Caoimhe Kilfeather – Interview

Caoimhe Kilfeather’s practice has a quiet sensibility. Described as being influenced by, ‘an interest in the built environment and our relationships to the spatial, formal and psychological qualities of architecture’ from this platform her works traverse a multiplicity of ideas, embedded in highly sensory encounters. Solo exhibitions have typically occupied spaces with a sense of cool contemplation, which belies the rich and complex relationality of the sculptural qualities which slowly emerge when given the sustained attention the works ask of us.
With a highly attuned understanding and sensitivity to materials, Kilfeather’s practice steps between total immersion in a singular object- working with materials which she coerces into new versions of themselves through slow, meditative processes, to coreographing multi layered dialogues between works and the spaces within which they are located. These conversations between places, materials, objects and images have an uncanny ability to evoke a concurrence of other spaces, from the domestic to the industrial, whilst articulating subjectivities of memory and the passage of time.

Since leaving the Slade School of Fine Art, London in 2007, Kilfeather has been exhibiting both in Ireland and internationally, each time demonstrative of a deeply engaged and developing body of work. We met up in her studio to discuss her recent exhibitions and her approach to making and thinking about sculpture.

RP: You had a solo exhibition at the Douglas Hyde Gallery in Dublin last summer, ‘evening and season and weather and history’, as a starting point could you perhaps say something about the thinking behind this constellation of works?

CK: The exhibition was conceived of over a period of time when I was doing a residency at the Irish Museum of Modern Art, which is set in formal gardens. I had been interested in the idea of outdoor enclosures, places that were ostensibly part of a greater landscape but still delineated in some way. So these gardens were an ideal way for me to start thinking about that. The body of work began with a series of photographs that I took over a number of weeks, always at dawn or dusk. I was trying to capture the quality of light that occurs at these times of day (sometimes hard to distinguish between the two) as well as a kind of thickness in the air… it just so happened there was a persistent mist at that time, it was early autumn. The photographs show spaces that open out – views through gaps in rows of hedges for example – but ultimately they are defined or closed off in some way. So I was interested in capturing both that in-between time of dawn and dusk but also this particular type of garden vista. Most of the photographs have this double edge.

RP: So the gardens provided a framework to begin thinking from through the photographs, but the exhibition also brought together different materials and sculptural languages in relation to these images, how did you approach the objects?

CK: When thinking about exhibitions certain elements are often crystallised in my mind quite early on whereas other things are a bit out of focus or unclear. So for that show, with the underlying interest in outdoor enclosures, and thinking about a particular time of day, I was also interested in using a specific approach to the use of materials – that there may be varying degrees of compression or density. I was thinking about compression, in a literal sense. Certain materials would be loosely packed, like powders or piles of small pieces of material, then others would be made of very dense materials. There can be an abstract material impetus which guides how I choose materials – as in thinking about compression or density as a way of approaching materiality. Other times I choose a specific material, for example coal. I have used coal for the past seven or so years… I am interested in it for how it encapsulates time; the scrubs from the coniferous period are all now extinct so it is a physical manifestation of a period of time and of matter that are now gone. As well as that odd out-of-time-ness of the material, there is also something about the treatment of it or my interest in polishing it which creates a compression along the surface (in that the surface becomes compressed when you polish something). It is very important to me that I am physically involved in the processes involved in making my work.

RP: Could we consider the importance of this physical, sensory relationship with the object in terms of an investment of energy?

CK: Exactly, it is like an investment of energy. In the traditional sense of making sculpture, you are figuring out and responding to the material and the shape and so on. There can be a slow pace to my making as I work across a wide variety of materials and processes. But this time accommodates my thinking and is in pace with the development of ideas in a way.

In terms of the show at the Douglas Hyde, another guiding factor or area of interest around the treatment of materials was to consider things that are forged through heat. For example the glass pieces and these piles of steel ballast which were strewn around the gallery space. When steel is heated it goes through a range of colours, so from straw colour at about 200 degrees C and a blue/purple at 300 degrees. I was doing this by hand with a blow torch, and also setting kilns to certain temperatures. Until recently I never used colour and definitely not in an applied sense, then more recently I ‘let’ myself use colour by looking at a chemical or physical change in the material – as in patinating or tempering – changing the properties of the material itself.

RP: This approach to colour, inherent rather than applied, is also apparent in the way you use light, or allow works to play with shadows, such as the ceramic pieces.

