About Debbie Godsell
Debbie is a visual artist and art educator. Her work is primarily lens based, but has evolved to include sculptural forms and video.
A graduate of Crawford College of Art and Design and Limerick School of Art and Design, she is a member of Cork Printmakers. In 2018, she was shortlisted for the Zurich Portrait Prize. She has won many awards and her work is in public collections, including the National Gallery of Ireland, the OPW, and the Crawford Art Gallery.
The full interview is available on the podcast and on YouTube. Below is some of the conversation between Éadaoin and Debbie.
About Art College
I thought art college was going to be splashing paint on canvas…So I nearly had an art attack, I didn’t even realize there were the fundamentals. I would say I probably wasted my first three years of art college [in Limerick College of Art and Design] drinking and having a good time…not listening to art history. I probably came to my senses in third year and then I had to very quickly catch up. …after my third year, I took a year out and then I went to the Crawford to do my degree. And they had Photoshop. I couldn’t believe it. They seemed to be a lot more progressive at the time.
Love of printmaking
I was really drawn to the photographic image as such, more lens based things. Because of Photoshop, I was able to scale up. I got really hooked in with print.
Teaching printmaking
Now that I teach print making myself, I can definitely spot the students who I think will take to print pretty much straight away.
What kind of person is drawn to print?
I always say we’re, speaking for myself, probably slightly ADHD as in, it’s just a lovely area where you can explore an image over and over again. There’s a million, trillion possibilities with print.
It’s somebody who [is] open to the surprises that it can throw up as well. It’s that sort of ta da moment when you pull a print off a press, or you screen print something, and you don’t know exactly how it’s going to turn out. It’s never ending, you could take one image in print and screen print, especially which is the area I specialise in, and you could explore it in 50,000 different ways and I suppose I love that.
I love that you’re not just done with an image. You’re not just finished with it at the first go. So people who know my work, I’ll reuse imagery over the years. I might revisit something that I used 10 years ago and it might pop up again in a new body of work. I love that flexibility as well with print.
I could give everybody a screen printing class and they’ll all end up doing completely different work. Which is what I love about it.
On Waste of Materials
When I learned printmaking in college, it was really technical. You have to learn the proper way to print and how to make these perfect editions. You might have, 10 or 20 images of the same thing, which I suppose is the principle of printmaking. It’s about editioning an image you might have 10 prints that might be 500 euro instead of one painting that would be 5, 000 euro. So they’re more accessible.
Over time, I found that very wasteful. I didn’t like having 10 of the same image. I found it quite boring as well. And I struggled with the technical side of it. Then I started to break the rules and, mess things up a bit and print on canvas and print on board and, put prints out in the rain and scrub into them and wash them away.
Breaking the Rules
I would very much bring that into my teaching practice as well with the students. I try and ensure that they learn how to do something correctly, but then very quickly break the rules because, in my world, life is too short to have a studio full of editions of the same thing.
My practice has changed a lot anyway. I think there’s a lot of waste involved in art. There can be a lot of waste involved in printmaking as well.
Stack
You might have seen from the work I started doing in 2020, actually it was a work called Stack that was acquired by the Crawford for the National Collection.
I made that by literally tearing up… around a hundred prints from my archive, and repurposing them into a new artwork, so they were all compressed together into these turf briquette shapes. I really love that idea of making something new from something old, and making a new work of art.
But I haven’t used any new materials in that. That idea of repurposing is coming into the work a lot more now. Just being a bit more mindful with the environment. I’m not an environmentalist as such but I’ve started to try and maybe use less framing as I said, do less editions, maybe repurpose things a bit more.
And I feel if all artists did that, even a small bit, if you change one small thing in your practice, it will make a big difference to the amount of waste out there. I don’t mean artist waste, I just mean materials. For a long time I would have printed on the back of images. I would have turned, the page over and you might often get a print where there’s something on the other side. Just little things like that.
your work is inspired by our relationship with the land. When did that start happening and how did that inspire you?
I live in rural Macroom we moved here 20 years ago. This area is very unvisited and, there’s an energy out here that you can really feel when you walk the hills. And it completely impacted my work. So when we moved out here first I’d lost my older brother. He’d taken his own life and we moved here a couple of months after he died. And actually living out here became such a huge part of the healing process. For It’s just walking the hills and feeling the land and, the watching the seasons change, the repetitive, just that cycle of life became very healing for me.
