Patrick OConnor art Ireland South Africa

The following interview was conducted in Kilkenny by artist and friend, Alan Counihan in late 2012.

I was surprised when Patrick invited me to participate in this celebration of his work over the past half century. Surprised primarily because I felt I knew neither the man nor his work well enough to write an essay that would do him justice. And so, over several weeks, we began to discuss this challenge with one conversation leading to another, and another again. Soon we were no longer talking about the problem but about our lives and our work in the world as artists. While I was familiar with Patrick’s work over the past several years I had no idea about his life and work in his homeland of South Africa, nor of his time prior to his arrival in this small city of Kilkenny in the South East of Ireland. Each conversation became a process of discovery, each revealing more about the man, the artist, the educator, and the work itself. This conversational process has been personally rewarding not only for the insights gained into Patrick’s vocation as an artist but also for the growth of a friendship. It has been a privilege to share this time together and what follows is its distillation.

Alan Counihan

AC
Patrick, you told me once how you knew from an early age that you would one day become an artist. Even as a very young child, rubbing your finger in the dust of the street, you would communicate with others through drawing rather than speech. It seems you found your vocation at a very early age.

POC
I don’t think we should put too much weight on the early years. It seems to me that in childhood things simply happen and there is no control over one’s life. Parents move and do things well beyond one’s understanding. I find it easier to draw an idea than to verbally explain it. I still maintain the image comes before the word. In the beginning was the Mark! So, for me, this mark making was real and ongoing.

And it seems to have come easily for you. When did you realize that although facility and talent are essential ingredients for an artist’s practice, - even that of a three year old, - at some point they have to be honed through discipline?

POC

The disciplines came later, when they were needed. Or they were learned haphazardly depending on surroundings or on influences such as those of my social environment or schooling. Even through adult intervention and friends. In my case, schooling was just something one had to do, but University was where one became educated and began to understand the world. My college years were, singularly, the five most formative years of my life. Everything else was secondary. Not so much a case of selfishness as of single-mindedness. And, for all that, I felt, regardless of everything else, extremely lucky.

And what was the response to your decision to become an artist?

POC

Let’s just say that, apart from my ever-supportive mother, the family was less than enthusiastic. Their support, for which I remain ever grateful, took a purely financial form and was neither intellectual nor emotional. My rebelliousness surfaced as someone becoming more independent. All of my educational loans and grants were paid back shortly after my getting my first teaching post in Durban at an institution then known as Indian College. The Head of Department there was Professor Jack Grossert who was a total supporter of Education through Art and this creed influenced both myself and my dear friend and colleague, Andrew Verster.

But how was it for you, and for your friends, as you developed as artists in a republic with, arguably, no great cultural traditions of its own and at such a remove from the world’s great museums? While it sounds like your discovery of the world’s great works of art was exciting, was it a frustration that such discovery was limited to reproductions?

POC

We did feel very far removed from the centres of art development such as those of Europe, or England, or America. And we did have to get the latest information through various publications whether they were books or journals, or the quarterlies and catalogues that were collected by the university and the public library system. In Johannesburg where I studied there were two public libraries and the University of the Witwatersrand’s own extensive one devoted to Art and Architecture. Most of my spare time was spent in visiting these. It instilled in me a love of books and the wealth of untapped knowledge available to one simply by investing time in them. Being, more or less colonial, it was vital to be up to date – naturally, so that one didn’t feel inferior to the unknown Other – and in fact when I finally arrived in Ireland, to discover the Other, it came as a surprise how uninformed even the art schools were. This wasn’t only a local failing as the English art schools were just as self-absorbed. These are observations mind you, not criticisms.

And the quality of education?

