How do you more forward from that particular moment of support at school?
Firstly, I went to the National College of Art and Design straight out of school when I was only 17. I was very young and it just didn’t suit me. It was all a bit much, I left half way through even though I really enjoyed it. I don’t think living in Dublin was working for me either.
I decided to move down to Cork and go to the Crawford College of Art and Design. I did a Foundation Course and then a Diploma in Painting, over three years and I loved it there. I did painting and print-making.
t that time there were few places to do a fine art degree course, so very few students were able to go on. This was the 1990’s, pre Celtic Tiger, Ireland. It was still incredibly poor and there really were few opportunities for work generally. People would simply go on to the dole, or they would emigrate, and certainly very little for people who wanted to work as artists.
I changed my specialty and went to in the National College of Art studying Print-Making. I finished around 1995.
An additional element to the main conversation
Straight out of NCAD, I found a placement in Italy, and I applied to an Italian etching studio called Il Bisonte. I sent off slides and an application. I didn’t have a sense that I could work as a professional artists but I was quite ambitious, I wanted to do a Masters and I wanted to push things further, and I went to Italy for a year which was funded by a Japanese business, with about 12 or 15 other people.
The training was incredibly conservative, highly technical, in this Italian Print Studio, where Picasso and other important artists had been to. This training didn’t lend itself to knowledge of the wider state of the art world but was quite intense and, as I said earlier, very technical.
Later I worked in Finland for 9 months on a European Exchange Programme, and all during this time I was producing my own work as well and starting to work on larger print designs and also work in a more installational way
From there what happens?
Because I was had a specialisation in printmaking I worked in the Graphic Studio in Dublin for a few years. The Graphic Studio was a place which had funding, and it made money through its gallery and editioning fine art prints.
I developed my own work as a Print Maker there but I was also editioning prints for other artists and then in 1999 I got into the Royal College of Art in London, so I moved to London. At that point I knew Print-Making and Etching backwards so I went there having developed a high level of craft.
What I needed to focus on was a different relationship to concept in the work. There had always been, within my work, a tension between configuration and abstraction, this pull and push between the two, and I needed to figure that out.
An additional element to the main conversation
In Ireland, one of the bigger projects I produced between 1996 and 1999 was a series of works which were the roots, the prelude to the work in Precarious Freedoms with the aerial views of the protesting crowds.
At that point the whole of Dublin was transforming and changing. Where my studio was the whole Docklands area was being developed. There was a palpable sense of change; there was a transformation; that the city was catching up with other cities around the world.
I flew in a helicopter over the city and I took photographs of what was happening to Dublin and I used those photographs to make extremely large prints which looked at the way the city was changing. I was looking at some areas where people were forced to leave because the value of land was rising rapidly. I was developing my thoughts on urban landscapes and how people react to a changing urban space
The tools I had were very traditional with etching plates and copper, and you can do amazing things with those tools but it was a very traditional approach to the work.
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