http://artprocess.net/evolveprj?prj_id=19&artist_id=1&prj_name=Notice%20To%20Quit&lastname=Delaney&firstname=JP
| JP Delaney is a visual artist who spent 20 years in Rome, Italy, washing dishes. There the Roman art world and he employed a mutual strategy of ignoring one another. In early 2011, on moving to live in a thatched cottage in rural Ireland he now doggedly refuses to wash any more dishes, and is told to try improve his rapport with the art world. | ||
|---|---|---|
| |
In winter I'd noticed a mattress buried in the fast-flowing stream at the end of the cottage garden. Figuring it was an odd place for anyone to sleep, I resolved to pull it out as soon as the water level lowered later in the year. I'd forgotten about it until the following June when I received an invitation to make an artwork for a show in Florence with the theme "places to sleep and dream" in October 2011 (http://ottoluogodellarte.it) |
|
Mauro, an artist friend, said he knew some high-class Sardinian bakers, and would I design a bread loaf for them? I decided to try it out by baking it myself first, so I made up a wholegrain dough with fresh yeast. I put it in a recently-emptied beer can and let it rise so it started to spill out the top and dribble down the sides. I baked it at 200C for some time (as I'd proceeded to empty other beer cans, I don't remember how long it stayed in the oven). Anyway after it cooled down, I cut away the most of the can to reveal the perfectly baked loaf. I then sent it off to Mauro. The resulting silence tells me the bakers weren't amused. | |
| |
After years of taking the latest object out of the studio to try find a space for it in the house, Semina, my exasperated wife, finally put her foot down telling me never to bring any more of that junk into her home. The cellar was already full of them, so I ended up spending years on a few pieces just constantly reworking them in place. I was working on this one when I left Rome at the end of 2010. Hopefully it'll still be there to continue where I left off next time I visit. |
|
| To counter the enforced reduction in completed works, I'd draw on opened-out beer boxes with oil pastel. This was the latest I was working on before moving to Ireland. | |
| |
Another one of those interminable reworkings. In the unlikely event that you'd like to find out more about it: http://artprocess.net/evolveprj?prj_id=19&artist_id=1&prj_name=Notice%20To%20Quit&lastname=Delaney&firstname=JP |
| |
The following are earlier works that I filled the house with, despite protestations of no more available space. They were good climbing objets for the kids when they were young though. Materials are oil on cotton or jute on a wire mesh structure. |
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
The following are some images from a show I did in Ireland 500 years ago. It was the last show I'd do before leaving the country. Basically I covered my living and working space in white paint, everything got a coat of white (even the remnants of my last meal) except the paintings I had done there. After the opening, I just closed the door and left the country, abandoning the works to their own fate. |
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
Here's the note I wrote for this show (of 502 years ago!): Being careful to maintain the privacy of the studio where I work has always been a priority. I wanted to challenge this 'secrecy' however and, on the invitation of the Wexford Art Centre, decided to turn the gallery into my studio for a month. I used the walls as my canvas and people came in walking around the space as I painted. It was a challenge to my usual method of silence and solitude but an interesting exercise. At the end of the month's work, we held a one-night show 'closing' (with readings by a bunch of poet friends). The next day the oil paint on the walls was scraped away and the surface repainted white. |