( exerpt from )
Sinead Breslin in conversation with Matthew Douglas
May 2011
Matthew Douglas so tell me more about your wirey haired three legged dogs with no teeth
Sinead Breslin i want my work to be awkward, ugly like that, but something you cant help but love or feel an empathy for. These works make me feel like that, they are unsophisticated but stem from a quite a sophisticated contemporary investigation into painting. Its hard to describe.. .. aesthtically maybe they are ungracious.
MD but knowingly so, appropriately so, but there are no rules, are there ?
SB I think there are, but I feel no responsibility to abide by rules dictated by the past
MD you have mentioned before that you have a compulsion to paint
SB absolutly, I feel guilty if I dont paint, I feel it gives me identity and value, it also allows me to be dynamic, instinctive and also take risks and be ridiculous, it is definatly a compulsive act
MD I view this particular work as a transitory piece, lying between two other pieces, Joe and Joseph and your new work Cormac. A sort of fulcrum or a pivot point between those two pieces. It feels like its come from somewhere and going somewhere.
SB I feel that, especially with this work that it has made me consider how far I want to push future paintings, and this is interesting for me because now I feel want to make them more exaggerated, more humerous but also darker.
MD its a big question but could you try and explain why you chose painting
SB it is something that I feel very happy to be part of, although there is a level of expectation when you tell someone that you are a painter because I feel I have to explain the works to poeple who are not familiar with contemporary painting, what do you think about that
MD I would never feel that I have an obligation to provide knowledge to a someone for them to experience a work, because everyone responds in some way, even if it is an emotive rather than an analytical reaction, I think there should be information existing somewhere that enriches the work, but not obligatory no.
how many painting have you made so far, in the last two years or so
SD probably ten
MD I think I may have seen most of them, and I believe you have, consciously or unconsciously gathering a series of signs or symbols like buildings, fences, windows, and large expanes of nausiating swirling colour that seem to reoccur
SB that seems to have happened without me realizing and I have only really started to notice since other people have started to point them out, like in the BV solo show where everything could be seen together in comparison to one another
MD when I spent time with them I began to question what does a fence mean, what do these buildings mean, they begin to have significance
SB they are not what they are, they are something else
MD like cages or monsters
SB absolutly these things become something more
MD but perhaps the danger is that once you become aware of their existence, you may lose the ability to make them instinctivly, but rather make them with purpose, do you think that the work may suffer at that point
SB perhaps its something that does not concern me too much
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