POC

The Fine Art Course I took also required that we study other disciplines so, for example, in my first year alongside Painting and Drawing, and History of Art, I took History of Music, Anthropology, Sociology, and Introduction to Philosophy. The first three eventually turned into the degree Majors. The latter all necessitated essays and essays required libraries. The only long-term reward was that one did acquire a well-rounded education. In the Final Year all one’s time was devoted to Drawing, Painting and History of Art (three lectures and one seminar a week). I was unwell in my final year so, instead of getting a poor grade, I spent an extra year repeating – much to my delight and increasing confidence. It is with this kind of background that we emerged as artists. We were as informed as we sought to be. As you know from Irish experience, the local scene was parochial and provincial. In a bad mood I might have described it as derivative and limited. As regards the reproductions, I can’t remember being particularly frustrated. As I mentioned earlier, most of the literature contained illustrations. Size, when it wasn’t indicated or legible, was perhaps the more irksome factor though colour reproduction was a problem too. There were even historical surveys with sepia reproductions interleaved with tissue paper! For me, the greatest failure of the reproduced works was the lack of texture – the actuality of paint, ink, charcoal and the nuance of surface and ground. To be honest, reproduction was a way of life until the miracle of confrontation arrived. Surely that is still one of the reasons we visit art galleries? That moment when what one thinks one knows transforms itself into something radically new, rare and mostly exciting.

The miracle of confrontation is an interesting phrase. As is reproduction as a way of life! Let’s talk about sharing presence with the works in all their actuality. How we recognize their authenticity. Is that what you mean? Was it the occasion of these encounters that made you realize how important or essential that quality is to good or great works?

POC

Quality seems something of an outdated hallmark nowadays and I wonder how much contemporary work will bear the weight of scrutiny and time. We preserve from the past those very things that have quality of some kind or other, that contain an essence. We admire John Donne for the quality of his thought. More light-heartedly, the humour of the Goon Shows was not its silliness but the dedicated search for brain confusion. It worked better there than with most Surrealist painters. The goons were in fact deadly serious and Spike Milligan insisted on sustained quality throughout – what most artists seek. Musicians know about quality too. The late great Pablo Casals pointed out that if he didn’t practice the cello every day he noticed it and, if he could, so could his peers and audience. The quality of the performance is somehow diminished. Look, I think we can all agree when we say that something lacks quality we are talking about something real. It’s not intangible – it’s very real. And in part this is the artist’s quest. To present to the Other a genuine high-aimed, even high-minded, artifact. Something of quality. Something authentic. And it’s vital that we see the original work at all costs. That was the artist’s own intention, how the work was to be experienced, and that must be honoured. From the experience through eye or ear to an understanding about reality requires only time. Sit and look.

And did you?

POC

I certainly did. Perhaps this explains why the move from South Africa was so vastly important. I’m essentially a visual person. To me images come before words. Visual language is universal and requires no translation. We each have our own accent and vocabulary but by and large we understand and enrich one another through the encounter. Culture becomes shared. And this is why I love museums and libraries so much – they have everything together, all my interests in one place.

As I listen it is clear that the attractions of the great museums, and indeed, later, of the quality of the light in Ireland, provided rationales for leaving South Africa. But were they the only catalysts for your departure? Previously I had only considered these factors as being decisive in luring you away from South Africa but I hadn’t reflected on the possibilities that the conditions of your life within that society might also have provided an impulse to leave. In this part of the world we were all very aware of the policy of apartheid but less reflective of the ethos that underpinned it and which must have permeated the lives of all the country’s inhabitants regardless of skin colour. Did that ethos, infused with a Calvinist rigour, condition or constrain the lives and work of South African artists? It must have been a challenge, to both Marika and yourself, as to whether you could rear your children in such a society.

