Laura Fitzgerald: Why being an artist is similar to being a farmer
On her father’s farm, Laura Fitzgerald found surprising similarities with her own career.
In her wry and sometimes satirical take on the art world, Laura Fitzgerald's Crawford exhibition, entitled I Have Made a Place, draws attention to the difficult and insecure profession of the artist. The Kerry artist, who has returned to live and work in her native Inch, having spent years in Dublin, has created large-scale scroll drawings, videos with her own voiceovers, and striking bale forms with sound installations that keep the viewer engaged. The cylindrical bales, green cotton ones as well as pink ones, are a nod to her agricultural background. She draws comparisons between farming and the work of an artist.
Fitzgerald recalls annual visits to the mart with her father, a former beef cattle farmer, who is now retired. "Dad would be selling the weanlings. His whole earning structure was based on a certain date in October or November. If it wasn't a good day at the mart and if the beef price had gone down, there was disappointment and real concern about staying alive and bringing up the family in Ireland in the 90s."
"Art," says Fitzgerald, "is very similar. Each year, my peers and myself go to the Arts Council looking for a bursary. If we get it, it means we can live comfortably, but not extravagantly, for twelve months. We can pay for our materials and our basic living costs."
The small green bales in Fitzgerald's exhibition "are supposed to be the artist at the beginning of the art career path and then the stack of large pink bales are like a more established artist's status."
There are speakers in and around the bales and among the musings emanating from them is the notion of the different stages of an artist's career, inspired by recent Arts Council categories for funding. "These days, for the annual bursary application, you self-declare whether you're an emerging, mid-career or established artist. I was really struck by this when I put in my application for the 2020 bursary. I was going - 'am I emerging? No way am I mid-career.' A colleague, Aideen Barry, referred to me as being mid-career. I was scoffing at this, going 'no way José'. I'm barely able to scrape from one year to the next. There are no guarantees. I want to use this show as a vehicle to examine some of that. Like when do you find that you're stable?"
Fitzgerald points out that in early seascape or landscape painting, there is always a horizon line in the distance. "It's the idea of a future. With the invention of perspective in art, you always have an idea of a future trajectory. In the last few years, before Covid struck, there has been a lot of discussion that we're living in a neo-liberal society. It's like a post-human society where computers and technology are the main labour forces. There's no idea of a future because of climate change. Or the future looks bleak."
But Fitzgerald wants to offer "a kind of resistance to this nihilistic approach. For me, if I see farmers out in the fields making bales of hay, it means there'll be another spring. The bales in the exhibition are meant to be hopeful."
In an amusing satirical voiceover accompanying Fitzgerald's videos of metaphorical nature scenes, there is much angst about time and not having enough of it in the busy life of an artist. Fitzgerald announces that she is going to phone her mother. She meant to do so - three years ago. Wading into seaweed, there is a sense of the artist submerging herself and experiencing social isolation. "I'd love to see people but you have to prioritise," she states.
Fitzgerald was tutored by performance artist, Nigel Rolfe, when she was doing her masters at the Royal College of Art, London. For one of her videos, she has co-opted Rolfe's piece, Into the Mire, where he walks into the Bog of Allen in response to the collapse of the Celtic Tiger.
Wearing a mask of a man's face, Fitzgerald sinks into and rises up out of a bog. "Sometimes you have to fall down to rise up again. So that video is a kind of hopeful gesture. It's fighting back against the message that you have to work flat out all the time to be a successful and upright member of society."
Fitzgerald is slowly renovating "an old cow house which was my dad's milking parlour when he was a dairy farmer in the 80s." It will be a studio for this innovative artist who has come back to her roots. The future may be uncertain but Fitzgerald feels grounded.
- I Have Made a Place is at the Crawford Art Gallery until September 19.
