JULIE CUSACK
Remember
Julie Cusack and her siblings were born of Irish emigrant parents in Brentwood, Essex. Summer holidays were spent in Tramore and the family returned to Ireland in the 1970s.
Cusack remembers being "terrified of the nuns and my parents - though Catholic - were quite critical of the church”. That move back "prompted many moves”, and Cusack thinks that "change, movement and structures that dissolve” are found in her work.
Drawing came first, pencil portraits of pop stars and famous people. A Frank Auerbach exhibition at the Tate was, and still is, an influence. "It blew me away,” she says, "that you could push drawing materials and break rules the way he did.”
A foundation course in visual art at Waterford Institute of Technology "was a great introduction to new disciplines like performance, photography and ceramics. It was my first proper look at painting as a medium and practice”.
At GMIT, she explored figurative art and during her final year she made a series of portraits in oil. "They were competent enough but not terribly interesting. In the negative spaces, though, I think there was an evolving interest in the materiality of paint, a desire to play and lean into awkward, accidental or uncooperative parts of trying to make a painting. "Much later, I was able to explore that - an inquiry that's ongoing for me even now. It's never ending.”
Today, her distinctive palette favours "cerulean blues and pinks, soft, tranquil colours, which hopefully keep the viewer there for longer”.
Her paintings, she says, are "an emotional response to any given moment, a meditation through colour and gesture, particularly the ones pulling from landscape”. Remember, acrylic on canvas, is based on an actual chair in Cusack's mother's bedroom.
"It came from her family home and is probably 120 years old. We had a conversation about its age and its use as a nursing chair back in the day.
"My mother is 85 now and we shared memories of the house, which prompted the title.
"It was also painted from memory. That chair, as an object, prompted stories about absent people or places from the past but also the idea of elevating the ordinary or mundane objects that outlive us. There are so many chairs throughout art history and I think, for me, at this point in time, they present a new spatial arrangement to play with as well, as an added narrative in this case.”
For her, "it's important that the painting reveals the passing of time in the history of layers”.
Asked, how she knows when to stop, she says "abstract expressionism is quite open. Within the making of that kind of painting there may be several points at which to walk away”. She adds: "Anyone working in that way is constantly building their own visual language through tensions around mark, shape, colour, line space, surface, noise and quiet.”
Cusack, now Waterford-based, is a member of Garter Lane Studios and also runs workshops "framed around increasing confidence and freedom within painting and drawing. The emphasis is on play.
"People in the groups I work with are not interested in representational painting. They're more after an emotional response to a place and what you carry with you.”
In Remember, those soft, dissolving, tranquil colours certainly hold you.