CF: I like working with materials which are effected by the changes in natural light (variations in how they reflect, refract or absorb to varying degrees). It is not often possible to use only natural lighting but I certainly like the changes in daylight to play a part in how the work is shown. The Douglas Hyde is like a bunker and there are only a few windows letting natural light in so it already feels quite dark. I reduced the normal gallery lighting to 20% of its capacity and used blue gels to ‘cool down’ the colour temperature in the space. I have always wanted to stay away from theatricality (even though it is all artifice in some ways)… I avoid spotlighting works or using this kind of overtly theatrical lighting to emphasise their properties, I’m more interested in allowing some kind of naturalism to be the context in which they are seen.

RP: Similarly in your exhibition, ‘this attentive place’ at Temple Bar in 2014, you hung blue veiled papers which affected the light and delineation of space. Could you say something about more about this intervention?

CK: That was a light weight paper that is soaked with blue pigment and oil, so maybe from a distance they appear uniform but up close they are quite mottled; it created a soft crinkly sound with any movement in the gallery.
In the Temple Bar gallery the angles of the walls are all off, like a parallelogram… I was thinking of an interior, maybe domestic space for this show – and I wanted to delineate that somehow. What I have done in the past is make one piece that is site specific in terms of scale which relates to the architecture of the gallery and also resets the scale for the rest of my work – creating a newly scaled context that the other objects/things can relate to. So the scale and layout of the paper piece did that, but then the actual material – its weight and colour – did something else. I was thinking about early forms of windows and ways of filtering light. Before glass, these windows were made with paper and wax. So I started experimenting with the materials and it evolved from there, through a very open process. When I began working on this exhibition it just fitted, making a window inside the window which cooled the temperature of the light and filtered the distractions of the busy street outside. I was thinking a lot about facades.

RP: But it’s a facade that you can move through…?

CK: Yes you can, though perhaps more than I wanted! It’s been on my mind recently – this relationship to touch. I’m very much on the ‘don’t touch’ end of things.

RP: It is an obvious question, whether you welcome touch, the objects being often seductive as well as holding the history of your own tactile involvement with them.

CK: Maybe there is a contradiction in that, but it comes from my own experience and interest in other sculpture which I find really powerful. As varied as Phyllida Barlow’s work to Richard Serra’s larger pieces, just the physical impact and the intrigue of surface and form and those more formal and material things that might draw someone to touch. I remember Phyllida Barlow saying as a tutor, how when you touch something it breaks that intrigue… you discover the temperature, texture and so on… this really resonated and stuck with me, all those questions you have when you experience work that is really having an impact on you, a bit like the surface of a painting but you would never touch the surface of a painting! I guess with sculpture that line is less clear.

RP: Returning to the idea of physically investing energy in the objects, or bringing out certain qualities that are inherent in the material, how do you feel about works in terms of them having their own energy? Very broadly, there is a lot of discussion currently around new materialism and objects having agency, or animism as a metaphor for how we create and experience subjectivity- animism being based on relational qualities and states. A sense of placement and relationality appears very important to how we experience your works. How do you situate yourself in relation to these ideas?

CK: The idea of any kind of performivity of objects, or an animistic approach is not something I engage in, I almost rely on a quietened down experience of it so that there is something else that might come about… perhaps the references or the relations that I try to create when there are a number or works together (as in a solo exhibition). So perhaps this could be described as a kind of performativity in that they really relate to each other in their own ‘world’. Though it’s not something that I bring in to my process or how I can articulate what I do. Also, I find that when particular terms or approaches to thinking about art, such as animism, begin to be used in this way, they automatically carry other sets of associations and the artwork/artist becomes defined by these things, or caught by them somehow. I guess because they are not things that I read about or think about as I am making the work, I don’t tend to consider them when reflecting on my work either.

But your point about placement certainly is something that has always been really important to me, also the gaps between pieces of work. I am interested in the first small steps when you encounter a piece of work, the questions of what it is, what the materials are and what the combinations are. A lot of these decisions are intuitive too.

RP: The placements and relations in your work often play with polarities, for instance weighty materials taking on a sense of fragility, or small pieces which draw close attention in dialogue with larger, architectural scaled works. These counterpoints create a dynamism, perhaps allowing something to emerge that is latent in the material. How do you think about this sense of emergence?

CK: That is of interest to me, often times the material itself is important and there is some significance to it whether its steel or coal, whether it links into a more industrial or domestic context, and although I present the material I am not leaving it to ‘be itself’ I definitely push and contrive it so maybe there is some kind of tension between my manipulation and simultaneous presentation.

