About

liminal: (def.)

...occupying a position at, or on both sides of, a boundary or threshold...

James is a free-lance visual artist, muralist, illustrator and qualified architect.

Based in the south-west of Ireland, his arts practice is borne of three distinct yet inextricably linked disciplines: (painting) // (illustration) // (architecture). 

A painter of the spaces between people_and_places; His work has been characterised as a unique blended form of contemporary engagement with both the genre of landscape painting and an intimate narrative painting tradition; eschewing hierarchy and category in favour of equal focus on both landscapes and figures. His practice is primarily based in oil painting, but also includes drawing utilising a variety of media.

Interviews

Link to Interview with Niall McMonagle for ‘What Lies Beneath’ (the visual arts column in the Sunday Independent)

Link to Interview with Clare McNamara for ‘Jacksons Art Blog’ (in association with the Jacksons’s Painting Prize)

Link to Interview with Valerie Gridneva for ’Made in Bed’ Magazine (in association with Sotheby’s Institute of Art)

Artist Statement

My arts practice is centred around an existential and phenomenological exploration of the complex relationship that exists between self and surroundings.
I am particularly intrigued by the phenomenology of place and pyschogeography. I’m interested in the way in which our experience of places and the relationships we forge with them exist as an ever evolving, jumbled and reciprocal flow across the material, -immaterial and -emotional realms. I think there’s always a kind of quiet unseen interplay between our phenomenal experience of a place in the moment and our own internal meta-narratives. It is this elusive interaction and fluid dynamic which I am attempting to capture in my paintings.

My ambition for my work is that it might communicate or illicit a tacit human understanding of the wholeness of our spatial or ‘platial’ experience, encouraging a more-active awareness of our conscious and unconscious spatial understandings and the creative and transcendental potential that this awareness might provide, in terms of generating self knowledge, altering our  perspective of our lives and everyday worlds.

As the territory of my work is essentially betweenness and the dynamics at play between elements, it inherently has many further threads of source inspiration woven through it in a kind of plurality -these may be part autobiographical, part experiential, part literary. For me, painting has the potential to give particular complex form to a multitude of overlapping personal experiences, moments, feelings, emotions, influences, and inspirations, capturing a blended expression of them, tied to a particular place at a moment in time.

Thanks for reading.