Kildare Artist Notebook Project

 

There is a spirit of great generosity behind the Kildare Artist Notebook Project. It begins with the act of giving a blank A5 Moleskin notebook to an artist. It ends with the completed notebook being returned. And so each notebook is a reciprocal gift. From this doubled magnanimity everything in the project flows.

 

There is little that is more tempting and more terrifying than a blank notebook – it is full of promise and potential; it is difficult to begin, to break the blankness of the first page with a mark or incision. And it is almost impossible to finish. But these notebooks are beautifully complete. Individually they are insights into how each artists imagines their process of making and crafting. Collectively they are examples of ‘things being various’, as Louis MacNeice wrote in his poem ‘Snow’. Or, as Ian Dury’s song has it, they are ‘Reasons to Be Cheerful’ – like the tumbling list of things, places and moments in Dury’s song (“the juice of a carrot, the smile of a parrot”), there is in this collection of notebooks a multifariousness that lets us wonder at the prodigious nature of human talent.

 

The notebook is a polyvalent thing, and for different artists it signals different directions of travel. Some of the artists included in the project treat the notebook as a place in which they draft, sketch and prepare for larger or more finished works. Their notebooks become a revelation of their working processes, something between a blueprint for things yet to be done and a stream of consciousness which will lead to the formation of that work.

 

For others the notebook is more akin to a diary. The discrete elastic band on a Moleskin notebook is not just a convenience, but a shadowy remnant of a lock and a ‘Private’ notice. So all the notebooks, and especially those which consciously acknowledge the implicit privacy of the notebook as a form, carry with them intimations of intimacy and, simultaneous with this shyness, they know they are made to be exhibited. It is this tension between the private and the public which gives such power to the return gesture residing in the notebooks. They open out what might be private – they are a trusting gesture, an unfolding.

For some of the artists the notebook is a form waiting to be challenged and embellished – so covers are created and the boundaries of the exterior of the book extended – Suzanne Tyrell, for example, adds lights to her cover. Others excavate the notebook’s interior. Fifi Smith creates a sculpture gallery inside her notebook – Louise Bourgeois’s spider, amongst others, is reduced to miniature dimensions and placed in a utopian sculpture gallery. Liz Smith’s shadowy cut outs insist on three-dimensions rather than two, and the same is the case with the beautifully elaborate carousel made by Oonagh O’Brien, or the quietly profound use of magnets and iron filings in Paul Quast’s notebook.

 

And so it goes on, and one could keep talking in wonder and excitement about each notebook. About Marian Sheehan’s beautifully simple drawing of a hare, for example. What is most important about the notebooks collectively is that they make a case for art as the exercising of human thought, craft and intelligence within formal constraints, while allowing for those constraints be taken to their creative limits. It is this that is the token of the generosity of the project and the marker of its success.

 

Dr. Colin Graham - April 2014