“island community,” etching, 34 x 36 cm (Courtesy of Niamh Flanagan)
How did you know you wanted to be an artist?
I was always interested in art – my mother is a painter and there was always art and music in my home growing up. I guess when I was in school, I liked a wide range of subjects, but art was the one that I could get really absorbed in. I would forget about the time, or the other work that needed to be done, and just engage with the process. Printmaking really appeals to me because often it is like a puzzle, with various elements that need to be solved one piece at a time. If I can’t figure something out, there is always another part of the puzzle I can work on, and come back to the problem later. I like this, because it never feels like I’m stuck! Even though sometimes I am stuck, but I can leave it simmering away in the back of my head, and when I come back to it a few days later, I can hopefully figure it out.
What inspires you?
I am inspired by lots of things- daily sea walks, books and poetry, dreams, words, and emotions can all provide starting points for my work. The process of etching and its many stages and states also sparks ideas – I find when I have a few things on the go, the ideas tend to flow, and the process itself can feed into the work. I like to make collage pieces and woodblocks too – they are more immediate and this creates a nice balance for me in tandem with the slower work of the etchings. The motif of the house is central to my work – it suggests ideas of safety and containment, community and stability, but the work also suggests something of the opposite: vulnerability, isolation, and volatility. I am interested in the narrative element of the prints, and the anthropomorphic quality of the houses, trees, and mountains in the worlds I create. These could be stages, set for action: the brooding skies suggest maybe something more than rain.
There is a dreamlike quality to my work, that I hope allows the viewer a space in which to ponder. With my own hectic work and home life, I certainly feel the need for dreaming in between the deadlines and the drop-offs. Sometimes the prints veer closer to abstraction, with shapes and colour suggesting a mood and a feeling. It is important to me that there is an ambiguity there, so the viewer is free to project their thoughts onto the work.
