to email me- I’d love to hear from ya xxxx