PEINT, 2013.
Solo exhibition for the Leitrim Sculpture Centre, Ireland.
PEINT is a 52 minute video exploring one young man’s encounter with three specific materials: Baryte, Lithium and Coal. Somewhere between an infomercial and instructional video, the protagonist’s engagement with these scavenged resources becomes the enquiry of the work.
Through the character of the ‘Ancient Celt’, Giffney performs and explains the rituals of collecting, treating and transforming one thing into another. This anthropological exploration of the speculative figure, blown backwards into contemporary rural Ireland, allows Giffney to embody and explore local roles that he claims ‘have been both idealised and stereotyped at the same time’. They include that of the Arigna Coal Miner, the Scrap Metal Dealer, the Wild Cat Oil Driller, the Lithium Chemist, the Barytes Miner and the Tinker.
There’s an informality to the production, mirrored in the easy shift between role, activity and setting. From the casual exploration of an abandoned mineshaft, the rudimentary tools used to harvest materials, to the home-science approach staged back at the lab, Giffney uses the determination and inquisitiveness of the amateur to conquer his materials. In so doing, the artist communicates a genuine fascination with that which can be harvested from the earth, manipulated, and conjured into something entirely different.
PEINT was produced by visual artist Carl Giffney over the course of three months spent at Leitrim Sculpture Centre, in the North West of Ireland, and was presented as part of a wider solo exhibition (pictured), also titled PEINT.
Text: Kate Strain.
Curator: Sean O'Reily.
Camera: Andreas Kindler von Knobloch, Phoebe Dick, Alex Synge, Declan McGauran.
Music: Maurice Lennon.