RP: But they are always materials which allow themselves to be transformed, or which allow for you to engage in a certain process… there is notably no cheap plastic in here or materials which are more static?

CK: Yes, absolutely, so there are limits as to how I explore materials and I rarely work with found objects. If I have used plastic, then they are moulded. Sometimes there are generations, I have re made objects. So these cast iron objects (thin swells, 2014) are made from some cut glass and some really cheaply produced plastic but again this is looking at splicing surfaces together. I revisited and remade this work, I was thinking of a second generation of objects…. making the same thing at a different time, or a similar thing at the same time and what those relationships might be.

RP: Reading around your work, many of the terms which come up in response to it such as liminality, transformation, references to zen, they locate your work in a metaphysical space which of course can be very problematic to articulate within contemporary art practice.

CK: These are not words I have used myself about my work, but as I am generating work, reading in order to inform my work, or using language either to title or just have with me in the studio, there maybe is a sensibility possibly akin to some of these terms. But language and artwork is fraught. And as an artist describing your work can also be problematic – as in, it is one thing to talk about how you generate work, what you think about and are interested in, but it is then another thing to come at the work from the other side – what it is doing/has done as finished work out in the world. I don’t research in a very academic way, sometimes its retrospective on subjects I have been feeling my way around more intuitively and I think ‘I’d like to read about that’, so I think that way of being or sensibility that has been indicated through those terms may come about through a pace of reading or a way of looking, a way of allowing a fluidity between sources and things that inform me, my own memory and experience and a more active looking for things that may be informative. I try to have a thorough understanding of and engagement with the materials that I am working with.

RP: Going back to the photographs in relation to the objects, on the most basic level there is a dialogue set up here between a real space, and more abstract concerns…

CK: I think it came out of questions about abstraction I was asking five or six years ago, how I was using abstraction, what the affect was and perhaps a misreading of formalism. I think some of the work I was making was doing something I didn’t want it to do so the photographs provided a way of reorienting the work and providing a context for it, as if the images could comment on the objects or structures and vice versa. It was a way of setting up a space and a dialogue.

RP: That is interesting. Abstraction, in the formalist sense, has always been in battle with the problem of hermeticism- so here, making a direct connection to the ‘outside’ is a way of opening that up?

CK: Yes, I think so – it opens up conceptually and visually. I think for my work that is really important – that the contexts are part of the work. In the Temple Bar exhibition the space delineated was an interior, possibly domestic and in that the photographs I used provided a view out… they are printed at a scale almost like windows or vistas out from this interior space. The more recent photographs from the Douglas Hyde are outdoor contexts which position and provide a context for the objects.

RP: Finally In terms of ideation, your practice feels very intuitive. Maybe you can say something about your larger sphere of influence?

CK: It is fundamentally intuitive, but I can point to other influences. My parents are both architects and they built our family home. When I started making sculpture I was photographing it and noticing things about the house, how it is made. It is built modestly from breeze blocks, wood, no insulation…but the spaces are very considered and in how they relate to each other too (both interiors and gardens/courtyards) It wasn’t apparent to me until quite recently but I really see the sensibility of the house manifested in my approach to making. I also read different types of texts in support of my work – either as I am developing it or sometimes more retrospectively. For example I am currently reading ‘Bluets’ by Maggie Nelson. A beautiful book with echoes of Wittgenstein in its form – conjuring her own relationship with the colour as well as multiple other histories of the colour and its significance to people over time. It’s also about love I think. But when I started thinking about blue, I was thinking about it from my experiences of the sea and sky, as well as eye colour; rich experience of places, or of looking into somebody’s eyes. The first works I made using blue were very intuitive and possibly romantic in this way. So in terms of ideation there is a back and forth between intuition, experience and a more active looking into things and those things can be very diverse: poetry, prose, psychoanalysis, fiction, film, philosophy…

RP: These more romantic considerations are a reminder of another counterpoint which I find so beautifully articulated in your practice, of sculpture being very physically present yet simultaneously indicative of other spaces…

CK: I am often interested in their being a doubling, so that there is the experience of the art in the gallery and they are objects, images and things as art works, but they are also of another place and of another time and have that sense of time and sense and place, raising questions as to what the nature of that other place is… whether it’s in the mind or the memory or is it another place… all those questions which are perhaps, ultimately, of the self.

