Interview for [art@work] – Artists Residency Programme catalogue, published by Roscommon County Arts Office,  2009

What interests you about making art?

For me making art is a way of navigating through and understanding the world. It is a process of learning and a means to communicate that which often cannot be expressed in any other way. When it works, it serves to unify complexities and open up perception to alternative ways of seeing. What interests me most in this process is the potential it offers to contribute to an ongoing conversation, while enjoying the continual element of surprise at the core of creativity.

What initially drew you to art@work?

I was interested in the art@work programme because of the potential it offered to open up my practice from being the often insular research of a visual artist, to one which engages in dialogues and interactions with the community of a particular place. I felt this would help me reposition my practice through gaining a kind of concentrated access to researchers, experts and authentic material which is rarely possible when just visiting or passing through a place.

Did you originally see any connection with what the company does and your work?

I am a visual artist working with photography, drawing and video and am interested in researching and documenting sites of historical, archaeological and anthropological interest in rural Ireland. I gather traces of events, memories and stories associated with the built environment and location. In one way my practice was already an intuitive artistic archaeological dig into the past. I was especially interested in the conceptual and visual overlaps between arts-based research and archaeological research e.g. their mutual use of detailed drawing, mapping, journals, field-notes and documentary photography to navigate space, memory, scientific evidence and imaginative speculation.

What noteworthy or significant stages or experiences did your process go through during the residency?

Significantly for me, the more I observed and spoke with the archaeologists the more I began to re-examine and re-invent my own process of selection and interpretation. I particularly enjoyed trying to appropriate archaeological systems of classification to look at ‘living’ contemporary subject matter. Learning to look at something again and again, in a very slow, calculated and patient way; learning to see everything that is present in a context as relevant, rather than recording what is only significant to the moment or subjective interest of the observer was important for me.

In what way did this process of creating work differ to your normal working practices?

Firstly, I had access to a far wider and varied number of sources from the outset. There were people on site who could very effectively point me towards knowledge and information that usually takes a long time to unearth when working alone in the studio. Being the artist in residence also provided me with a very clear context from which I could approach people in the local community. Most of my time during the residency was given to gathering as much information as possible as events, particularly the archaeological dig, were unfolding. The extent of interactivity of this process was a new and valuable way of working.

In what way did this process of creating differ to other residential contexts?

Other residencies I am familiar with have been more studio-based, which usually means working alone in a designated, set aside space. The residency was overall far more interactive, involving far more daily discussion and communication with other people than the usual residency context.

If your work practice changed during the residency, how has it changed and what influenced these shifts in your practice?

The biggest change in my practice is that I am now far more interested in pursuing projects that are collaborative and community based. The experience allowed me to test out my own abilities and capacities to create in this way. The fact that the programme was really well run and that the people I worked with at the Cruachan Ai Centre were incredibly supportive, interested, and open to my project were key influences in facilitating this change.