encounter the artwork from multiple points of view rather than a single perspective, more typically associated with looking at a painting for example.
Before leaving this conversation we would you like to pose a question about the nature of the relationship of your art with your audience. Do you consider the issue of audience reception as being a crucial component of your decision-making process, in terms of what type of language is used in a particular context?
I consider audience reception and interaction a crucial part of the work but not of my decision making process. I will always envisage how the work will be installed and how the aesthetics of the pieces/project will sit together and how the audience will interact with the work but I always work for myself- thoughts, dreams, words, substance, identity, language.
I consider the accomplishment of the artist more important than the interpretation.
Thanks a lot for your time and for sharing your thoughts, Anna Marie. Finally, would you like to tell us readers something about your future projects? How do you see your work evolving?
Thank you so very much for taking the time to research my work and ask me such thought provoking questions- it has really made me think about my practice and its place in contemporary art practice today!
I am currently collaborating with poet and landscape writer, Dr. Martin Cromie researching visual and tangible dialogue in response to his recent book. In an attempt to translate an individual’s ‘response to place’ through Cromie’s own identities, histories and geographical meanderings, the intention is to be a symbiotic process of action and reaction in which each artist acts as the other's ideal audience. The Spirits of the Stones is a work of literary non-fiction which explores a number of rural town lands in South Armagh, N.Ireland. The work is structured as a series of interlinked essays reflecting upon different aspects of the landscape and exploring the author’s personal links to the area.
Central to the work is an initial investigation into making photographic images, concentrating in particular on the processes and ultimate outcomes of pinhole photography. The challenge, however is working with the unpredictability of pinhole photography and the strange distortions that occur naturally from the primitiveness of the apparatus whilst also trialing different developing times, papers and other materials in the darkroom. The resulting drawings, paintings and pinhole images will endeavour to see my work evolving via the exploration of cross disciplinary media and addressing how the use of other materials will challenge the assumptions of what the ultimate objective- ‘painting’- is or might be; conceptually, visually and as importantly, technologically.
I would like to dedicate this interview, if I could, to my father, Pat McClelland (1933-2016). He made me who I am and was always so proud of what I was ‘becoming’…