Every now and then over the last year I tried to document what I was doing in the studio, since I had the video camera lying around anyway.

Unfortunately my video camera broke a while ago, so as it looks now there will be no video documentation of this studio year, but I can tell you that I’m kept busy, both making work and studying, since I’m doing a part-time distance learning course on Jungian Psychology with a Swedish university this spring. The media I’m currently using is quite diverse, including super 8 film, sculptural installation and painting.

Press Release Cecilia Danell
Talbot Gallery Studios, 51 Talbot Street, Dublin 1.
Tel: 01 8556599
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The Consoling Dream Necessity
Cecilia Danell at Talbot Gallery Studios
January 11th – February 4th 2012

Cecilia Danell is a Swedish artist based in Galway. Her work focuses on questions concerning identity, dealing with such themes as perception of the self and sensations of otherness. Her media spans a spectrum of painting, photography and video, all of which are utilized toward making hazy the boundary between fiction and reality. The surreal quality of her video and photographic pieces is well complemented by the installation works consisting of such materials as twigs, safety clips and folded graph paper. The potentially mundane associations these works call to mind throw into greater relief the polarity of Utopian and Dystopian landscapes, and the notion that what we regard as personal can have universal connotations.

Danell studied at the Galway-Mayo Institute of Technology, where she obtained a first class honours degree in Fine Arts (2007-2008) having first achieved her Bachelors Degree in Art & Design with Distinction (2004-2007). As well as featuring in innumerable exhibitions and publications, she has received several awards since completing her college education, including the Arts Council of Ireland Project Award 2011, which is funding her upcoming show here at the Talbot. She is also the 2011 winner of the Wexford Arts Centre Emerging Artist Award.

We are delighted to have this opportunity to further promote Danell’s work. Her upcoming show is comprised of a new body of work geared toward a personal search for meaning, dealing with contemporary life as coloured by her Scandinavian heritage and upbringing. With her inspiration largely deriving from our physical encounter with the landscape and the merging of the outer environment with the inner being, Danell’s exhibition promises to elaborate the metaphorical act whereby the two are made interchangeable.

Talbot Gallery & Studios
Tue – Fri 10.30 – 5pm
Saturdays: 11 – 4pm
www.talbotgallery.com
eventsonthecorner.blogspot.com

I am also commissioning writer Michaele Cutaya to write a piece for the project. She writes regularly for Circa and is a part of the research project Fugitive papers together with Fiona Woods and James Merrigan. I am very pleased to have her on board!

Yesterday I was in Dublin and attended the preview of VUE: National Contemporary Art Fair in the RHA. It is running this weekend until the 6th November and is a showcase for all the main commericial galleries in the country. I am being represented by the Talbot Gallery in the fair. The turn out was great and there was a lot of great work on show, including work by artists such as Alice Maher, Damien Flood, Philippa Sutherland and Micky Donnelly.

Today I’ve visited a couple of the venues for this year’s Tulca Season of Visual Art here in Galway. Curated by Megs Morley this time around. I am not showing any work myself this year, but Tulca is always a great few weeks in the Galway visual arts calendar. I’ll be going along to the opening in the Arts Centre tonight before joining Fiona in the Forge studios, where I am to fire the clay prototypes for a part of my model set, which I will then be casting in pewter. The Forge is where Fiona has her studio, and it’s also where the kiln is located, since there are a number of ceramic artists working there.

I recently completed the second out of two large paintings for the Dublin show, I also have some smaller pieces I made over the summer, so the painting work is done, so now I’m concentrating on manufacturing the model set. Also, there will be an open studio event here in Engage studios on the 19th November as part of Tulca, do come along if you happen to be in Galway.

The title for the piece is “Range Lat: +58.663979 Lon: +15.099152“. Type the coordinates into google maps and you’ll get the exact location of the intervention. I was working with ideas of mapping out space, of using caution tape to mark the danger zone within range of a particular hunters’ shelter but also to use the tape to track the eye movement of the viewer . I had found the shelter when I walked in the woods last October and had been intrigued by the fact that there was an orange modernist chair inside of it. I had thought of working with the shelter in some way since then and this proved to be the perfect opportunity.

It was a joy to work with Mary Conlon, who is an excellent curator, and the exhibition, which included work by Tim Acheson, David Beattie, Karl Burke, Cecilia Danell, Angela Fulcher, Dana Gentile, Ann Maria Healy, Clare Lymer, Laura McMorrow and Victoria McCormack was praised for being interesting and cohesive. A recent review written by Michaele Cutaya can be read here: http://www.showerofkunst.com/2011/07/hammer-and-feather-experiments-in-space.html

Niland Gallery opening.

