Project Twins: Twice the fun as Cork-based sibling artists return to Tipperary
Project Twins: James Fitzgerald and Michael Fitzgerald have an exhibition at South Tipperary Arts Centre, Clonmel.
James and Michael Fitzgerald, working as the Project Twins, have carved a unique niche for themselves in the Irish art world. As their new exhibition at South Tipperary Arts Centre, Clonmel confirms, their prints, paintings and sculptures are more influenced by old Polish, Soviet and Cuban poster designs than the tradition of lyrical landscapes or solemn portraits beloved by so many of their peers.
The two are really twins, and more or less identical, though James’s recent cultivation of a moustache makes it a little easier to tell them apart. Based in Cork city for years, they grew up in Clonmel, and this is their first exhibition in their native county. They have, they say, stepped up for the occasion, experimenting more with hardware materials and making more of their work by hand.
“Our last couple of shows had big graphic paintings,” says Michael. “But for this one in Clonmel, we’ve brought more sculptural elements into the work. One piece is made out of wood, for instance, with hinges, tarpaulins and duct tape. There's collages and paper pieces in the show as well, and in those there's lots of little icons and pictograms and grids. A lot of the work is exploring the idea of language and communication and miscommunication.”
“Some of it is influenced by gaming and AI,” says James. “There’s one piece that feels a bit glitched and digital looking, but it's made of tiles. And it’s made by hand; it's that play between the two that interests us.”
The title of the exhibition - CIVIC, RADAR, LEVEL, ROTOR - is a series of palindromes. “A lot of the works have two figures in them,” says Michael. “And palindromes have that same sense of symmetry. We looked them up on Wikipedia, and the first four listed are civic, radar, level and rotor. That was interesting; there’s a weird rhythm to those words, but they still felt clunked together. And a lot of our work feels clunked together as well.”
“Some of the words seem weirdly connected to the ideas we were thinking about,” says James. “Civic and level feel like they’re describing societal structures or something, or they might hint at that anyway. And rotor and radar feel kind of mechanical. It’s a coincidence, I suppose, how those four words worked together. We wrote them down as a possible starting point for a title, but when we thought about it more, we said, let's just use those four, they're nice together.”
“We like how the title feels clunky,” says Michael. “It’s almost as if we’d asked AI to write a title and it came up with something that sounds almost right, but a little bit wrong.”
The twins first moved to Cork when they were 17, to study graphic design at Cork Institute of Technology, or Munster Technological University, as it is now. On completing their degrees, they travelled separately in Australia and New Zealand before reconvening in Cork around 2009. “It was the height of the recession,” says James, “but we started getting bits of design work, and then we got into illustration, for newspapers and magazines.”
Over the years, they have won numerous editorial illustration commissions from publications such as the New York Times, Time Magazine, the Economist and the Guardian newspaper, where they were published weekly for years. “With projects like that,” says James, “we’d be sent an article and it was pretty much up to ourselves how we’d respond to it. We might send them two or three sketches, they’d pick one, and we’d finish it.”
The two have also worked on large-scale art commissions for the offices of companies such as Facebook and Accenture in Dublin. “But most of the large-scale projects we’re doing now are Per Cent for Art Scheme commissions for schools around the country,” says Micheal. “We’re doing four of those at the moment.”
The two first got a space at Sample Studios around 2010, when it was based on Sullivan’s Quay and housed scores of creatives. “We saw what other artists were doing in their practice,” says James, “and we went from design and illustration to printmaking, and making larger art pieces.”
They began showing their work in exhibitions around Cork. Most of their peers had been to art college, “and we may have felt a bit of impostor syndrome when we started showing our work in those spaces,” says Michael.
“But there was nobody unwelcoming,” James adds.
“And day to day,” says Michael, “making work, it’s not really been a concern for us.” Sample Studios has since moved to Churchfield, where the two have a large space to work in. Their relationship is, they insist, mostly amicable. “We do fight sometimes,” says Michael. “But it would just be over a particular colour, or something.”
They do differ in one respect. “I'm left handed and left footed,” says James, “and Michael is right handed and right footed.”
But even that can have practical uses. “Sometimes, like when we’re cutting wood for a sculpture, it can be easier for Michael to do it from his side. Or when we’re painting, he might pass the brush over to me to finish something from my side.”
When they’re working on concepts, “we’ll sit opposite each other at either side of a table,” says Michael. “We'll each have a sketchbook and we'll both be drawing and talking. And it's through the dialogue that the ideas will come up. I suppose the process is similar to a design studio, where you have a couple of people working on a project. That’s the way we trained, and that’s how we still operate. When the work is done, we’d never say, that was my idea, or James's. With some of our older work, I’d have no idea what parts of it I worked on, or what parts James painted.”
In February, the twins will have another exhibition, called Fighting Games, at Garter Lane in Waterford, where they’ll be showing a series of large scale paintings on tarpaulin. Beyond that, they’re working on a major public art commission in Dusseldorf, Germany. “It’s a big project,” says James. “The school will be opening in the summer of 2026, so it will have to be finished by then.”
It's not the first time they’ve worked abroad - last year, they spent a month on a residency in London – but they have no plans to relocate. “Maybe ten years ago, we could have moved to London,” says Michael. “But we’re well settled in Cork at this stage. We have this great studio space at Sample, and it’s an easy city to live in.”
- The Project Twins’ CIVIC, RADAR, LEVEL, ROTOR exhibition runs at South Tipperary Arts Centre, Clonmel from January 18 – February 22. Further information: southtippartscentre.ie theprojecttwins.com