POC

It was a challenge. I call it the background noise in the culture. All cultures have a background noise, and it’s not something that you’re always aware of, but in South Africa it was always this political, background noise, the hum of the State. And you’re right about the Calvinist side of things. One didn’t go to Church to be enlightened, to be shown the Way; one went to Church to be chastised. You are a sinner and you have sinned. You have transgressed on every level. You’ll never find redemption. Never reach God. You should try to visit a wedding in a Dutch Reform Church! You are never going to have children because you mustn’t enjoy the making of them and you can’t even enjoy having them because it’s wrong to start with, the enjoyment that is. Really the Calvinist thing is a very strong one, we used to joke about it in South Africa. And most artists can see it. One in particular, Niels Coetzee, used to carve these huge works the size of trees. In granite! He was going out with drills and things and he said that he was the best Calvinist he knew because he set himself challenges that even God would struggle with.

It was Roman Catholicism that drew me to granite. The greater the punishment, the greater the joy.

POC

But enlightenment didn’t come into it at all. It had to do with sin, outright sin.

And conformity?

POC

Of course.

Systems demand conformity, and they demand it of all citizens. If an artist sets out to challenge that conformity within his or her own life, and works further to challenge the tenets of the society at large, it doesn’t go down very well.

POC

It doesn’t. It doesn’t go down well at all. The reaction is vicious to start with. This man isn’t towing the line. Culturally you’re not supposed to challenge the system. And yet what do you do? You have to break out of it. You have seen things that are wrong, and things that are different and more exciting. It might not be the most appropriate example, but the insides of Catholic churches were, comparatively, so extraordinarily beautiful. Not just Catholic ones, Dutch churches were too. But they were foreign, they were over there, they were away from the everyday noise. And then one day you find yourself in Notre Dame surrounded by stained glass which is nothing but light and suddenly you realise what a dark time and place there is outside but inside light is flowing in and this light changes the colour of your skin. I visit the Black Abbey sometimes in the summer to specifically watch light from a stained glass window move across an aisle.

Looking through your early work, the paintings you made in 1968 must have been a taunt to that system. The South African press described your paintings from that time, works such as The Kiss or The Temptation of Saint Anthony, as “erotica”.

POC

Yes. That‘s basically because they all have to do with sensuality.

Has that remained a constant theme for you? I have to admit that I was not familiar with your work until I saw the drawings made during a residency in 72 John St. in 2006.

POC

That’s right, and I think you were particularly impressed with the one called Corpse’s Dream. It has that long line on the top, a man lying all bloated but he has this dreamed elephant trunk floating across the sky!

AC

I remember it well, and my response to it. I am drawn to the expression of dualities in your work because I also like to engage with them in my own. In that drawing their expression is very clear and very evident. The contrast between sex and mortality, creation and dissolution, blossom and fade.

POC

They’re very closely related.

Last week we spoke about another evident duality in your work that may also have its root in your South African experience, violence and beauty. Your works challenge us to regard them as often one and the same, as mutually infused. To return to the carnal, you expressed it beautifully last week with that line from John Donne - “The bright hair about the bone”.

POC

It’s a compliment to say that you know. I think it is there, it hasn’t been deliberately pursued but it’s part of that background that is myself. I think a lot of that was broken when I left South Africa, all that violence had disappeared. Its insidious poison was diminished. And it was insidious, all pervasive.

It must also have demanded your complicity in some degree, surely? Such a society wants you to conform and thereby to make you complicit. This is what the system needs to do. It demands complicity.

POC

It does indeed, and there will be consequences if you don’t. Did I tell you about the censorship in South Africa and the case of Walter Battiss, for example, and his set of silk screen prints which were banned from a gallery because the title of one was Elephant Fucking a Butterfly. Andrew Verster and I also had a show at the Durban Art Gallery that had to be withdrawn. Andrew had a lot of paintings of naked, elderly women in the show and they were fairly blatant and it was banned because it was considered it would upset children. Admittedly, it might have, but the work should have been shown. My own paintings, on the other hand, were totally erotic, they weren’t sexy or upfront, they were quietly erotic pieces and I think that they chose the wrong artist to ban. I’ve always quite regretted this. His paintings weren’t to be seen by children whereas mine were actually exciting half the male population of Durban. So in that case you could say that the social culture influenced the work. We were being told, once again, that you might paint this kind of still life but not that kind of still life. You know you may not do Gauguin because it’s full of eroticism, but you may show flowers, and a small little Buddha, because it is in line with the traditional Dutch still-life style. At the time, the older, respected generation of artists was deeply influenced by the Dutch masters. It was so safe. And I don’t think painting is safe, I don’t think art is safe. If it is safe there’s something actually wrong with it. Great art always rubs you up, it irritates you, it starts to itch and if you don’t get rid of that itch by scratching, by confrontation, or arguing with a piece, or finding resolution in a piece...

