Delighted to be named as one of Its Liquid Magazine artist of the month for September 2020.
Luca Curci – What is art for you?
Esther O’Kelly – Art is life, It’s everything, I see it as fundamental to the human experience. Art helps us form an understanding of the world around us, it helps us process our experiences and connects us with others.
LC – What are you currently working on?
EOK – I have been working outside the studio and experimenting with being more immersive in the landscape by actively engaging with the notion and experience of the journey. Making work based on how I experience time, place, and space. How I experience the transient, the impermanent and the romantic all in a more connected way. Being in the landscape is a big part in making the work more relevant for me bringing a balance between being mindful and being mindless. I would like to make work that records the wisdom and bleakness held in the vastness of the landscape as it consumes and intoxicates generations of humans on their journey
LC – What is the most challenging part about creating your artworks?
EOK – The most challenging part about making work is getting the time and resources to make the work. As a self reliant full time artist and carer you feel the pressure to justify the time spent on your practice, so it can be difficult to dedicate research and development time to enhance your career with research trips and residencies. I have worked hard however to improve my creative network and relationships with mentors which has helped me gain perceptive on my career and my work which I am very grateful for.
LC – What is your creative process like?
EOK – I make my paintings in Vault Artist Studio’s in Belfast. They are mostly large format acrylic paint applied with thick brushes. An experimental and intuitive approach is at the core of my work. Works are produced in a spontaneous manner drawing upon the unconscious as source material. I work into the painting using wide blades that remove layers of paint while simultaneously creating scratch marks. I like this visceral approach to the medium, quite often it is what I remove from the canvas rather than what is added that creates the focal point of the work.
LC – Are your artworks focused on a specific theme?
EOK – My paintings are an evocation of my relationship with home; memories, landscape and heritage. I paint from memories and remembered experience, drawing narratives from personal and cultural memory, an active engagement with the idea of place. I am inspired by how we form an understanding of our surroundings, how the chaos of this world can turn into an abstract expression where personal experience overflows. Our mental maps are skewed by whatever is meaningful to us, it’s a visceral, fundamental human thing, My everyday experience goes into making a painting, recurring ideas that take root and flourish in the imagination, gateways into feelings and stories known or imagined. By travelling with the inner landscape I can encode a map that’s constantly being influenced with what is meaningful.
LC – How is being an artist nowadays?
EOK – I love being an artist, I feel very privileged to be able to practice my art. We play a diverse and necessary part in contributing to the overall health, development, and well-being of our society. Artist provide our communities with joy, and inspiration, enabling steps toward meaningful social progress. But right at the moment it’s tough for many of us particularly the performing artists. I’m hopeful for the future though, we always find a means and a way, that’s our thing and we’ll keep doing it.
Full interview here