And then because of that, I became very interested in things like psychogeography and folklore, custom and belief, anything to do with the land. And all of that has fed into my work since it’s really enriched it. I think the clatter of the city too, it’d be too noisy in the city for me to make the kind of work that I make here.
I could work it out. I could work the grief out. It’s a form of therapy in a way. I’m not saying that art is therapy, but it really helped me to get through that dark period. I have to say just the land itself. You realize that there are bigger things than us at work and so I became interested in liminal places and maybe the thin veil between worlds and all those ideas.
There’s also something about the sense of loss within the land in your work and our complicated colonial relationship as Irish people
I started a project in the Harvest Thanksgiving, which is a Church of Ireland custom. And that’s, that was a huge body of work that I did. .There is an archival element to all the work that I make. And I’m not really interested in things in a romantic, nostalgic way that, Oh, it was better, years ago and life was more simple.
I think life was really hard back then. And I’m glad. we don’t live. Especially for women that we don’t have all that work to do that they would have done then. So yeah, that, that would have been the gates and the turf mounds. They’re all sort of colonial markers alright. Things to do with the land and boundaries and keeping out and keeping in.
And of course turf was used as a tithe to pay the church often when people didn’t have any money. I started this. Harvest Thanksgiving series because I am from a Church of Ireland background myself.
The wrong side of history
There’s a sense of being slightly other that still exists today, I think there’s books called, different, but the same and Irish, but not Irish, that sort of idea that that if you’re a member of the Church of Ireland, especially in the early 20th century in Ireland, that you might have been considered more English than Irish.
I set out to document the Harvest Thanksgiving custom because it hadn’t been documented anywhere. So when the National Folklore Collection had started their school’s collection of stories – they were collecting stories about customs, folklore, and belief from all these school children in Ireland in the 30s. And they, they didn’t really collect them from the Church of Ireland.
So there was a huge gap in their collection, which they’ve acknowledged now, they’re working really hard to fill. I realised that they’d nothing on the Church of Ireland Thanksgiving custom. And I worked with Deirdre Nuttal, who is a folklorist who wrote a Protestant folk history that I was really interested in.
So I set out to document as many Harvest Thanksgivings that I could, because when I looked in the National Library there was nothing there. The National Folklore Collection had very little. The Museum of Country Life had nothing either.
I worked with Richard Wood, who’s a Church of Ireland farmer based in Dripsey about half an hour from me. So I photographed his oat fields and his barley fields as they grew through the year. And then every year Richard cuts sheaves and he takes them to his local Church of Ireland for the Thanksgiving.
And then the chair, I just had this idea that I had discovered this amazing set of chairs in a local antique shop. And the day that I bought them, I dragged them up to Richard’s farm and across the field on my back with his wife, Pam, and I photographed them and I called it notions because As I was making the project and interviewing people and talking to anybody who wanted to talk to me about their perception of the Church of Ireland, a lot of people had these notions about the Church of Ireland being, they used terms like the Landed Gentry still the ascendancy, and I, I was saying personally, I don’t know anyone from a big house.
I don’t know anyone who was a member of the ascendancy. So I was interested that all these notions still existed. And that’s what the piece became then. I think it just summed it up perfectly that you’ve got this sort of posh looking chair and this very this beautiful oatfield and that they might have represented a sort of almost a class system that would have existed.
But I was very interested in trying to find in the project, the ordinary Protestant, not this perception of the colonial. landed gentry, ascendancy elite, but the people who would have come over as workers and maids and farriers and farmers like even saying to somebody that there was a massive amount of tenant farmers.
In West Cork that belonged to the Church of Ireland. And this person couldn’t believe it. They couldn’t believe that, the Church of Ireland were tenant farmers. There’s a lot of holes in our history and a lot of sort of spaces that I’m interested in getting in there and exploring. Some of the topics are a little bit.
Awkward and contentious to do with politics and identity and nationality and what makes a person more Irish than the other. And during the whole project I discovered that my own ancestors I got as far as 1620. So my ancestors would’ve come over in the first wave of Elizabethan colonies.