Or, in the artist’s case, by making a piece.

POC

Yes, in the artists case, through making. As a person, I need to resolve an issue. As a person, and an artist, I make drawings to resolve that issue. What does that person actually look like if I do not attempt to draw him? What is that problem that challenges me to resolve it?

I’ve been reading the work of a wonderful poet, Adrienne Rich, who died recently. In one of her essays she challenges us as artists to make works, as poets to write poetry, as readers to read books, as viewers to look at paintings, as if our lives depended upon it. And she sees these activities as political, not in the sense of party politics but political in the sense that we discover the nature of humanity, and the responsibilities of being human, in the process. We discover our own humanity and we reach out to the humanity of others. In such a process we increase the potential of what it is to be human. That’s strong stuff.

POC

That is strong stuff but it’s actually spot on. Approaching it from a different slant, if you look at ethnographic museums where we in the west have gone out to, say, the Trobriand Islanders and while there we collect coconuts with heads painted on them, - that’s a bad example because I don’t think they did that -, but we go to these primitive tribes and discover that they make remarkable and beautiful artefacts which reflect their culture, a culture which is not open to our full understanding. Nonetheless, we praise this work by collecting it. We appropriate it. We build a museum to it. We build a cathedral to their work and then people say this is not political. Of course it’s political because that’s exactly what we’re doing. We’re saying this is the way these people are. We approach people through what they make and do and say and write, and from that we interpret what their culture is. We take that and praise it, or we condemn it. We are the arbiters.

Is that an avenue you’d like to explore further?

POC

Not in this conversation. But it is an interesting subject. I studied ethnography and anthropology very specifically because I wanted to find out how other people were doing things, why were they drawing differently to the way we were drawing.

And what did you discover?

POC

Same motivation. There is absolutely no difference in that whatsoever. The sources of information or inspiration can be different. I, for example, might be looking at Matisse, you at Noguchi, while the Trobriand Islander is likely looking at the work of his tribal ancestors.

But his ancestors might not be the cause of his itch. On the question of motivation, a friend recently described the role of the artist as that of making the world strange. I find that as unsatisfactory as saying that you do it for enjoyment.

POC

I think this is where a lot of art school direction has gone astray in that art is now perceived as a kind of entertainment. It’s about money and entertainment. I think you’re morally obliged to commit yourself to something that is greater than yourself. It’s almost like a faith. I believe in art doing what it can do and it’s not a simple thing. It’s not one statement. It’s a combination of so many things all coming together at the right time and in the right person. I’m not speaking about myself. I’m speaking about great people. They’re there at a moment when it’s necessary to make massive changes in the way we’re to look at the world and these people are…I almost wanted to say saints there but I’m not going to. That throws it all back into the religious context. But they are there, and there have been people in the past that make you look at the world differently and I think that is amazing. You can listen to a piece of music and never hear music again without making a comparison to it. Or you can read something and you never read another word without thinking, wait now, that was better said in greater depth, with more subtlety and more profundity and more knowledge and...

AC
...and fewer words...

POC

And fewer words, you know. That’s where it gets difficult to talk about because it does take fewer words. The greater the impact of the piece, the less there is to say about it. When you have finished listening to a work by Mozart or Bach you are changed. What can you say? Wow?