My work in the exhibition can be viewed :here:

Two out of the four images I showed in the exhibition.

Just after I came back from Sweden I received a Project Award from the Arts Council for the project “Build your own: Scandinavian Loneliness“, a flat pack series commenting on society’s promotion of happiness as a commodity. I have enlisted artist Fiona Hession, who did sculpture in college, to help me with some of the technical aspects of casting parts of the model set. I am in the middle of ordering materials and figuring out details of the production phase, and I’m delighted to have once again got the backing of the Arts Council.

A few days ago I also got a delivery of wood for two large stretchers. For those fo you who don’t know, stretchers are the wooden frames that painters stretch their canvas over. The larger one of the stretcher is roughly 130 x 160 cm in size. It’s a long time since I worked that big so I’m quite excited about getting started! Since coming back from Sweden I have also made five smaller paintings, which will form part of a larger body of work while also serving as a sort of testing ground before getting started on the larger canvases. They deal with juxtapositions between natural and man-made, modernism and romanticism, the straight line versus the free flowing organic, surrealism versus the hyper real. If this sounds confusing you can rest assured that there will be more info to follow in due course.

I have also just started off a new piece using paper clips as its main material titled “Hide #2″, so I’m about to head to a friend’s house now to use her sewing machine and prepare the ground. It will be a continuation of my work with paper clips that I did for the Live@8 at Occupy Space, Limerick in early May. (See :here:)

Myself and artist Majella Dowdican were approached some time ago about doing a collaborative wall installation for the event, so we’ve been very busy lately discussing ideas and making work. Installation will commence in Limerick on Tuesday morning to be ready for the event on Thursday evening. Our pieces will be dealing with the process of making work and ideas we’ve been exploring in the studio concerning what’s real and what is not, copying, modernist thought and most importantly – the exploration of materials and their limitations.

I don’t want to say too much before the event, but my work will include 10 000 paper clips and a tribute to one of my artist heroes. I have loved the process of really immersing myself in the exploration of materials and ideas as opposed to only making finished pieces and I’ve also done a lot of reading, which has influenced my thinking when making the work, most importantly Focault’s “The order of things”.

I’ve also made some other work lately, which I will share here on the website in time. And we’ve had a number of studio visits in Engage by different curators/artists these past few weeks including Mary Conlon, Alice Maher and Megs Morley. It’s always beneficial and interesting to have people visit the studio and get their input about the work in progress, and it gives them a better insight into how you work as an artist as well.

Anybody in Ireland is most welcome to Limerick on Thursday for what promises to be a great night, and I will put up photos documenting the event for those of you who can’t make it.

You Had Another Skin (The Super 8 Series)
New work by Cecilia Danell
February 22nd – April 2nd 2011
Opening Reception: Tuesday, February 22nd from 6pm.
EIGHT

“I held your hand. You had another skin. I believed all you told me”
– J.P Sartre, The Room

The series of paintings presented in You Had Another Skin (The Super 8 Series) are part of an ongoing body of work and look at the house as a metaphor for the psyche and the human condition, referencing Jungian dream theory.

In October 2010 Cecilia Danell travelled to Sweden and documented a number of semi-abandoned villages in rural areas, which resulte­d in the Super 8 film You had another skin. These paintings are stills from the film; every building depicted is derelict, left behind to slowly decay while silence and lost ambitions turn Utopia into Dystopia. The title holds many meanings, including the proverbial act of shedding one’s skin which points to a transition or reinvention, here seen in the transformation of a place. There is also the suggestion that the skin may act as a mask or ‘persona’, shrouding the real self, leading to the philosophical question of ‘the Other’ as being something different from us but also a possible aspect of the self – ‘you had an-other skin’.

Cecilia Danell is a Swedish artist based in Galway since 2004 and a member of Engage Art Studios. She graduated from the GMIT in 2008 with a first class honours degree in painting and was awarded Paint student of the year. She has exhibited in Ireland and the USA including group and two person shows in the Galway Arts centre, 126 Gallery, Red House Arts Center in Syracuse NY, Crow Gallery, Dublin, Claremorris Open (2007, 2010), where she was one of the 2007 prize winners, and most recently Tulca Season of Visual Arts. Danell is a recipient of an Arts Council Bursary Award for 2011.

EIGHT supports both local and international artists in a unique curatorial programme that combines high art and high food. Owner Tom Sheridan and his team are dedicated to providing a modern approach to hospitality in Galway.