Pre Cromwell and settled around East Cork and Waterford and I was really interested in that, because I guess technically I’m from the wrong side of Irish history. There’s a lot of artists making work about colonialism and and and where it is now, how it sits now. And I was interested in.
Where do I fit in the story?
Where do I fit in that story? How do I fit in there as somebody who comes from potentially the wrong side? That’s a much more difficult space to navigate. That’s fascinating. I have never thought about this before. And it’s really interesting that we have this bias and bigotry because I’m familiar with those stories.
I’m making loads of heads and figures. I’m trying to imagine my early ancestors, and I’m trying to imagine why they came here.
Were they developers, were they seeking a new opportunity? Were they escaping persecution in England? Did they hurt anyone? Did they take things that weren’t theirs to take? I don’t know. But we’re still here, so they must have been really tenacious.
Because those times were awful in Ireland, for people to live. It was a really vicious time in history. I’ve had to do an awful lot of historical research myself, because I didn’t know anything about the Church of Ireland’s history in Ireland. I think when we did it in school, it was history light.
I was reading some stories in folklore and it was like, oh, if you’re, and I think it was in a book in Irish vernacular furniture, but it was something like, if you’re, your butter won’t churn or your eggs are, your hens aren’t laying it’s definitely the fault of a local witch or hag or protestant woman. It was basically because there was something unusual in the area.
Can you tell us about Harvest Thanksgiving?
Yeah. I grew up going to harvest Thanksgivings and I thought every church did them. I didn’t realize they were exclusive to the Church of Ireland until I, I read Deirdre Nuttall’s book and she had interviewed lots and lots of Church of Ireland members and all those transcripts are archived in the National Folklore Collection. So I went and I read them. They all talk about the Harvest Thanksgiving so fondly, because I think it was, as Deirdre says, it’s a performative way of showing how much they loved and cherished the land in a public way, in a safe way.
It was a way for the community to meet up. You might have had maybe Methodists in the Church of Ireland going to each other’s Thanksgivings, and they might try and jam as many in. They were called the autumn manoeuvres.
The Harvest Thanksgiving, it’s, it is relatively new, 1840 in England, 1843, it started over there when a clergyman brought it into the church in Cornwall.
It was a pagan thing originally, and then it was a huge festivity every year and there was a lot of drinking and dancing and celebration. The church always seems to take these things and try and sanitize them by bringing them inside the church, but that’s what they did.
And it took off like mad then, but it didn’t come to Ireland for another 60 years. So if you think about that period of time in between celebrating the harvest in England and Ireland, there was the famine here. So you couldn’t have a harvest Thanksgiving in Ireland if there was no harvest. It came to Ireland in 1901, I think, and then it took off.
So it’s still been practiced today. It literally is giving thanks to God for the produce of the year. And that’s what it is. It started in biblical times and we’re still doing it now. But when I look at the imagery. I can’t help but see these pagan [imagery] They look sacrificial. The harvest has been celebrated for 4,000 years, with corn dollies and different customs with the last sheaf.
The last sheaf
The last sheaf [known as] the cailleach. That’s where the spirit of the corn would have traditionally resided. And that might have been taken into the farmer’s house and hung over the table for the year to bring good luck to the house.This tradition it’s in England. It’s all over Europe. It’s not just an Irish tradition and then ploughed back into the land the next year for the luck of the harvest.
And it was really powerful. You’re just sitting in the field. And it’s waving around in a breeze and you do feel like there is a spirit there. I’m not really that spiritual, you felt a presence. I think it was very powerful.
Photographing the harvest festival
I didn’t want to interfere with [the photographs]. I just wanted them to be what they were. I didn’t want to Photoshop them and, make it the black and white and, make them something that they weren’t. Some of them were really ornate. So some of the newer ones have become very floral, lots of floral displays.
But my favourite one, I think was in Cora in Skibbereen. St. Mary’s, which had the basket of turf in the hall and just a simple oat sheaf. And then these orchard apples were lined up all around, the church and the sides.
Some of the churches had produce from Lidl. If you think about our produce globally, where it’s coming from. The project was really interesting from that sense. When you were just looking at it as a food, where is the food coming from?
Those photographs are now archived at the National Folklore Collection. I think there was 145 in the entire collection. So in 100 years, they’ll be able to see some of the churches were using imported carrots and imported, there’s sweet potato and pineapples and things that aren’t grown locally.