Is this where the cliché comes to mind...when you are left speechless?

POC

But it does. It leaves you speechless. It does. We’ve all experienced it with really great work. Sometimes even with the almost great works because they attempt the same thing. There are different levels of reading, different levels of quality. I do believe very strongly that not everything is perfect but, my god, the experience of them can still be very nice.

I agree with that. But whatever about levels of quality one also has to be open to experience of the works, one must be fully engaged. This brings us back to the challenge set by Adrienne Rich. It is possible to engage with the work on a particular day and to not be present, to not be paying attention.

POC

You’re right there.

I’m going off tangentially here but the notion of being left speechless by the experience of great art prompts another indirect question about the articulation of work. In this case I mean the challenge artists face in the verbal articulation of their own work. Despite all the obscurantist nonsense that passes for articulation nowadays there is no point, as you have frequently said, in trying to describe or verbally explain a painting, or any visual art, because it is its own language and it demands your presence in response. In your painting, Prometheus, for example, I sense longing and bondage, beauty and violence. But I cannot say that is what the painting is about. However, the painting articulates something that’s very, very clear to me. It enters the consciousness whole. It is the same with your Confrontation paintings. I think they’re marvellous works and it’s very clear to me what they seek to express. They are not about one particular history, nor one particular event. They are not about Bosnia or whatever. They are bigger, more universal than that. They offer an insight into the nature of conflict.

POC
No, they’re not, and you’re reading them perfectly, you really are. It’s mysterious to me in the sense that I don’t quite understand why they came about. I just knew that some things couldn’t be included. At times I have started to engage with confrontational events but they have become too specific and parochial. They failed to summarise, didn’t say, broadly, a very specific thing. Does that make sense? They were large containers that held very small things. The successful works are the opposite.

I suppose that means that if you identify a work to a very particular event, a holocaust for example, that event becomes both the access and the limit of the work. It opens the door but limits the internal experience. You can’t come at it from all sides. You can only enter through that one particular access. With your Confrontation series I can feel their content, perhaps their intent, without any need for an explanatory intellectual rationale. I can apply what’s happening within them to the notion of conflict anywhere. The experience is visceral and the understanding is emotional.

POC

A lot of people approach the work too cerebrally and other people approach it and don’t like the subject. It doesn’t excite them. That’s something else I wanted to talk to you about. Excitement. You are a creative person working with both physical materials and language. Do they excite you as much, the materials, the words that you use or the stone that you carve or the clay that you manipulate or the paint that I use? Do they excite you as much as the idea of what you want to do? You start with stone. I start with paint. But the idea moulds around the substance.

Material was my tutor. I can still recall the tremendous excitement of creating my first outer curve. It was the engagement with material, the process of making, which lured me into the excitement of art. Then you have the whole thorny issue of facility, of skill and mastery over material. I think that you can be too skilled for your own good. That said, I do like Seamus Heaney’s dictum that technique is the test of sincerity. But it must also be the servant of the idea. I’m not much interested in the representative nor in technique and skill preferring to engage with an exploration of presence and process.

POC

So would you say that the weaker pieces in the most recent show were in fact those that contained twirly wurlys?

Yes, the ones that were too explicit.

POC

Too explicit, that’s the word I was looking for earlier on.

I give you the solution on a plate. That’s the thing, there’s no mystery for you to discover as a viewer, no sense of ambiguity. I think that the obvious evidence of skill, that which encourages over-elaboration, can be dangerous for an artist.

POC

I’ve got an example for you. I’m speaking of the oldies again. Bernini. For years I disliked his work until one day I actually came upon The Ecstasy of Santa Teresa in Rome. I could hardly stand in its presence. It was a revelation and almost incredible. The woman’s thigh does look and feel just like a woman’s thigh. And then that big hand, to do what he did is almost a miracle in the sense of being able to control your material.

