Monday, January 14, 2013
Seven educators have returned to the studio to create work for Turning the Tables, says Tina O’Sullivan
TURNING
the Tables, at Cork Vision Centre, presents the work of seven art
educators. Usually, their job is to train the next generation of
artists, but for this exhibition they have gone back to their own
practices. The seven are Evelyn Egan-Rainy, Declan O’Meara, Mark Ewart, Daniel Sexton, Sandra Norris, Tracy Cronin and Zara McDaid. Most of them paint, though Egan-Rainy works with thrown ceramic vessels in two- and three-dimensional pieces, and O’Meara uses digital media tools, such as Photoshop.
Ewart says the title of the show plays on the shift from educator to artist. "It was a play on the fact that we are normally teachers, but now we are turning the tables on ourselves — we are going to be artists, just to see what it would be like to play the game from a different angle."
Ewart had not exhibited for two decades, so Sexton’s invitation was particularly welcome. "In terms of sustained practice in the studio, it’s 20 years since I’ve done it," he says. "It’s a bit of a shock to the system. It was a bit nerve-wracking to realise that, at some point in the future, you are going to be under the scrutiny of the people you are teaching.
"There’s this whole thing of being able to practise what you preach, and prove that you can do the stuff yourself before you can teach other people how to do it."
Ewart presents traditional, painted landscapes alongside work constructed on the iPad. On entering the studio, he considered the conceptual, but felt that landscape was at the heart of his work.
"My interest in the landscape has been there for a long, long time," says Ewart.
"As a child, I had these images etched into my mind of landscapes and skyscapes. One, in particular, that’s always stayed with me is when I was walking over to my grandfather’s house when I was living in Sunderland. The sun was setting, a great, big, flat sun in the sky, just hovering over the horizon.
"Smoke was rising up from vegetation that was being burned in the allotment. The way the shimmering effect from the smoke and the heat in the fire was affecting the colours in the sky, and the shape of the sun, stayed with me forever.
"I think that was my first recollection of being affected by the power of nature and the beauty of nature, and it has just stayed with me ever since.
"To this day, I would look out over the horizon when the sun is setting and have that quiet time, being moved by the beauty of the colours and the stillness."
Ewart had doubts about returning to landscape painting. "You see people doing conceptual work and intriguing, new media practices and you think ‘are you a little bit old-fashioned and a little bit boring’?"
"But when I entered the studio over the summer, I decided, quite quickly, that I had to remain true to what was important to me, to things that move me as a visual person, so it was back to the skyscape and back to the landscape," he says.
New technology means the business of making and teaching art is rapidly evolving. Ewart says the students are streets ahead of most of the teachers in their media-savvy skills. But he has embraced the iPad as a tool and has used it to create some of the work in this show.
"The beauty of the iPad is that it’s so spontaneous: it’s portable, but it’s intuitive as well," says Ewart. "You can layer, you can experiment with brush sizes and textures quite easily. What I found useful about it, as a creative tool, was that when I was doing paintings and sketches, I would photograph them, import them into the brushes programme, and layer on top and do my own textures.
"So it was this dialogue between works-in-progress and images that were created from scratch.
"I liked that you could use the technology to support what you are doing or make something brand new."
*Turning the Tables runs at Cork Vision Centre until Jan 26
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