Exploring the borderlines

CAPTURING THE ENERGY Artist Breda Burns with 'Pebble Shore', one of the artworks in ‘Between Tides and Peripheries’. Pic: Dragana Jurisic

Interview
Ciara Moynihan

Stepping out the back door of Westport artist Breda Burns’ house is like stepping into an artwork. Clew Bay opens up around and in front of you, majestic, fluid, muddy, wild. The shallows of low tide reveal an undulating mass of silt, rock, seaweed and algae. High tide waters, driven by whims of weather and season, bob, throb, roar. The soundscape laps and crashes; caws, whips and shrills. It’s a world’s edge.
And it’s this idea of the edge—of boundary and margin—coupled with the ebb and flow of tidal brine where ‘Europe ends and the Atlantic begins’ that informs Breda’s current exhibition of new work, ‘Between Tides and Peripheries’. The show was officially opened in Claremorris Gallery on Saturday night last by fellow artist, Dr Dragana Jurisic, who herself recently exhibited in Mayo as part of the Westport Arts Festival.
A multimedia exhibition, it contains 21 panoramic photographic works, eight large ink and pigment drawings, five smaller wire drawings, two acrylics and a video incorporating time-lapse and film footage.

Vocation
Breda’s interest in art was first awakened by the children’s art programme ‘Let’s Draw with  BlΡithín’, which aired on RTÉ in the late ’60s and early ’70s. “I’d be watching it on the telly, and my mother used to say it was the only time I’d turn my back to the television,” Breda laughs. “I’d get the cornflake box or whatever … and I’d draw with a knife—BlΡithín used to be big on palette knives at the time – I used to get the kitchen knife and do whatever she did!
“And there was also Sr Pius in the Sacred Heart School, where I went. She was great, very encouraging and continues to be so – she’ll come to shows or let you know how you’re getting on.”
Breda went on to study art in Sligo and just last year returned to GMIT to do an honours degree in sculpture. Previous exhibitions have included solo shows like ‘Constant Web’, ‘Friendly Shadows’ and ‘Chasin’ Space’, as well as group shows, such as the recent ‘Off the Wall’, which grew out of a six-week GMIT residency, and ‘Overlap’, which was hosted by Áras Éanna Arts Centre on the Aran Island of Inis Oirr.
Many also know her from the popular Westport Radio programme, The Arts Show, which she co-hosts with GrΡinne O’Reilly on Sunday afternoons.

Shift
Those familiar with Breda’s body of work will instantly notice a shift in the art on display in Claremorris. For one thing, gone are the written words that so marked much of her previous work.
“In ways the pieces in this exhibition – and it was not my intention – they’re landscapes or seascapes. They don’t appear with any writing across them, but I hope the messages that I was writing are still there, and that people can add their own – because that’s the whole point of it.”
Breda worked on the show’s concept for some time before it took shape in her mind, and much of that work was done within the creative space given to her by two artist residencies.  
“I would have put the thought processes into them during the residencies,” she explains. “One residency was at Noelle Campbell-Sharp’s international artists’ retreat, Cill Rialaig in County Kerry, the other was at Sheila Flanagan’s self-run ArtFarm near Ballygar in east Galway. I did the preliminary drawings and stuff there, pulling ideas apart. And that’s half the work of creating.”
The plein air movement, whereby artists work outdoors while rendering the scenes in front of them to canvas, has also had a strong impact on Breda’s recent work.
“Some of the work in the exhibition would have been started in the plein air way, and then brought home where I continued to work at them—but that energy of the outside work hopefully stays.”
Breda’s interest in energy was first sparked by one of the artists she now cites as a major influence, Francis Bacon. “I was lucky enough to see a Francis Bacon show when he was still alive, and every one [of the artworks] looked like he was gone for five minutes and he’d be back – it looked like he was still working on them.
“It was the freshness and the energy I was drawn to, and it’s something I’ve always wanted to do. And I think I’m maybe getting close to it. That expressive and emotive feeling we all have, to put that into something and have elements of recognisability. That’s always been my aim. And I keep ploddin’ away at that.”
Other influences include contemporary Irish artists Clare Langan and John Gerrard, as well as her own peers locally. “I must admit too there’s a lovely artist community around, and even though we don’t sit around talking about art, we do engage with each other and that support of other artists is so important.”
Indeed, Breda is quick to stress that the support of all her friends and her family—her brother Joseph, and her sisters Clare and Mary—has also been invaluable, as was a materials grant she received from Mayo County Council’s Arts Office and the support of Claremorris Gallery’s Rosemary Noone.

Inside out
One of the central aspects of ‘Between Tides and Peripheries’ is a short video shot by Westport-based Frank O’Reilly, with the invaluable support of ‘gofer’ Kathleen Foley. During the piece, a frenetically paced time-lapse video, created using 1,400 stills, gives way to a slower, black-and-white film section towards the end.
It was shot without break over six hours at ‘the mud flats’ of low tide out behind Breda’s edge-of-the-world house. Breda is depicted standing in the bay, painting on three canvases. The tide comes in, the boundaries between earth and sea alter, and slowly the artist becomes submerged, while the artworks rise with the water and remain afloat.
“The mudflats here at the quay are constantly changing … I love the way the light just keeps reflecting on the mud and then reflects on the water. I thought, ‘Wouldn’t it be lovely just to engage with that?’. The important bit is the landscape, and I’m a little bit in it.”
The other elements of the exhibition chime in with this exploration of boundary, each bringing their own moment of peripherality. “All the paintings—one’s a path, one’s a boundary field, one’s the edge of the ocean—they’re all edges. It’s about us being on edge as people and the constantly changing borders of the world, internal and external.”
In many ways the landscape that first inspired ‘Between Boundaries and Peripheries’—the mudflats of Westport Quay at the mouth of Clew Bay—encapsulate that internal/external dichotomy for Breda in a very personal way, allowing her to ‘look in, in order to look out’.
For her, that landscape is at once intimately familiar and vastly unknowable. It is a world she grew up beside and now lies within touching distance of her home, but it is also the gateway to another world, a massive expanse of ocean separating the landmasses of two continents. And the energy created by the sway and interplay of all of those borders has proved very fertile ground.

‘Between Boundaries and Peripheries’, an exhibition of new work by Breda Burns, will run at Claremorris Gallery, Mount Street, Claremorris, until Saturday, November 12 (and until November 18 by appointment). For more information, visit www.claremorrisgallery.com.