And what about your own experience of materials and attempts at the miraculous? After over half a century of engagement you must have a few reflections? I saw Gypsy’s photographs of your studio, your brushes, your paints and it looked like a room pregnant with possibility.

POC

Ah, the brushes. Well, each of them is a sort of a sub-dialect within an overall language. This is an odd thing to say but some of them are pleasantly inarticulate whereas some of them are extraordinarily articulate. Some of them are very difficult to control and you actually approach them with trepidation. And there are others that you know exactly what their strokes are going to look like and that is exactly what you’ve got to do. So you know that look, that effect is there. You might only use it once a year but that’s what it says best. Mind you, that’s only due to using it a lot over the years and the more you use it the better it becomes at that one aspect of itself.

And the paint?

POC

The pigment! The paint. I love it. As I mentioned earlier, my training was fairly traditional. We spent the first year drawing and using watercolours. These were replaced by gouache in the second year. It was only in our third year that we began to work with oils. (Acrylics, thankfully, were unknown). As a result both the substance and the colours became thicker in the course of our engagement. Oil paint, when appropriate, remains my material or medium of choice. I find everything about it; the history, the manufacture, the chemistry, the oils themselves, the turpentine, even the drying times, to be a sensory feast. To be honest I find it addictive and not only for its great smell. I especially like its ability to take on the qualities of something alive, substantial and tactile. The challenges posed by colour combinations, transparency, translucency, tonal equivalence, and so forth, have all become part of my vocabulary. Yes, after all these years I am still excited as much by my material as by ideas. One becomes the other.

As I think of the length of time you have been working as an artist, a lifetime, I’m prompted to reflect on the years I myself have spent at it, and on their fruit. When I reflect on my work there are several pieces I would like to disown. But there are others that still hold their power. Some might be more than twenty years old now but they still retain it. How about your own work, in retrospect?

POC

Well the curious thing is I haven’t looked back on it until we started this particular exhibition process. I actually find it tremendously disturbing living in the past. And I’m finding it rather annoying having to live there because I thought I had given up South Africa and everything that went with it. I’d come here and I’d given up everything as I arrived in Kilkenny. And I had. Now I find that I’m spending the last several weeks of this work period doing nothing but living in the past. How did it feel on the morning of Sharpeville? And this is going through my head all the time. I’m bringing up memories that I really shouldn’t be bringing up. Why did that happen, and how come this happened and that didn’t happen? It’s not nice. I’m not enjoying it at all and talking about it is worse. I’m serious, but writing about it is even worse than talking about it. It’s so distant. And yet there are paintings in my past that I know are extraordinarily important paintings for me, not necessarily for the public. They might have appreciated them. There were one or two sales to people whom I admire which might have indicated that they felt the same way. But there were some paintings that were really breakthrough paintings for myself and I wouldn’t have got to where I am now without having made those particular pieces. There’s one that will be in the catalogue. It is simply called Icarus. This was the first work in which I realised I had nobody sitting on my shoulder. You know you go through school for four years and you’ve got these vultures sitting there saying don’t, do, yes, no, and one by one you shake them off and one morning you wake up and there’s no vulture on your shoulder and you think, wait a minute, this is me. You discover and recognise yourself. And it shows in the work and there are pieces like that. I’m not going to articulate them. I’m not going to tell you which they are but there are personally important pieces that I’ve kept, that don’t part from me. Like Leonardo used to carry the Mona Lisa around with him although I think he did that to earn some money. Twenty ducats per peek! That’s sacrilegious, I suppose. Anyway those are different times and places. But there are works I have made that I know are important, to me at the least, and they’re not necessarily all big, and they’re not necessarily all paintings either.

Those are the valuable works of your own time. No matter what anybody else thinks of them.