In Baltimore, there was a lot of fishing nets. I thought it was interesting, they were referencing the harvest from the sea and they had some very expensive bottle of wine there as well. And they had like little packets of organic oats, so it was more upmarket harvest.
It was beautiful, absolutely stunning church as well. So they were, they all had their own little, and then the further we went into October more pumpkins were appearing and it became more Halloweeny, which was really interesting that a Lunasa harvest was meeting Samhain, the quarters were colliding.
The artist approach
I’m not a folklorist and, as an artist, we research in a really funny ways. We’re looking for the in between bits or, I might just grasp on a word or a sentence and that might become a whole body of work.
Will you continue this project?
I would love to grow it. I’d love to do the whole of Ireland but I’d probably need a team. Because even doing the fourteen that I did here, they all happen at the same time. So it was driving around all of West Cork for two months. I was really exhausted at it, even just trying to get that amount.
I think it will be a life project, that I’ll just spread out slowly, or I might connect with other artists who can help me document the ones that happen up the country.
Stray Sod
I loved your piece Stray Sod, which The Crawford acquired, and I saw it recently in the Bodyworks exhibition. Can you tell us about the folklore?
The perceived belief is that, the Church of Ireland are really practical and they don’t believe in, in these things, you don’t believe in, fairies and piseogs and things, but actually, as I was going around talking to people, they did.
The stray sod I was really drawn to that actually because I felt it really reflected modern life. A lot of these stories, if you look at them, they can give you a lot of context for how we live today. [If] you stand in a stray sod, it might be, an unmarked grave or a fairy pathway or something, and you become extremely disorientated.
There’s tons and tons of these stories available in the National Folklore Collection. And to remedy the situation, you might reverse your coat or put it on backwards, and then the natural world returns to the way it should be. So I made that work during COVID, so I felt it really reflected that.
disorientation that was happening in the world. If only we could, if only we could have reversed our coats or turned our coats inside out and the known world returned. Wouldn’t it be a lovely thing? And I think that idea of the stray sod, I will return to it. I’m not done with it yet.
It’s my son, Milo, my son he doesn’t model for me anymore, but I think he might’ve been 11 when I made that. That was his last session with me anyway.
I took it in a stone circle that’s just in the field behind the house. Yeah, and the technique then it’s just using dye and decolorant. It gives you that sort of broken screen printed .. that particular technique suited that particular topic really well.
[The stray sod] could be an unbaptised grave from a child or it could be a famine grave. That’s in the lore. .. it’s happened to a lot of people. I’m driving home on a road that I’ve always driven on, and and for a moment I don’t know where I am. .. I might be tired or something, that moment where the world slips. Everything is different just for a split second. I love that idea that things aren’t fixed as we know it. We think they’re fixed, but they’re not. So just a slight shift in reality will change your worldview. And that was really alive in Ireland, maybe up to a hundred years ago, where people really appreciated that there was maybe another world existing over this world and there was just a very thin veil between the two and often slippages over.
And I think that thinking really returned in COVID when people were looking for maybe their own church, but be it meditation or cosmology or something like that that sort of belief in different layers in reality definitely returned. And you can actually see that in a lot of the art college.
I think at the moment the student shows a lot of stuff has to do with cosmology and maybe other belief systems. So I think it had an effect on artists, definitely, including myself, obviously.
Your work has moved into evolving into sculpture. Can you tell us about Kneeler?
They’re called Hassocks, but people would refer to them as Kneelers. I didn’t know that they were unique to the Church of Ireland either. I thought they were in all churches, but they’re not.
So I made my own and they have printed alongside the side of them, Don’t Make a Fuss, and that would have been a huge sort of unspoken thing in the Church of Ireland, even in my time growing up, was, just don’t make a fuss, don’t draw any attention to yourself and I think a lot of that would have come post independence after, especially the troubles around West Cork, just don’t talk about what happened, just put the head down, don’t draw attention, and the Church of Ireland community maybe became a little inward looking then, sort of protectionism evolved, and so they’re church kneelers, but they’re built up like a turf reek.
I did take some hassocks and take them to a bog and build them like a reek of turf as well. Again, I was thinking of the tide and, mountain tops and lunasa and all the other huge layers of ideas that come with turf and mountains and reeks.
