the power of touch
Drawings used in set design for Tall Tales Theatre
Joe McConnell talks to Pádraig Naughton about his journey as a visual artist with a sight impairment.
After first coming across the powerfully evocative, minimalist, charcoal landscapes reproduced on his website at www.touchart.com, I have been eager to experience Pádraig Naughton's work in the original. This desire has been heightened over the years through glimpses of his sculptural work in photographs and tantalising descriptions heard in many conversations. Although this wish is still to be fulfilled, it was a great pleasure to finally catch up with Pádraig at the recent Disability Film Festival in London and to speak with an artist so unequivocal about his identity as a disabled person.
I began by asking Pádraig to give an overview of his practice.
There are basically two main strands to my work: ceramics and charcoal drawings.
The ceramic work is tactile and abstract. It is made by touch with no visual references. Working in the medium began when I was first introduced to ceramics at the age of 7. By the age of 15, I wanted to go to art school to become an artist and didn't want to go into any of the stereotypical careers that visually impaired people seemed to do: physiotherapy, piano tuning, telephony or basketry.
Initially, going to Art College was as much about getting away from visual impairment, as it had to do with an interest in art itself. However, within a few months, I was struggling. The ceramics (Craft Design) course was highly visual and I couldn't see in the way that I needed to see in order to complete the course. So I had to find my own ways of making work. Firstly, I had to figure out what I could or couldn't see. Over the 4 years at the National College of Art and Design, I found that the best way of relating to clay was through touch, working really large and making very large murals. I was searching for a way of working that was sympathetic to both my way of being and thinking and also to the experiences that I was gathering. Quite by accident, I became interested in art therapy. Not because it had anything to do with disability - I just found it fascinating and ended up doing voluntary work in a local physiotherapy department (the only medical environment that would let me in) where I was asked to assist the ante-natal classes and received a crash course in massage techniques. This experience opened up a whole new language of touch. Throughout my last year of college, I researched massage and how it worked. Massage is very structured and I was able to extract different techniques and turn them into ways of mark-making that I used in my sculpture.
other ways of making
The techniques derived from massage - such as hacking which uses the sides of your hands in quite a vigorous motion and thumb-rolling - make very specific marks. In the early days, I worked blindfold but as I became more comfortable I would just close my eyes and disappear into my own tactile world. I tend to create a large area of clay, spending a few days rolling out and laying down and then working my hands across it for a day or two. So whatever the size of a mural, you'll find they've been created as entire pieces and then cut up into sections. Partly because of the fragility of the murals and the problems transporting them, I started looking at other ways of making and began to devise hanging pieces. This was influenced by a visit to Japan, where I saw all sorts of ways of using screens and ways of closing off space. I began to devise pieces based on small ceramic objects (square or rectangular boxes, spheres, different shapes) strung on sash-cord or rope and then suspended from a height. This created something that was like a mural, but you could see through it and view it from both sides. You could actually walk through some of them, giving the viewer more ways of engaging with the work.
last updated: 2006-02-01 00:00:00
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tags : international visual impairment interview_profile visual arts tactile sculpture