POC

No, that’s not important. That is not important. What matters is what I think of them. This isn’t boasting or being prideful. You can be surprised about how good you were. You hadn’t realised that you were that good, that all those things were there and they all came together in that one piece and you’ve only now noticed. It might be twenty years later that you realise that this particular, crucial mark must have been deliberate. You are surprised by yourself and I think that’s a lovely thing to happen. You take yourself for granted every day of your life, you get up, you brush your teeth and you go about things for granted. And there’s a painting that says, wait a minute, at this time, at this moment, everything worked. This is a gem held in time.

AC
At that moment you see it sparkle.

POC

Yes.

And you feel sparkling with it?

POC

Yes.

And time passes, night falls, and you no longer sparkle?

POC
No, but it still does. That’s what matters.

If not, the absence or lack draws you back to the canvas once again, or to the block. Occasionally, if not often, I suffer disconnection from work that I’ve made, especially following an exhibition. The magic is in the making. You know that process is working when as a human being, as an artist you feel most focussed, most disciplined and most alive.

POC

But you don’t feel more alive, you don’t feel anything because you are more alive, you are at peace, it’s more than feeling alive because you’re so into that moment that you’re not outside it to be valuated, it’s completely happening.

But you know it when it’s happening, you recognise that.

POC

Yes you recognise it but if you think about it it will disappear.

Self-consciousness will kill it.

POC

Yes, knife edge stuff.

For somebody young, beginning their life as an artist, would you have advice for them? I know that you have spent many years teaching although, if I recall correctly, you have said that you did not try to teach, but that you did try to educate

POC

I tried to educate, yes. It’s a broader process. Teaching shows somebody how to throw a pot, but you can’t educate on how to make the clay to the right consistency. That might be a bad example. The way you look at the world makes you do what you do, you analyse the world in a particular matrix, in a particular paradigm that you have built around it. I think we construct the world into the way we want it to be, intellectually, and we have to then fit things into it. If it fits or it doesn’t fit depends on how well we’ve constructed it. A lot of philosophers have looked into this in a great deal of detail. But art falls outside, lives outside, of these constructions. There are certain things that can’t be said, they have to be shown. You can’t talk music. You have to play music. As an educator I was trying to build into these people that if you approach the world with an open eye and a sharp pencil you can make it what you want it to be. You look at other things very, very closely. If you want to be a painter, you must look at paintings very closely. If you want to be a musician you must listen to music very closely. And you do it, even if you do it badly, until you learn how to improve. You do it with conviction and dedication, almost like a faith. We should believe in the process so it becomes a faith. I believe in art working for society. It doesn’t actually, or rarely. Art doesn’t do anything for the world except it makes culture, and culture makes objects, and objects influence people. It works the other way as well. We are the summary of what we imagine. There are people who make motorcars that, in their form, are as sculpturally beautiful as any other piece of work around at the moment. Their object is self-contained. Everything about it is created with, and perfectly expresses, an awareness of purpose. If I was teaching sculptors and somebody said that they didn’t know how to be a sculptor I’d spend a hell a lot of time with them just walking, picking up stones, drawing in sand, making holes in walls, even making walls and digging trenches. These activities then become the common background. I’m using that word again. They help develop empathy and an understanding of pattern, a common feel for the nature of work and the existence of things. It can all be accessed through these kinds of activities that I discover I can manipulate. Ideas are generated out of their practice. I might then want to make something in the landscape which, given its origins, would belong in the landscape. That’s cultural. It ends up as occupying space, belonging.

The process gives it truth. It makes it true to life.

POC

Yes exactly. I live it. You live it.

We must know what we live. I would think this is important for anybody in that we must learn to accept or reject the constructs of society so that, as an artist, when you’re making work, the language and its expression are distinctly your own.

POC

I reckon it’s more important to be committed to something than anything else to do with that thing. That you eat it, breathe it, look at it, listen to it. You must do that all the time. If it hasn’t got to do with that and it’s not enhancing that thing steer clear of it, go away from it. It’s not doing anything for you.

Get serious, for God’s sake. Don’t waste any time.