Are they printed on material?
They’re printed on calico. My friend Joan Hickson sewed them and I can’t sew, which is unfortunate because I’m so drawn to the textiles recently, and I’m using it a lot more in my work.
I have to employ people to give me a hand, or else I have to find the time to learn sewing machine techniques myself, eventually. So Joan helped me, and so we built 30, so I’m hoping to progress that idea on for the show next year and maybe have a much bigger Turf reek of Hassocks, Hassock Heap and each time you make it.
The sculpture you make, is it different?
People were messing around with them. I could see every time I went in that people had moved around and that’s okay. That was the same with the sack stack piece I made in the Crawford when it was showing in the Sirius, the one that the Crawford collected. It would occasionally have been rearranged.
I love that idea that, so it’s sandwiched together, and I’ve made a lot of work where I made a big piece on a stand, a continuous screen print.
It’s called Going Over Old Ground. And it took me a year to print it. But you actually can’t see most of the imagery because it’s underneath. I printed it on both sides. And I love that idea that you can’t see what’s there, just like you can’t see what’s there. underneath your feet and all the layers of things going down and all the history and all the stories and you can’t see that you just have to guess at it.
A non confrontational discussion
It’s a play on the two things together, so religion and turf together, the Church of Ireland and again, the turf tithes and the, the difficulties around maybe the history of the Church of Ireland because before the church was dissolved from Ireland, everybody had to pay a tithe, whether you were a Protestant or not.
It was dreaded. It was really resented, understandably. So all of those layers are embedded into the harvest work, but the harvest Thanksgiving was a really friendly way to get into that discussion in a non confrontational because things were the way they were history has passed, but I think we can learn a lot from it going forward.
I like to draw, using the ancestral to almost predict the future in a way. So it was a friendly way of getting into a really sticky conversation that hasn’t.
Teaching of history
So I remember being very, it was confusing as to what version of Ireland we were in. Even when I was doing history, we’d be like. Yeah, England bad, Ireland good, and I used to be England bad because I was Irish, but then not really, but actually in some people’s view, I wasn’t as Irish as them.
Yes. And I didn’t understand that when I was, and I got like a B in honours history. But my ignorance, I didn’t actually even know who Cromwell was. Because Cromwell was bad also. He was also, he was very, I can’t remember. He was bad. That this black and white narrative.
And I have discovered you can’t just read one history book, you have to read 50 and you have to get all these different views and opinions, because they’re all different. And there is a lot of revisionism going on. But I guess Michael D Higgins calls it, what does he call it, ethical remembering, it wasn’t all as as was written post independence, that narrative became very black and white.
I’m not interested in the black and white, I’m interested in everything in between, I think.
Unconscious prejudice
I actually think what’s been the best thing for me about making this body of work, because we did an open discussion with Sarah Kelleher and Deirdre Nuttall, the author of the book different from the same. And everyone had a story [about unconscious prejudice]. People used to say that to me all the time. We used to live next to Protestants and actually they were very nice, you’re thinking, of course, they were, why wouldn’t they have been very nice? I think it’s a more difficult because of our perceived privileged history.
I’m just trying to ask questions and hear people’s responses.
So often you feel like you can’t discuss it. You have no right to discuss it. Don’t make a fuss. Don’t make a fuss. Just don’t go there. But I’m okay going there now, it’s taken me a long time. I’m saying, I’m not trying to, I’m just trying to say, I’m not trying to say anything. I’m just trying to ask questions and hear people’s responses.
Would you consider writing something to accompany it or having somebody to write something to give more information?
Definitely. But I wanted to be very respectful. I thought that was really important for this first part of the project called Flail, which I showed in Court Printmakers because people were letting me into their lives and into their churches.
I wanted to be respectful and let the community see that I’m doing this in a respectful way. So the next show then it’s going to be more about what we’ve discussed now, I think, and my own history maybe.
Visuals are a great way of doing that because visuals do draw people in. I think I’d just prefer to use my own story, maybe my own family history. I’m happy to do open discussions and I’m going to be working with Cristin Leach on the next show as well. She’s going to write some text and I think we’ll probably write what we were just discussing maybe. That would be very interesting.
