Paul Connell
To Hell or to Connaught, 2019
Paul Connell
- Charcoal on Paper
- 29.5 X 21 cm, Book
ARTIST STATEMENT
A contemplation on the Cromwellian phrase ‘To Hell, or to Connacht’, my work concerns a contemporary mythopoeia as a response to and means to understand or resolve a relationship with my national and personal heritage.
The Irish language and oral tradition are important elements in my practice, and verbal wordplay often trespasses into the visual or conceptual vocabulary in the work, such as the personifications of my pseudo-Hibernian mythmaking called Ocras (Hunger) & Olcas (Evil), or Ifreann (Hell) & Aifreann (Mass). Reflecting on the mythopoetic legacies of Irish history, the work endures communion and cannibalism, penance and protest, memory and myth.
This island has always known great hunger, we are a starving people, though I have never met him, I took the soup, and it did not burn my tongue, or my mother’s tongue, or my mother-tongue. This island has always known great evil, we are a god-fearing people, though I have never met him, I drank the blood, but it gave me no tongues of fire either.
But I tasted the salmon, the forbidden fruit, and here I regurgitate its stories, and like Orcus, who devours the sinner, you devour me as I speak.
Logos, as an appeal to logic or reason in search of truth, is born from mythos; in turn mythology is born in attempt to articulate or make peace with the illogical, the absurd or the painful.
For me, drawing is discovery, drawing articulates meaning and expression that is both far more brutal, and far more sophisticated than any verbal language, it is an active and urgent means of thinking, understanding and storytelling.
The use of hand drawn animation and blackboard drawings make my work more volatile and performative.
Instagram: paul_connell_