The food at EIGHT is unique, hearty and sourced locally. It is produced by the legendary Michelin Star trained chef Jess Murphy. Murphy has just been named the Best Chef in Connaught 2010 by Food & Wine Magazine and 2011 Bridgestone Guide’s “Top 10 Hot Chefs to Watch”. EIGHT, Bar and Restaurant has also been ‘Highly Commended’ for the Restaurant of The Year Awards 2010 by Food & Wine Magazine and was one of the finalists for the Good Food Ireland Top Regional Member in the West Award

www.ceciliadanell.com
www.eight.ie

EIGHT, Bar & Restaurant • Galway, Ireland • 8 Dock Road, Galway • Phone: 091 565111 • Email: info@eight.ie

I am busy painting, I am working on a series of 30×40 cm paintings on board. They’re stills from my Super 8 film, I just got started on the seventh one today. I have a title for the film now. It’s called You had another skin It’s taken from a short story by J.P Sartre called “The Room”. Even if the work doesn’t have much to do with the content of the novel itself, I felt very inspired by this particular line: “I held your hand. You had another skin. I believed all you told me”. I really recommend the story, it’s about a woman who cares for her mentally ill husband, despite everybody around her wanting him to be locked away so that she can have her life back, but she doesn’t feel that she belongs to the outside world anymore, she has become merely an observer of the life that goes on below the window of their 6th floor apartment. Sometimes she secretly longs to be mad too, so that she could feel more connected to her husband.

That idea of having another skin and of shedding one’s skin really speaks to me. Below are some excerpts from my notebook, if you can read my handwriting that is…

Here are some books that I absolutely love, recommend and get a lot of inspiration from:

They are:
* The Faber book of Utopias – ed. John Carey
* Det Omedvetna (Psychology of the Unconscious) – C.G Jung
* Notes from underground and The Double – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
* The existential imagination – ed. F.R Karl and L. Hamalian
* The Bell Jar – Sylvia Plath
* Intimacy - J.P Sartre

Notebook:

A drawing of some scrap metal and machinery at Zinkgruvan mine, Sweden. Oct ‘10.

I am waiting for the Super 8 film to be transferred to DV tape. Then I’ll consider the addition of a soundtrack to the digital version. As you may or may not know Super 8 film is silent. You used to be able to buy sound film for certain cameras which enabled sound recording, but that stock was discontinued in the ’80’s so today only film stock without sound is available. I am also waiting for a couple of rolls of slide film I shot in Sweden over Christmas to return back from the lab in Leeds. Fingers crossed they haven’t got lost in the post. I shot winter woods at dusk and returned back to the semi-abandoned village Björnhammaren to shoot my favourite street of abandoned houses covered in snow. Understandably no one cares to clear away the snow there, so I had to struggle through snow up to my thighs. I’m anxious to see the result!

Also, I have made four ink drawings on primed, unstretched canvas of houses in the above mentioned street (they were completed before Christmas). They are to feature in a reunion exhibition for the GMIT graduating class of 2008 in the Lorg Printmakers Gallery, Galway in mid February. Here’s a sample:

That’s all for now!

Just over a week ago my Super 8 films arrived back from the lab in Berlin, so I’ve been reviewing footage and editing by hand, which has proven to be so much fun!

And I am also loving my newly renovated studio. I let the old carpet give way to a painted concrete floor. I did it all myself and am very pleased with the result.

I love the hands on approach to working with film. I am a great lover of medium format film cameras, Polaroid and now Super 8. But I work with digital video as well of course, and my digital SLR is invaluable when it comes to research photography, documentation of work and stop motion animation. Having said that though, editing by hand is a whole different experience to Final Cut and methods of distressing and painting on to the film can also be employed, making the medium more closely related to painting and drawing.

Yesterday I attended a professional practice seminar for visual artists at the Nun’s Island theatre in Galway. Speakers included Michael Fortune, Mark St John Ellis, Aine Phillips, Aideen Barry and others. Thank you to Maeve at Galway Arts Centre for organising such an informative and enjoyable event and to Galway City Council for sponsoring it. It was great to meet and talk to so many of my fellow artists too and the cold weather prompted us to have hot whiskeys in a nearby pub afterwards. Great day!

I also want to say thank you to all who came and saw our show in Tulca, I am very happy about the great feedback I got on my video piece and on the space and installation of the show as a whole. (See more info in the video section of this site).

Tonight there’s a fundraising disco in the Galway Arts Centre, not to be missed!