Tell us about your new work – the heads
I’ve spent those kind of three months Trying to line up what I’ll be making for the show next year because I will be returning to teaching in September.
I like to have the sort of nuts and bolts worked out in the summer. I can make slowly and calmly then when I’m working when the structure of work is returned. I wanted to use fabric. I wanted to refer to the harvest. Again, I started trying to imagine my ancestors who were, I think, Amos and John and James and all these guys that are referenced in actually the Trinity depositions from 1641.
I was trying to imagine my ancestors and I started making these heads because I don’t know anything about them.
I don’t know obviously what they were like or why they came here and that’s how that started. They definitely refer to corn dollies and the effigies that would have been made around the harvest as well. They’ll be a starting point for the new show as well. And I guess I’m thinking about folk theatre and characters, thinking about characters from history.I’ve got my lady writer I’ll have my lady painter, because a lot of the aristocracy went painting the harvests. And I have my peasants and my various characters that I’ve developed and it was entirely accidental, but I think the topic is so enormous. This is the way it’s bubbling out for me, if that makes sense.
Over the summer when you’re not teaching is your time where you can have this creative freedom to be in the studio. What’s your week like come September when you’re working full time teaching print?
I teach prints and drawing and painting. I would work the weekends and the evenings a lot. And I guess there’s a structure in place when I return to work. I know what time I have. And when you take that structure away in the summer, everything goes really blobby.
I’ve just learned to work in this way. I have to teach, the teaching I do enjoy it. I learn a lot from the students to find it really enriching, but it pays the mortgage as well. And so it’s just that balance. And I’m a parent.
Planning
I just schedule everything out. I work really hard. I might go in and I’ll have all my heads and things planned out and I could get a lot of done and, over a couple of weekends and in the printmakers or a couple of evenings.
Studio
I have a small home studio. It’s not that big. And it’s actually jam packed at the moment and I use my kitchen table more and more as well. I just love working in my house. So I’m hot spotting around the printmakers and Cork and my home. My kitchen, my big kitchen table, and my studio outside then.
How do you start?
For the last year and a half, I’ve just read so much history. And every book there is to read about Irish history, and every book there is to read about Irish folklore, so it all bubbles around in my head.
I just found myself making these heads, like literally stuffing them and pinning them and gluing them together. I just went with it, you just have to go with it, and often you’re trying to push a different idea that you think is, going to be the work, but this little side idea that you’re playing with in a more playful way will actually become the work and the big idea won’t.
I’m also going to be developing the video work on a bit more as well. The actions of flailing and threshing that, that physical performative thing has become very important in the work.
What’s the best advice you were given as an artist and also what advice you give your students if it’s different or you give to anybody listening?
I think I get a lot of other advice, really good advice from fellow artists. So I think it’s really important to be in a network, or be in the printmakers, or be part of a group, because just the chats are really helpful. And I think if you’re just working alone, you can get really stuck in your own head.
Love the mistakes
Also love the mistakes. Make the mess, make the rubbish. 90% of it I think is rubbish. You have to keep persevering before the good stuff comes out. And for years and years I felt like I was, paddling in the wrong direction to everyone else.
I wasn’t really conforming to maybe gallery work or commercial work too much. I seem to be just, I don’t know, my work fitted, didn’t fit in anywhere, but it was the work that I had to make. It was the truth to me. So I just make your own work, just stick with it. If it’s the right work to make, don’t follow try not to follow what’s current at the time or trends.
That’s harder for younger artists, but it does take this long. My work was only bought by the Crawford in 2020, I think. I was 48, maybe. So it took that long.
Did that mean a lot to you? That acquisition?
Oh yeah, especially in your hometown. It was a huge validation. Their support has been amazing. It hugely validated my practice because every artist as far as I know, just talking to people, you’re full of self doubt and self loathing at times and wondering what you’re doing and why you’re doing it. And there’s this weird compulsion to make all the time.
And it can get very frustrating if you can’t make, and you’re thinking life would be so much easier if I wasn’t an artist and I was just a teacher. Why do I have this self doubt? But it’s a really great way to work out the world. I think it’s just a really great way to express or yeah, just to unpick things that are happening in your life.
