Surface History: Serena Caulfield

Serena Caulfield, Ghosts in the Garden, 2021, oil on canvas; photograph courtesy of the artist.

Serena Caulfield: I don’t think we need to talk about the pandemic too much, though it’s probably quite important for the context of this conversation. I found myself drawing from the stuff around me and within me, rather than pulling ideas from other places. I became very disciplined and focused, perhaps as a way, initially, to make sense of what was happening. Living at home with my Mum and sister together, for the first time since we were in school, conjured lots of memories and stories, which began to feed my work quite quickly. Have you found your working methods changing recently?

Stephen Dunne: Luckily, I’ve been really productive because a lot of distractions have been pulled out of the way. I was already in a kind of lockdown, due to having three young daughters, including the chaos of twins. I’d left Temple Bar Studios and then started working in my studio in Cavan, working around other constraints, but that kind of suited the work in lots of ways too. Putting paint on, letting it dry. Where in the past you’d maybe fret about it or push it round a bit more, I was forced to leave it and come back to it later, so layers and things built up quite quickly, keeping as much immediacy as possible.

SC: It was great in lots of ways, for me. Pre-pandemic I was living in London, flying home to Wexford every few weeks to do a burst in the studio, and then back again! It just wasn’t conducive to making progress in my career or making great work. I moved back in March 2020 and threw myself into the studio. That has been really beneficial to me and my studio practice. It’s just a different kind of focus, isn’t it – a sort of recalibration?

SD: It’s a sort of collapsing moment. There’s so much in flux. When we’re in it, we can’t see it for what it is. So, my approach was to try and experiment as productively as possible – break a few rules, be irreverent.

SC: You mentioned that you start work on your paintings without a reference image – with nothing. Does that mean that an image emerges from what came before, or how does your process usually come about?

SD: I like to begin from absolute zero, just marks or random colours, maintaining energy, each new element building into a catastrophe of sorts, uncontrolled. Then at some point a kind of rescue operation intervenes to make something coherent. There’s already so much on the blank canvas, potential, historical noise. There are no photos or reference material; perhaps I should use them more. I take a lot of photographs though, mostly landscapes and through the process of composing, editing and looking through the frame, a large amount of information gets stored in my surface memory, to be ransacked later. Looking at your work, I’m curious about the importance of art historical references. Are they an armature to twist into something new, or a deliberate undermining of something?

SC: They are both. When I was a small child, we had a Brueghel painting over the fireplace. When I asked my mother about it, I said: “I remember, it was big and it had animals in boats!” She said, “No Serena, it was a really small painting.” My childhood recollection was totally wrong – it couldn’t have been small, because how else would they fit the animals in?! I love the idea of using art history as a way to play with power, particularly as a female artist. There are ideas of ownership and art for the poor or lost, as well as being a way for me to discover more of my family history and to learn about an art collection my great grandfather had. I’ve been reimagining these paintings with elements of things that are familiar to me, while incorporating local myths and stories about my family home and the locality, childhood memories, and pure imagination! There’s also, like you, an inherent interest in mark-making and colour, and a surface history, which has always been present in my work.

SD: Do you see each work as part of a wider narrative? How do the associations between multiple works combine?

SC: Absolutely. I have adopted a multi-strand approach to making my work and I find it really interesting to see how the conversation emerges between paintings. What happens when one sits next to another, and how the narrative changes depending on the context, the space, the use of paint or colour. Brushstrokes sometimes become characters in a way, and each gains its own ability to talk to the one next to it. Maybe conversation happens amongst paintings in the studio or gallery, though I hope that each painting has its own story to tell, too. Perhaps each artwork can be seen as a fragment of a bigger picture. You seem to work in multiple ways too, with different lines of enquiry. What’s the motivation for you, and how does it all fit together?

SD: Recently, I’ve been making landscapes inhabited by otherworldly yellow birds, hinting at the canary in the coal mine, something vulnerable or fragile. Stuck on trees, immobile, waiting within a hyper-colourised environment. Inhabiting something akin to ‘The Zone’ in Tarkovsky’s 1979 film, Stalker. There’s an invisible toxicity around them while they wait together for brighter days. They are trying to balance a joyous epiphany of landscape and togetherness with a hidden more uncertain core. A few years ago, I built a powerful PC to run various high-end 3D software, as a somewhat different line of enquiry, something to do when you hit a wall with painting, or as a way to make static drawings and ideas more fluid. I’ve been making experimental animations and digital catastrophes as well. With painting I’ve been working on a larger scale, building layered and more complex metaphorical landscapes inhabited or haunted by mythic and nomadic histories. This is an attempt at realising something material, physical and charged with energies that are both contradictory yet ultimately emancipatory.

Serena Caulfield was shortlisted for the Zurich Portrait Prize 2021, which continues at The National Gallery of Ireland until April and at Crawford Art Gallery until July. Caulfield’s solo exhibition will also open in July at Wexford Arts Centre. serenacaulfield.com

Stephen Dunne is exhibiting as part of ‘Oh Whistle and I’ll Come’, which opens at Superweakness, The Hague, The Netherlands, in spring 2022, and in ‘A Generous Space’, continuing at Hastings Contemporary, England, until April 2022. stephendunne.org