I travelled around to different villages scattered around the countryside where a mine, mill or factory has more or less been the sole employer of each community. As said companies have either down scaled or closed down the villages have changed in character and some are now almost deserted. I am interested in failed utopias, deserted places, the uneasy, tentative feeling of a place where things are more or less intact but have been left to deteriorate. I like the contrast between Utopias and Dystopias, the landscape and the built enviroment, the old and the new, hope and despair. I found a village with a deserted street of ten 1950’s style detached houses. That was my most successful find. People may draw parallels to the situation Ireland is in right now where the recession and banking crisis has resulted in many empty newly built estates.

Bona, two kilometres from my parents’ farm. The buildings have acted in turn as a reformatory for boys, a mental asylum and a refugee hotel. Now they are empty.

I have a lot of research material to process, and I’m feeling very inspired! I also have to send off my Super 8 films for developing to see how they turn out.

Shooting Super 8.

Apart from doing research I also had time to go to Stockholm for three days. I stayed with my good friend Sofia and visited her lovely vintage shop ‘Drakens Källare’ (The dragon’s cellar) in the Old Town. I went to the Museum of Modern art, Magasin 3 Stockholm konsthall and Galleri Magnus Karlsson as well and met up with my other friend Ragnhild.

Södermalm, Stockholm.

I gave a talk about my art, studying abroad and working in the Galway Tourist office at my old secondary school in Vadstena, which was fun and met up with several friends, relations and neighbours, so I got to meet a lot of people I hadn’t seen for a long time.

The weather was great for the most part of my trip and the leaves were bright yellow, so I hope the colours come out well on the Super 8. I have to say I’m very pleased with the past three weeks.

I arrived back in Galway last night and today I was thrown straight into the preparations for the Tulca season of visual art. Six artists from Engage studios, me included, have been selected by curator Michelle Browne to exhibit in a new space on merchant’s road called Niland Gallery.

I’ve made a video piece called “Travelling through” where I’m showing an alternative route out to Mutton island off the Galway coast through the causeway, as opposed to walking on it. It’s a stop motion piece that I got completed just before I went off to Sweden and it’s going to be projected on the wall. It was very painstaking to make, and involved me crawling the distance of 1km through the causeway, taking photos as I went along. I really love the exhibition space and am excited to see it all come together in the next couple of days.

Tulca (which means wave in Irish) will run from the 6th – 21st November with exhibitions, performances and lectures all over the city.

View from my hotel room.

The nice thing about this exhibition is that it’s full of juxtapositions. Claremorris is a small rural town, but for three weeks every year it gets to present some of the most relevant contemporary art this country (and places further afield) has to offer and for the curators who are used to living in busy London it’s a very different experience to what they’re used to. Given it’s high standing, the exhibition now being in it’s 33rd year, it gets submissions from recent college graduates as well as established artists. The first time I was in it I had just completed third year in college and I got to exhibit, and won an award alongside people like Susan McWilliam, who went on to represent Northern Ireland in last year’s Venice Biennale. It was a big deal for me at the time, and it was also my first exhibition outside of the college.

This year Loretto Cooney, who was in my year in college also got in, as did our former college tutor Fionna Murray and Anne O’Neill who just finished her ceramics degree this year. Fionna won this year’s top artist award (there were three prices awarded this time) so I’m really happy for her!

One of Fionna’s pieces.

Anne O’Neill’s video installation.

I should also give The Claremorris Arts committée a mention, since they’re doing such an amazing job. Marayde O’Brien is incredibly committed and hard working and it was great to see her again and they made sure we all had a great night. In the usual fashion the participating artists are first treated to a dinner in the hotel in the main street. Then it’s time to have a walk around the galleries and then there’s an opening and prize giving ceremony. I talked to Lisa, the curator, afterwards and she’s lovely. She really enjoyed the experience of adjudicating the show, which is obviously very different from being in London, and was so impressed with the standard of the work.

One of Loretto’s paintings.

The rest of the night was spent in Ward’s bar, as is tradition, and we all had a great time! Nice to talk to friend as well as new faces, and we stayed on until we were pretty much kicked out after two.

Today some of us had another proper look at the exhibition and I got to know that I had sold one of my pieces, which is always great to hear. The last time I was there I left Claremorris with only happy memories and this time was no different!

Got a photo of me with my pieces taken today before I went back to Galway. The one with the lego houses to my left sold, it’s also the image used in the catalogue.

You can see more photos from the opening in the Pictures section and I’ve created a new page for this series of paintings called “A Comment on...”