So just make the work that you have to make, and eventually if you keep on making it, things will start happening. It doesn’t happen overnight. I see a lot of younger artists who win a lot of prizes after their degree year and. They might be really everywhere for a year and then nothing, it’s very hard to keep the momentum going.
Female artists – we’re in the background. We’re parenting and we’re caring for people and we’re working and we’re doing all these other things as well. Think for a long time there was a perception that art had to be big and huge.
And I think with age, it’s okay to make little heads in the kitchen table. That’s as valid as making a huge big public sculpture. It’s just, you find your way to work. You find, you need to find your way of working and it mightn’t be anybody else’s way of working.
Zurich Portrait Prize
I was really interested in portraiture. I still am, but I think it’s just naturally evolved on from then.
That was Milo looking through a prism and, he’s got four eyes and that’s, it’s, it was, neurodivergent the way the world sees you, the way you see the world. And it was an image that I made really quickly, like it was done in a day.
Rejection
I’ve entered the Zurich a few times since, and I haven’t been successful. So you just never know. Again, you just got to keep applying for things and. And don’t take the rejections too personally and just. Keep going.
I’ve moved away from that kind of work again, but I think that’s the way art goes.
For me it’s always going to ebb and flow and it definitely reflects what’s going on in my life. I think it’s very autobiographical, the work that I make.
What are your least favourite jobs as an artist?
I think most artists will say the old arts council applications. I don’t apply every year because I got a visual arts bursary last year. I was really lucky. That enabled me to make Flail and it enabled me to pay for help with video because I didn’t know how to use editing tools or make videos.
It was a solid month to fill out the application form. So they’re a little bit daunting and I’ve met people who’ve had a 14 rejections in a row. They’ve been successful in the 15th one. So it’s just all so objective. You just don’t know who’s reading your application and what they’re looking for.
So you just gotta keep applying for things. And it’s like for every 10 rejections, you might get one, or you might think, Oh, nothing’s happening. I’ve had a whole string of rejections and you’ll get something into your inbox inviting you to be in something. So you just gotta hang on in there.
Who are your art heroes?
Louise Bourgeois I use her as a teaching tool a lot, her work. I just love her textile work in particular. And, her work is, it’s not, it appeals to a lot of my more mature students as well, they can identify themselves, I can identify myself in her work a lot.
But I went to see the Tate Modern recently, art, I think it was art and society, and I came across a really amazing artist called Ana Lupas, a Romanian artist who works with straw structures that she started making in the 60s. And I just, really attracted to her, if it’s sculptural work more than her photographic work.
There are also Agnes Denes who did the, Wheatfield in Manhattan. Her work reminds me of Dorothy Cross. Their work is so simple. It’s just so simple. Yet it’s packs a punch and it, what I like about their work as well as that it’s not frightening to people who don’t come from an art background, it’s accessible to everyone.
Everyone’s going to walk away from that work and have a reaction. So that they’re the kind of artists I’d be drawn to.
We actually talked about this a little bit before we started recording about the importance of art being accessible and how sometimes the language can be intimidating. As an art educator is that something you talk to your students about?
One of their projects is to write an artist statement so we look a lot at artist statements and you know I have noticed over the last two years there’s definitely a return to the simple artist statement just in plain English because for a while there, it just became a little bit of a joke, the artist statement, but it’s very difficult for a student who’s just learning to make work to write about their work.
It’s very hard. I actually hate writing artist statements myself because you’re like, how do I compress all this one paragraph. .. I don’t like being hemmed into the statement, so I think a lot of artists don’t really write them if they can avoid it.
We’re visual people and this expectation that we are also writers and accountants and, graphic designers and like everything an artist has to be these days, it’s fairly daunting.
And I see it a lot in the younger artists, they wear a lot of different hats. The younger artists are really savvy, I think , in my day, there was a scheme, a community employment scheme or a way to survive outside of art college, whereas now they have to get straight into, being business people.
And it’s not always an artist’s gift to be a business person as well as a visual person. And I think a lot of the times in exhibitions now you can be wheeled out like a performing monkey. So not only have you made the work, then you have to do the talk. I actually don’t mind the talk too much, but you have to, workshops or do a community engagement or socially engaged practice around the exhibition as well.
Instagram @debbiegodsell
Solo exhibition Flail in Source Arts Centre, Tipperary, 14th September – 19th October 2024