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The artworks I position before the viewer aim to evoke an active response in anyone who has felt within themselves an urge to grow beyond their inheritance. My works play in the space between documentation and the iconic quality of a staged composition. My interests lie in transitions and transformations, masquerade, artifice and play. The transition from naiveté to knowing, innocence to experience, suppressed eroticism to sexual awakening.
I am attracted by the malleable qualities of fiction, and the literature works I cite may form part of the viewer’s collective consciousness. Even if the viewer has not previously read these books, a familiarity exists due to the continuous cultural, educational and historical references that are drawn from these classic fictional works. Some of the literature that I have referenced include works by Iain Banks, Truman Capote, Charles Dickens, J.D. Salinger, Theodor Seuss Geisel and William Shakespeare.
By referencing classic works of fiction, I aim to go beyond the narratives, exploring hidden histories, contexts and personal engagements with the texts. The intersection between the performing arts and the visual arts has been a huge influence on my artistic practice. I continue to use elements and motifs from the ‘black box’ positioning them within the ‘white cube’, or gallery context.
In evaluating my work I can identify that identity construction is a reoccurring theme. By liberally appropriating works of fiction, personal histories and experiences, I can avoid creating strictly agenda driven or didactic ‘documentaries’, but instead create scenarios in which the viewer can identify. Recently my practice has been informed by Jacques Lacan’s theories, in particular “The Mirror Stage as Formative of the I” (1936).
By inhabiting and interpolating myself into various roles, and by collaborating with professionals including actors, directors, writers, dancers, and theorists, I begin new learning processes. I have become hugely interested in how actors connect with a character and aim to reject cliché imitations of reality and to search for something more real in himself.
Séamus McCormack, Feb 2010