Rebecca Partridge

Caoimhe Kilfeather – Interview

Caoimhe Kilfeather’s practice has a quiet sensibility. Described as being influenced by, ‘an interest in the built environment and our relationships to the spatial, formal and psychological qualities of architecture’ from this platform her works traverse a multiplicity of ideas, embedded in highly sensory encounters. Solo exhibitions have typically occupied spaces with a sense of cool contemplation, which belies the rich and complex relationality of the sculptural qualities which slowly emerge when given the sustained attention the works ask of us.
With a highly attuned understanding and sensitivity to materials, Kilfeather’s practice steps between total immersion in a singular object- working with materials which she coerces into new versions of themselves through slow, meditative processes, to coreographing multi layered dialogues between works and the spaces within which they are located. These conversations between places, materials, objects and images have an uncanny ability to evoke a concurrence of other spaces, from the domestic to the industrial, whilst articulating subjectivities of memory and the passage of time.

Since leaving the Slade School of Fine Art, London in 2007, Kilfeather has been exhibiting both in Ireland and internationally, each time demonstrative of a deeply engaged and developing body of work. We met up in her studio to discuss her recent exhibitions and her approach to making and thinking about sculpture.

RP: You had a solo exhibition at the Douglas Hyde Gallery in Dublin last summer, ‘evening and season and weather and history’, as a starting point could you perhaps say something about the thinking behind this constellation of works?

CK: The exhibition was conceived of over a period of time when I was doing a residency at the Irish Museum of Modern Art, which is set in formal gardens. I had been interested in the idea of outdoor enclosures, places that were ostensibly part of a greater landscape but still delineated in some way. So these gardens were an ideal way for me to start thinking about that. The body of work began with a series of photographs that I took over a number of weeks, always at dawn or dusk. I was trying to capture the quality of light that occurs at these times of day (sometimes hard to distinguish between the two) as well as a kind of thickness in the air… it just so happened there was a persistent mist at that time, it was early autumn. The photographs show spaces that open out – views through gaps in rows of hedges for example – but ultimately they are defined or closed off in some way. So I was interested in capturing both that in-between time of dawn and dusk but also this particular type of garden vista. Most of the photographs have this double edge.

RP: So the gardens provided a framework to begin thinking from through the photographs, but the exhibition also brought together different materials and sculptural languages in relation to these images, how did you approach the objects?

CK: When thinking about exhibitions certain elements are often crystallised in my mind quite early on whereas other things are a bit out of focus or unclear. So for that show, with the underlying interest in outdoor enclosures, and thinking about a particular time of day, I was also interested in using a specific approach to the use of materials – that there may be varying degrees of compression or density. I was thinking about compression, in a literal sense. Certain materials would be loosely packed, like powders or piles of small pieces of material, then others would be made of very dense materials. There can be an abstract material impetus which guides how I choose materials – as in thinking about compression or density as a way of approaching materiality. Other times I choose a specific material, for example coal. I have used coal for the past seven or so years… I am interested in it for how it encapsulates time; the scrubs from the coniferous period are all now extinct so it is a physical manifestation of a period of time and of matter that are now gone. As well as that odd out-of-time-ness of the material, there is also something about the treatment of it or my interest in polishing it which creates a compression along the surface (in that the surface becomes compressed when you polish something). It is very important to me that I am physically involved in the processes involved in making my work.

RP: Could we consider the importance of this physical, sensory relationship with the object in terms of an investment of energy?

CK: Exactly, it is like an investment of energy. In the traditional sense of making sculpture, you are figuring out and responding to the material and the shape and so on. There can be a slow pace to my making as I work across a wide variety of materials and processes. But this time accommodates my thinking and is in pace with the development of ideas in a way.

In terms of the show at the Douglas Hyde, another guiding factor or area of interest around the treatment of materials was to consider things that are forged through heat. For example the glass pieces and these piles of steel ballast which were strewn around the gallery space. When steel is heated it goes through a range of colours, so from straw colour at about 200 degrees C and a blue/purple at 300 degrees. I was doing this by hand with a blow torch, and also setting kilns to certain temperatures. Until recently I never used colour and definitely not in an applied sense, then more recently I ‘let’ myself use colour by looking at a chemical or physical change in the material – as in patinating or tempering – changing the properties of the material itself.

RP: This approach to colour, inherent rather than applied, is also apparent in the way you use light, or allow works to play with shadows, such as the ceramic pieces.

