About
liminal: (def.)
...occupying a position at, or on both sides of, a boundary or threshold...
James is a free-lance visual artist, illustrator and qualified architect.
Based in the south-west of Ireland, he operates at the threshold of distinct yet inextricably linked disciplines: (painting) // (illustration) // (architecture).
A painter of the spaces between people_and_places; His work has been characterised as a unique blended form of contemporary engagement with both the genre of landscape painting and an intimate narrative painting tradition; eschewing hierarchy and category in favour of equal focus on both landscapes and figures.
His practice is primarily based in oil painting, but also includes drawing utilising a variety of media.
INTERVIEWS
Link to Interview with 'Made in Bed' Magazine (in association with Sotheby's Institute of Art)
Link to Interview with ‘Jacksons Art Blog’ (in association with the Jackon's Painting Prize)
Background
Places James has called home at one point or another include: Tralee, Murroe, Dublin, Dingle, Melbourne, London, Ennis, Conna, Ballyvaughan and Houston.
His earlier professional and educational background lies in architecture, holding a masters degree from UCD and postgraduate diploma from the University of Westminster. In the past he has worked in architectural practice both at home and abroad, however in recent years he has focused on developing his artistic practice; specialising in painting. Today he divides his time between his personal artwork, occasional select mural projects, or commercial illustration commissions.
Artist Statement
My arts practice is centred around an existential and phenomenological exploration of the complex relationship that exists between self and surroundings.
I am particularly intrigued by the phenomenology of place. I’m interested in the way in which our experience of places and the relationships we forge with them exist as an ever evolving, jumbled and reciprocal flow across the material, -immaterial and -emotional realms. I think there’s always a kind of quiet unseen interplay between our phenomenal experience of a place in the moment and our own internal meta-narratives. It is this elusive interaction and fluid dynamic which I am attempting to capture in my paintings.
My ambition for the work is that it might communicate or elicit a tacit human understanding of the wholeness of our spatial or ‘platial’ experience; ..a particular sense of place, a subtle suspended narrative or emotional state. The work seeks to encourage a more-active awareness of our conscious and unconscious spatial understandings and the creative and transcendental potential of this awareness might provide in terms of generating self knowledge, altering our perspective of our lives and of our everyday worlds.
The territory of my work essentially being betweenness and the dynamics at play between elements, it inherently has many further threads of source inspiration woven through it in a kind of plurality; these may be part autobiographical, part experiential, part literary. Independent of considerations of subject or genre, I view the paintings I make in fact as vehicles for the exploration of many further interrelated and recurring themes and sub-themes.
Themes & sub-themes that will often permeate the work, including but not limited to an examination of:
The coming to awareness of embodied experience.
How landscape acts as protagonist in the emergence of identity / becoming of self,
How we ‘think with’ landscapes, how they might ‘think us’.
The inscription of memory in place; its reanimation.
Recently responding to:
Concepts of being & belonging; ‘home’ vs. ‘shelter’, place-less-ness.
A new kind of perpetual precarity.
’Generational fissure’ / ‘Aspiration-expectation gap’.
The weight of all the necessitated ‘not-thinking-about-things’.
Landscape as site to be lost / absent; distraction as coping strategy.
Thanks for reading.