Andrea Newman: 'I walked around Mayfield and found 13 more houses boarded up'

An exhibition at the Lavit by Cork artist Andrea Newman draws on her own experience of noticing council houses that have been left uninhabited for months and more

Mon, 12 Feb, 2024 - 17:36

Marc O’Sullivan Vallig

Ireland may well be one of the most prosperous countries in Europe, but most would agree that it is also in the grips of a chronic accommodation crisis. It is timely, then, that artist Andrea Newman has chosen to explore the phenomenon of derelict housing in her exhibition, There is no place like home, in Ireland, at the Lavit Gallery in Cork.

Living in Mayfield, on the northside of Cork city, Andrea Newman has always been aware of the derelict houses in her vicinity. “There was one house in particular that was derelict for at least five years,” she says. “I photographed that over a period of three years, and it was still derelict. Then I thought I should start looking for more of this dereliction. I walked around Mayfield and in half an hour, I found 13 more houses boarded up by the City Council. I live in a council house myself, and I started looking into the statistics to find out why this is happening.

“The Council claims it takes 75 weeks to renovate a council house, but we all know from living here that there’s houses boarded up for far longer than that. None of it makes sense to me.”

Newman was invited to show at the Lavit when she won the Roberts Nathan Student of the Year Award for her graduate exhibition at the Crawford College of Art and Design in 2023.

“I really just wanted to focus on social housing in my work for the Degree Show,” she says. “We're always talking about private landlords and bad landlords, but the City Council are a landlord too, a kind of invisible landlord for all these social housing tenants. And there's so much dereliction and neglect on their part. I think it's such a shame, in a housing crisis like we’re experiencing at the moment. Social housing should be an asset, but no one's holding the City Council accountable. So I guess that's what I wanted to do.”

Some of the work by Andrea Newman at the Lavit: 'In Cork City, it is taking an average of 75 weeks to re-let a council home.'

Newman works in a variety of media, including photography, printmaking, book making and posters. “I was always into photography, and I experimented with print in college, but it wasn’t until Fourth Year that I really got into screen printing. In the first semester in my final year I was just researching, really, but then, by the time the second semester came around, I knew exactly what I was going to make.”

The dominant colour in Newman’s work is a distinctive shade of green. “We associate green with Ireland, don't we?” she says. “In my photographic work, I was using the Eyedropper tool and seeing how many shades of green I could find. I had a colour wheel, and then I settled on this shade in particular because it's a very emerald green. Someone told me it reminded them of the old Irish passports.”

Throughout her work, Newman has employed words and phrases in the Irish language. Bánóg, for instance, translates as ‘a field in which something occasionally happened but no longer does’, while díláthair translates as ‘the absence felt when something or somewhere has been depopulated or destroyed by other human beings.’

“I went to a Gaelscoil in Mayfield,” she explains, “and then my parents encouraged me to keep it up in secondary school. I’m really glad I can speak Irish, though I wish I had the opportunity to use it more often. I got all the words for my posters from Manchán Magan’s book, Thirty-two Words for Field. I thought they were really interesting to use in the context of the housing crisis.”

Newman has recently shown her work in two other exhibitions, Origins 2023 at Lismore Castle Arts and Ar Scáth A Chéile / In Each Other’s Shadow at the James Barry Exhibition Centre at MTU Bishopstown Campus, and she is busy preparing for a second solo show at Studio 12, the Backwater Artists Group exhibition space on Wandesford Quay, in August.

“That's still in the research stage,” she says. “I haven’t made the work yet.” Newman still lives with her family in Mayfield. “I'll definitely have to go on living at home for a while to pursue my career at the artist. A lot of my friends are moving away, but I hope I don't have to do that. I work part-time, so I can try and focus on my art. I have a space at Backwater Studios, but the hardest part of graduating has been trying to find time for my practice.”