CF: I like working with materials which are effected by the changes in natural light (variations in how they reflect, refract or absorb to varying degrees). It is not often possible to use only natural lighting but I certainly like the changes in daylight to play a part in how the work is shown. The Douglas Hyde is like a bunker and there are only a few windows letting natural light in so it already feels quite dark. I reduced the normal gallery lighting to 20% of its capacity and used blue gels to ‘cool down’ the colour temperature in the space. I have always wanted to stay away from theatricality (even though it is all artifice in some ways)… I avoid spotlighting works or using this kind of overtly theatrical lighting to emphasise their properties, I’m more interested in allowing some kind of naturalism to be the context in which they are seen.

RP: Similarly in your exhibition, ‘this attentive place’ at Temple Bar in 2014, you hung blue veiled papers which affected the light and delineation of space. Could you say something about more about this intervention?

CK: That was a light weight paper that is soaked with blue pigment and oil, so maybe from a distance they appear uniform but up close they are quite mottled; it created a soft crinkly sound with any movement in the gallery.
In the Temple Bar gallery the angles of the walls are all off, like a parallelogram… I was thinking of an interior, maybe domestic space for this show – and I wanted to delineate that somehow. What I have done in the past is make one piece that is site specific in terms of scale which relates to the architecture of the gallery and also resets the scale for the rest of my work – creating a newly scaled context that the other objects/things can relate to. So the scale and layout of the paper piece did that, but then the actual material – its weight and colour – did something else. I was thinking about early forms of windows and ways of filtering light. Before glass, these windows were made with paper and wax. So I started experimenting with the materials and it evolved from there, through a very open process. When I began working on this exhibition it just fitted, making a window inside the window which cooled the temperature of the light and filtered the distractions of the busy street outside. I was thinking a lot about facades.

RP: But it’s a facade that you can move through…?

CK: Yes you can, though perhaps more than I wanted! It’s been on my mind recently – this relationship to touch. I’m very much on the ‘don’t touch’ end of things.

RP: It is an obvious question, whether you welcome touch, the objects being often seductive as well as holding the history of your own tactile involvement with them.

CK: Maybe there is a contradiction in that, but it comes from my own experience and interest in other sculpture which I find really powerful. As varied as Phyllida Barlow’s work to Richard Serra’s larger pieces, just the physical impact and the intrigue of surface and form and those more formal and material things that might draw someone to touch. I remember Phyllida Barlow saying as a tutor, how when you touch something it breaks that intrigue… you discover the temperature, texture and so on… this really resonated and stuck with me, all those questions you have when you experience work that is really having an impact on you, a bit like the surface of a painting but you would never touch the surface of a painting! I guess with sculpture that line is less clear.

RP: Returning to the idea of physically investing energy in the objects, or bringing out certain qualities that are inherent in the material, how do you feel about works in terms of them having their own energy? Very broadly, there is a lot of discussion currently around new materialism and objects having agency, or animism as a metaphor for how we create and experience subjectivity- animism being based on relational qualities and states. A sense of placement and relationality appears very important to how we experience your works. How do you situate yourself in relation to these ideas?

CK: The idea of any kind of performivity of objects, or an animistic approach is not something I engage in, I almost rely on a quietened down experience of it so that there is something else that might come about… perhaps the references or the relations that I try to create when there are a number or works together (as in a solo exhibition). So perhaps this could be described as a kind of performativity in that they really relate to each other in their own ‘world’. Though it’s not something that I bring in to my process or how I can articulate what I do. Also, I find that when particular terms or approaches to thinking about art, such as animism, begin to be used in this way, they automatically carry other sets of associations and the artwork/artist becomes defined by these things, or caught by them somehow. I guess because they are not things that I read about or think about as I am making the work, I don’t tend to consider them when reflecting on my work either.

But your point about placement certainly is something that has always been really important to me, also the gaps between pieces of work. I am interested in the first small steps when you encounter a piece of work, the questions of what it is, what the materials are and what the combinations are. A lot of these decisions are intuitive too.

RP: The placements and relations in your work often play with polarities, for instance weighty materials taking on a sense of fragility, or small pieces which draw close attention in dialogue with larger, architectural scaled works. These counterpoints create a dynamism, perhaps allowing something to emerge that is latent in the material. How do you think about this sense of emergence?

CK: That is of interest to me, often times the material itself is important and there is some significance to it whether its steel or coal, whether it links into a more industrial or domestic context, and although I present the material I am not leaving it to ‘be itself’ I definitely push and contrive it so maybe there is some kind of tension between my manipulation and simultaneous presentation.

