Aisling Roche on art inspired by swimming: 'I swim in Lough Ine all through the year'
Aisling Roche coming out of the water in Baltimore after swimming from Sherkin Island; and some of her works - Urchin 3 (top-right) and Whorl (bottom-right)
, Aisling Roche’s exhibition of new work at the Grilse Gallery in Killorglin, Co Kerry, is inspired by her love of swimming.
Roche traces her interest to her childhood holidays in Co Cork. “I grew up in Dublin, but we went to our summer house in Myrtleville from June to August every year,” she says. “My aunt, Mary Porteous, owned Bunnyconnellan restaurant, and my grandmother lived there too. That was where I learned to swim, in the sea, and sea-swimming has been part of my life ever since. We swam every day at Myrtleville; even when it was raining, my mother used to bring us to the beach because she couldn’t bear to have us in the house all the time.”
Since 1997, Roche has lived outside Baltimore in West Cork, in a townland called Spain. “These days, I swim in Lough Ine all through the year. If it’s a short swim – 500 metres or something – I’ll do it in togs, but when I want to do longer swims, I usually put on the wetsuit. This year, because the water is quite cold, I’m wearing the wetsuit more often.”
Roche studied Craft Design at the National College of Art and Design in Dublin before completing her Masters in 3D Design, Ceramics in Cardiff Metropolitan University in the UK. She has combined her work as an educator with her artmaking ever since, and now drives to Cork two days a week to teach ceramics at Colaiste Stiofain Naofa, on Tramore Road. “I used to teach five days a week, but that took up too much of my energy,” she says. “Even in the summer holidays, I often found it would take me a month to wind down and start making my own work again.”
She also serves on the board of Uillinn: the West Cork Arts Centre in Skibbereen. “Initially, I was there as an art educator, helping with the education programme,” she says. “But now I’m Chair, so my involvement has become a lot broader.”
Cutting back on her teaching hours has given Roche more time in the studio. For years, she worked in a small shed, heated by a wood-burning stove. “But during covid, I got it together to build a proper studio. I have this huge space now, with a big kiln. It’s fabulous. There’s an office and a bathroom, and a kind of mezzanine for storing my work.”
Most of the pieces in Roche’s exhibition derive from the photographs she takes while swimming. “I have a little underwater camera that I wear around my neck,” she says. “At Lough Ine, there are all these different ecosystems that vary depending on the time of day and the year. And that informs the work I make. I suppose the work is really about the sort of otherworld you enter when you swim underwater. You’re removed from your normal way of seeing. You’re only thinking about being in the water; you're not thinking about anything else because you have to focus on your breathing and staying afloat.”
The work includes a selection of the ceramics for which Roche is best known, as well as paintings and photographs. “There’s a lot of porcelain wall pieces and panels, based on the kind of things I’d glimpse as I swim around,” she says. “But I’ve got these 3D pieces as well. There’s a place in Lough Ine we call the Whirlpool. When you swim through the rapids, you have to be really careful you don’t swim to the right of the shore, because basically you can get trapped. The current is so strong that you might not get out for a while. I’ve done a good number of pieces based on that, because a few of us have got stuck there over the years. But it’s an amazing experience, you know, swimming through the rapids, and then just literally being thrown out the other side. It’s just incredible.
“There’s a few pieces in the show based on that. And then, there’s a couple more that are based on sea urchins. There’s this one sea urchin that I visit all the time. It’s about the size of an orange. It’s always in the same crevice, and it’s been there for years.”
Included also are two large paintings in acrylics. “I absolutely adore doing paintings,” says Roche. “I didn’t really have room to paint before, but since I built the studio, I’ve been doing more of them. They’re not representational. I got maps of the coast of Co Cork, and traced them, and then I repositioned everything. So they’re really talking about the fragility of our coastline and how it’s being eroded by global warning and climate change and all of that.
“There’s a couple of black and white photographs in there as well, along with one watercolour and one drawing.”
Going forward, Roche has begun collaborating with the video and sound artist named Dave Beckley. “We’re hoping to do some work based around augmented reality, using my work as a base to project images,” she says. “So that’s exciting.”
- Aisling Roche’s exhibition runs at the Grilse Gallery, Killorglin, Co Kerry until September 17.
- grilse.ie
- aislingroche.weebly.com
