Kevin Mooney: 'Horror films became a visual thing that has stayed with me'

Cork-based artist Kevin Mooney's exhibition at IMMA reveals influences from the likes of Van Gogh and Goya, as well as 1980s movies

Mon, 23 Jan, 2023 - 02:00

Marc O’Sullivan Vallig

Vincent Van Gogh, Peig Sayers and 1980s horror movies may not on the face of it have very much in common. But all are grist to the mill for Cork-based artist Kevin Mooney, whose solo exhibition Revenants is currently showing at the Irish Museum of Modern Art in Dublin.

Revenants is mostly inspired by Mooney’s fascination with the notable gap in Irish art history in the hundreds of years up to the mid-18th century. “Before that,” he says, “you had the illuminated manuscripts being produced in the monasteries in the medieval period, but then there were centuries when it seems like there was no art being made at all, and that coincided with a pattern of famine, poverty and mass emigration.”

Mooney wondered how a contemporary painter might deal with that period. “So what I’ve done is create a fictional world, a sort of speculative art history. I began to research the history of emigration, and I learned about the connections between Ireland and the Caribbean. I hadn’t known much about that before, but it’s really fascinating, and I guess it’s been talked about a little bit more over the last few years. Then I began thinking about what art history might have existed among Irish people under emigration.”

His interest in emigration is partly rooted in family history. “My background was urban on my father’s side, and rural on my mother’s,” he says. “My parents both went to Britain in the 50s, when they were 17, and they met over there. I was born in Leicester, but we moved back in the ‘70s and settled in Offaly.”

Mooney studied at the Crawford College of Art and Design in Cork in the 90s, but credits his breakthrough as an artist to the MA in Fine Art he completed at the National College of Art and Design in Dublin in 2012.

“I was making work,” he says. “But I really felt I needed critical feedback, and NCAD was brilliant for that. I think everything I’ve done in the past ten years has come from the research I did then.”

Mooney’s painting is loosely executed, and mostly figurative in style. Van Gogh is an obvious influence, he says, as well as Francisco Goya.

“Goya is a painter who has a particular kind of relevance for imagining an Irish artistry in the 18th century. He’s working in Spain, and dealing in themes that would have chimed with what was happening in Ireland. Social upheaval and political violence. Superstition and Catholicism and folklore.

“All these things would have been relevant to an Irish painter, and Goya is a mainstream European influence that might have found its way to an Irish painter in that period.

“And then, visually, I’m also influenced by 1980s horror movies, which are like a contemporary folklore. Growing up in the ’80s, horror films became a visual thing that has stayed with me today.”

The subject of emigration was what led him to choose jute, or hessian, as a material to paint on. “Jute has connotations with global trade,” he says. “It’s been used to carry goods around the world. The work I’m making is really about the movement of people and ideas, it’s a kind of history of migration, so using jute as a material fits in conceptually with this. It has quite a rough surface, so it’s got a particular texture. It’s more difficult to work on than canvas or board, so it takes a little bit of getting used to.”

Mooney is particularly drawn to painting human heads. “In early Celtic culture, there’s this idea of the head being the site of spiritual power and consciousness, and there was this kind of cult of the head. If you possessed the head of your enemy you possessed all their knowledge and all their spiritual power.”

Naked eyeballs feature often. “The paintings are not portraits,” he says, “but they play a little with that idea of portraiture. They’re kind of artworks that look back at you and return your gaze. I was interested in that confrontation.”

Mooney’s love of the macabre is partly attributable to the ghost stories his grandparents told him as a child, but he cites a well-thumbed collection of folktales by the Blasket Islands seanchaí Peig Sayers as another influence.

“We know Peig as the inventor of the misery memoir,” he says. “But these are tales that were collected from her in the early 20th century, and they’re really interesting. They would have been lost but for her. She’s like a repository of folklore and cultural history.”

Alongside his career as a painter, Mooney is currently kept busy by his work as a tutor at the Crawford. “I’m lucky,” he says. “I started exhibiting very regularly after the MA, and I’ve always had something on the horizon.

“I teach two days a week, I have a space at Sample Studios, and I’ve started working with Hillsborough Gallery in Dublin in the past few years. Hopefully I’ll be doing a show with them in the next year or so.”