RP: But they are always materials which allow themselves to be transformed, or which allow for you to engage in a certain process… there is notably no cheap plastic in here or materials which are more static?

CK: Yes, absolutely, so there are limits as to how I explore materials and I rarely work with found objects. If I have used plastic, then they are moulded. Sometimes there are generations, I have re made objects. So these cast iron objects (thin swells, 2014) are made from some cut glass and some really cheaply produced plastic but again this is looking at splicing surfaces together. I revisited and remade this work, I was thinking of a second generation of objects…. making the same thing at a different time, or a similar thing at the same time and what those relationships might be.

RP: Reading around your work, many of the terms which come up in response to it such as liminality, transformation, references to zen, they locate your work in a metaphysical space which of course can be very problematic to articulate within contemporary art practice.

CK: These are not words I have used myself about my work, but as I am generating work, reading in order to inform my work, or using language either to title or just have with me in the studio, there maybe is a sensibility possibly akin to some of these terms. But language and artwork is fraught. And as an artist describing your work can also be problematic – as in, it is one thing to talk about how you generate work, what you think about and are interested in, but it is then another thing to come at the work from the other side – what it is doing/has done as finished work out in the world. I don’t research in a very academic way, sometimes its retrospective on subjects I have been feeling my way around more intuitively and I think ‘I’d like to read about that’, so I think that way of being or sensibility that has been indicated through those terms may come about through a pace of reading or a way of looking, a way of allowing a fluidity between sources and things that inform me, my own memory and experience and a more active looking for things that may be informative. I try to have a thorough understanding of and engagement with the materials that I am working with.

RP: Going back to the photographs in relation to the objects, on the most basic level there is a dialogue set up here between a real space, and more abstract concerns…

CK: I think it came out of questions about abstraction I was asking five or six years ago, how I was using abstraction, what the affect was and perhaps a misreading of formalism. I think some of the work I was making was doing something I didn’t want it to do so the photographs provided a way of reorienting the work and providing a context for it, as if the images could comment on the objects or structures and vice versa. It was a way of setting up a space and a dialogue.

RP: That is interesting. Abstraction, in the formalist sense, has always been in battle with the problem of hermeticism- so here, making a direct connection to the ‘outside’ is a way of opening that up?

CK: Yes, I think so – it opens up conceptually and visually. I think for my work that is really important – that the contexts are part of the work. In the Temple Bar exhibition the space delineated was an interior, possibly domestic and in that the photographs I used provided a view out… they are printed at a scale almost like windows or vistas out from this interior space. The more recent photographs from the Douglas Hyde are outdoor contexts which position and provide a context for the objects.

RP: Finally In terms of ideation, your practice feels very intuitive. Maybe you can say something about your larger sphere of influence?

CK: It is fundamentally intuitive, but I can point to other influences. My parents are both architects and they built our family home. When I started making sculpture I was photographing it and noticing things about the house, how it is made. It is built modestly from breeze blocks, wood, no insulation…but the spaces are very considered and in how they relate to each other too (both interiors and gardens/courtyards) It wasn’t apparent to me until quite recently but I really see the sensibility of the house manifested in my approach to making. I also read different types of texts in support of my work – either as I am developing it or sometimes more retrospectively. For example I am currently reading ‘Bluets’ by Maggie Nelson. A beautiful book with echoes of Wittgenstein in its form – conjuring her own relationship with the colour as well as multiple other histories of the colour and its significance to people over time. It’s also about love I think. But when I started thinking about blue, I was thinking about it from my experiences of the sea and sky, as well as eye colour; rich experience of places, or of looking into somebody’s eyes. The first works I made using blue were very intuitive and possibly romantic in this way. So in terms of ideation there is a back and forth between intuition, experience and a more active looking into things and those things can be very diverse: poetry, prose, psychoanalysis, fiction, film, philosophy…

RP: These more romantic considerations are a reminder of another counterpoint which I find so beautifully articulated in your practice, of sculpture being very physically present yet simultaneously indicative of other spaces…

CK: I am often interested in their being a doubling, so that there is the experience of the art in the gallery and they are objects, images and things as art works, but they are also of another place and of another time and have that sense of time and sense and place, raising questions as to what the nature of that other place is… whether it’s in the mind or the memory or is it another place… all those questions which are perhaps, ultimately, of the self.

Rebecca Partridge