Conor Harrington X Atelier Ji Print Release
In the run up to the edition release of 'Blind Exit', Conor Harrington gives insight on his work and practice.
Hi Connor, could you tell us about the origin of the ‘Blind Exit’ edition?
It began with an oil painting, I painted an 18th Century ‘man of importance’ sitting down on a chair with a globe beside him on a side table but the globe was a sort of wiped out, distorted, playing with the idea that maybe the rest of the world doesn’t matter so much anymore to certain people. And then down at his feet are two loud speakers, I think on the run up to the referendum the role of fake news, right wing media and propaganda was deafening at the time, there was a lot of noise and a lot of lies. There’s been a lot of flag waving I think, I think that’s what’s been interesting, and its been echoed on both sides of the Atlantic with the Trump election in 2016 and the Brexit Referendum in 2016, and there’s been a lot of joking about the special relationship but I definitely think both countries were waving a lot of flags at the time and that definitely had a big impact on the work I was making.
What was the first work or art that made you realise you could have a political voice within the arts?
I guess it began with a lot of the early hip hop I was listening to was quite political, the very first rap I got into was Public Enemy, and then after that it was Ice Cubes The Predator album which was a response to the Rodney King beating in LA and that really stuck me. The music was something that I really enjoyed, but as a 13 year old living thousands of miles away it was something educational and informative. So from then I really liked that marriage of aesthetics and style with a strong message as well. I guess street art has always been political, graffiti is a very political act, my own work early on was probably a lot less political but as I get older the ideas are coming to the fore a lot more. I’ve always tentatively been playing with the ideas of politics, masculinity and empire but in the last few years its been coming out in my work a lot more clearly I think.
Conor in front of his mural, Greenwich, London.
When you look at the murals on the side of building your figures are ghostly, painted so they appear and disappear, seemingly trapped in a cycle of repeating the same action or gesture. How did this style evolve?
I’m very interested in the cyclical nature of power and politics and ego and all these things. Nothing lasts forever and I’m very interested in the downfall of the so called great and the good, so I think that feeds into the way that I paint, the feeling of pain and erasure, putting the paint one and taking it off. And that goes back to earlier work that I was doing that was responding to painting graffiti and then the council removing it, so that’s where I started the swipe thing that I do, putting solvents on the canvas and removing paint, and it relates to these figures, their downfall eventually come round and I’m trying to convey some of those idea in the way that I paint.
Left: Blind Exit / Print Edition / Conor Harrington
"Greenwich has so many ties to British history and empire so I was very excited and a little bit nervous if I'm honest about painting my anti nationalism mural there, but again I think people generally just saw a giant British flag and were mostly happy with it."
Below: Working on the edition at Atelier Ji
How did you discover graffiti / street art?
I went to school in Cork and there wasn’t much of a street art scene at the time, there was a little bit of tagging and a few wall pieces but I saw my very first piece in a National Geographic magazine before I’d seen anything in real life and that really jumped out at me, it was a piece that said City Of Fallen Angels, I presume it was in LA I’ve got no idea who the artist was and I realised this was connected to the new music I was discovering. So I practiced bubble letters for a couple of years before I bought my first can of spray paint I tried it outdoors for real. So there’s wasn’t much of a scene going on until a few years later so it was a very slow isolated process which is possibly different to a lot of other graffiti writers early learning experiences anywhere else I think.
Did the famous murals of Northern Ireland influence you when you were growing up?
I few years into starting graffiti my uncle went up to Derry and when he came back gave me copies of his photos and that was the first time I’d seen them, this was before the internet and even though Derry was only 300 miles away it felt like a world away and yeah, I was definitely blown away by them.
Costume in your work is distinctly 18th century, even though your confronting contemporary issues, is this a way of saying things haven’t changed or are you siting the origin of the problem?
Its very over the top and in a way reminds me of the fantastical elements you find in hip hop to a degree, just the idea of fantasy and make-believe kind of elevating your status above what you are. It creeped in slowly I guess, my dad was really into history, so I grew up around a lot of history books, I wasn’t such a big fan of reading them but I enjoyed looking at the pictures! So I think that kind of aesthetic was ingrained in me from an early age, and when I got older and went to art college and started to learn about art I was quite taken by the renaissance and then I wanted to try and find some way to intergrate that into graffiti so how do they work together or do they work together, I had no idea. But it also related to my own experiences at art college where I felt that graffiti and street art wasn’t necessarily respected and I felt the art establishment didn’t respect graffiti, so at the beginning this costume versus the tags was a dialogue between the art establishment and all of us who grew up painting on the streets.
Work list detailing the 24 screen process.
In the studio.
Master printer Pete Bennet (Atelier Ji) checking final prints.
When I see the hand grasping the chair in this work and the position of the figure I’m reminded of Velazquez’s & Bacon’s, Pope Innocent paintings. I kind of imagine that face under the flag. Were those works an influence?
It wasn’t a conscious decision but there’s a big chance that those works did creep in subliminally, I think there’s a kind of similar stress going on in both figures, in my painting the guy is sitting on the chair with the flag infront of him and he not at ease, kind of being smothered by the flag. I’m interested in the idea of being trapped by history which can happen and I think definitely happened with the Brexit referendum where the was a definite sense of nostalgia and a pining for an imaginary past going on.
