CIRCA 111 article

Hugh O’Donnell

Hugh O’Donnell: gender1; courtesy the artist

Hugh O’Donnell: sketchbook images; courtesy the artist	Hugh O’Donnell: sketchbook images; courtesy the artist

It starts with an object, any object; it could be a toilet or a tin can.

I then see an image or a shape that becomes a drawing or at least the start of one.

The object is appropriated into my artistic thinking and then something happens… I think of the room that I could be in or a space outdoors. I begin to draw and within my studio this drawing takes the format of being on the wall or the floor or the notebook that is small enough to fit into my pocket.

The intuitive way of drawing and planning of the performance happens so quickly that it changes rapidly, not always representing the performance in question.

Top and above: Sinéad O’Donnell and Hugh O’Donnell: Gravity, performance shots; photo Phil Babot; courtesy Trace

Materials always seem to fuel an action, or the amount of the material used sometimes decides on how long the performance will be. Is my audience my material as well as a bucket or a tin can would be?

Thinking and thinking and thinking, then drawing and doodling and thinking again after seeing that nice wig in the shop near the Albert clock I feel that I must draw something so that I can envisage this performance further.

These drawings that happen in the studio don’t last forever; just like performances they are documented and don’t exist physically any more. The white paint is painted over and the trace of the previous drawing appears to create the next. This helps formulate a performance or just some sort of action that becomes maybe an extension of the drawing itself.

Sounds and noises are interesting. Shush, bucket barking, sawing into a table, hammering the table, the echoes that are made from a performance that happened in an underground space where the trains pass overhead. The sound of a chair being scraped and dragged across the floor. The sound of a red toilet smashing off the side of a skip on College Street in Belfast.

Materials and the sounds they make or could make. Blue, and yellow, black dress / red dress, table on front and table behind, bread and water, buckets, tomato sauce, knife and fork. That performance was about table manners.

Thinking about deconstructing performance: how do you do that? Is it through drawing and writing scores? Is the deconstructing of performance the sketches we draw while considering the action within performance?

Hugh O’Donnell

Article reproduced from CIRCA 111, Spring 2005, pp.62–63

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