Threads of meaning Kilmaine artist Fidelma Sheridan’s first exhibition in Mayo is a fusion of past and present inspirations The Interview Denise Horan WHEN the vagaries of the artistic life threaten to become too much, Fidelma Sheridan summons a single thought to counter the negativity: the prospect of a life without art.
Since she was very young, the Kilmaine woman has known that the creative path was the one she would follow. There have been challenges along the way, the odd dark moment and a lot of hard work. And the cycle of highs and lows and in-betweens will repeat itself many times more as the journey continues. But, as the 24-year-old remarks, ‘if I didn’t love it, I wouldn’t be doing it’. Her passion for art trumps all else.
The seeds were sown early on in life. No particular time or moment stands out as the starting point; it was just always there. “It was kind of a natural thing to go into really,” she says matter-of-factly, as if all nine- and ten-year-olds in south Mayo in the mid-nineties were aspiring Picassos. They weren’t, but art was always big in the Sheridan household. Fidelma’s mother Marian dabbled in painting herself and was regularly doing courses and attending exhibitions. Imbibing from this rich fountain of interest and experience, it was little wonder that three of the five Sheridan siblings went on to study art in college.
Irish-born artist Franics Bacon once said that ‘the creative process is a cocktail of instinct, skill, culture and a highly creative feverishness’. With the instinct coming from the womb of her family, Fidelma Sheridan’s skill was the next aspect to be honed. On leaving Kilmaine National School, she travelled the daily five-mile journey for her next stage of learning in Ballinrobe Community School. There, Maura Morrin – whose flair and easy manner of imparting her love for the subject she teaches have inspired many to choose the artistic option when roads diverged – encouraged her and nurtured her blossoming talents, while trips to a Sunday school in Galway in fifth and sixth year copper-fastened her career choice.
“You have to do a portfolio there [in Galway], so you pick your best work for that. After that it was a matter of deciding where to go: the National College of Art and Design [in Dublin] or Limerick. I thought for a while that I should go to Limerick because I thought I wanted to do fashion, but then I didn’t know anything about textiles so I went for NCAD,” she says.
Ironically though, textiles was where her future lay in the NCAD. “It’s a four-year degree and you do everything in the first year and then you choose a speciality for the next three years, so I decided on textiles. You work with every type of textile for the next two years and then you specialise again in the final year. I chose embroidery.”
Contemporary embroidery, she adds, lest images of delicate doilies or colourful cushion covers should spring to mind. Unlike the traditional form, contemporary embroidery is considered an art rather than a craft and it can cover creative stitchery by hand or machine and can involve a wide range of materials besides fabric, including paper, wood, plastic and even metal.
Her work is multi-layered – both in terms of the media used and also in the themes that inspire it. The most common materials she uses are inks, watercolours, pencils, threads, hand-dyed yarns, fabric, paper, bleach and paint, with both a sewing machine and an embellisher assisting in combining them at times.
Her inspiration is drawn from many sources, one being the magic of capturing forever a moment that will otherwise pass and fade, as she outlines on her website, www.fidelmasheridan.com. “I am fascinated by fleeting moments. For me beauty lies in the unplanned ordinary instances that can be captured and turned into extraordinary art. I treasure the enchanting ephemera of the everyday world that, for most of us, slips by unnoticed.
“[I am] Inspired by these moments of great beauty and also by the fragility of existence and the erosion and eventual disappearance of our paths through life. My work symbolises many things – passing time, vulnerability, frailty and decay.”
In freezing these moments to later reproduce them on mixed-media backgrounds of paper or fabric, she takes thousands of photographs and fills dozens of notebooks and sketch books.
“I’m always taking photographs and writing down ideas. You’ll always have your pieces planned and work your way up to the final piece. A lot of my work is based on photographs of people, both from my past and from the present, fused with other materials and layered to give the look of something that is fragile and is being preserved,” she elaborates.
Her ideas from the past come mostly from family members and their surroundings. “A lot of my older work was based on an old house where my mother was born, just outside Kilmaine. I’m kind of interested in the idea of aged interiors, peeling paint, layers of wallpaper coming through. I like putting that together with a history – old letters and photographs. It preserves memories before they disappear.
“I still go back to that house for colour inspiration and texture inspiration. There’s another layer in a lot of the work inspired by the house, that has to do with maps and journeys. The house is hidden from the road, you have to crawl under a hedge to get to it, so I like the idea of treasure maps and something disappearing and being found again.”
The connection with the past has never been lost and never will be – ‘I don’t think you ever move away from what inspires you’ – but other influences, like travel – ‘I went crazy with my camera in a city in a northern Brazil where all the walls were peeling down’ – and the city she now calls home have brought a different dimension to her work. It’s the culture part of Bacon’s equation.
“The colours in my new work are different because I’m using more city colours – neons and metallics – and more daydream ideas. There are also a lot of cranes and abstract dot shapes in my new pieces because I was looking out the window of my fourth floor apartment in Dublin and looking at lots of different skyscapes,” she explains, adding that drawing on all of these influences and pulling them together is what brings variety to her work.
Three years after graduating, her first solo exhibition in Mayo is currently running at the Linenhall Arts Centre in Castlebar. Though she has exhibited jointly in Shrule in the past with local poet Colette Nic Aodha – who also opened her exhibition in the Linenhall – it is clear that allowing her work to stand alone and be judged on her home turf by a home crowd is something that excites Fidelma. Coming to an the end of its run this Friday, she is happy with the way it has been received.
“The Linenhall is fantastic and it’s so well run,” she gushes on the mention of its name. The reaction to it [her exhibition] has been very positive and I’ve already sold a couple of pieces from it. I gave a talk there last week and got some really good feedback from the people who were there, which is very encouraging,” she smiles.
Returning to live and work in Mayo is something she intends to do eventually and she is encouraged by the way her home county has embraced art in recent years and by the opportunities and level of support that now exist for people like her, conditions that didn’t prevail when her mother was young. For now though, working away with ‘creative feverishness’ in her Dublin apartment – sometimes all day, sometimes through the night, mostly juggling several different pieces at one time – constitutes happiness for Fidelma Sheridan.
She’s what she wants to be: a full-time artist. Right now, she is working part-time in the Museum of Modern Art in the capital, while doing some creative work of her own in the evenings. Other times it’s just her and her apartment and a mass of artistic materials.
Surviving as an artist can be tough, but attitude, she asserts, is everything.
“It is hard at times and you can’t expect things to come your way, you have to go out looking for them. No one comes along offering you a show, you have to keep on looking and keep on applying and just be alert to what’s going on.
“I do craft markets at the weekends as well: miniature pieces and handmade cards and stuff like that.
“Sometimes you can get into a state of mind where you think you should give up, but I think you know when you just can’t leave it behind. It’s in you and you can’t get rid of it,” she says.
