Helen O’Leary: The Shelf Life of Facts
Metropolitan Arts Centre (MAC), Belfast
January 26 – May 19, 2013

In the following video, produced by the Metropolitan Arts Centre (MAC), Belfast, artist Helen O’Leary discusses her artistic background and the origins of her current body of work. She comments:

“I ended up in Paris and found myself walking to the Museum of War a lot, and I’d look at all the flawed armour… I’d look at the armour with cannonballs through the heart and they seemed to have real power for me … started thinking about … armour with … holes [in it] and I wanted painting to come out, be like a phoenix out of shreds… So I started thinking about a painting that would be a history painting, that wouldn’t just be memoir… I wanted it to be about the world as I knew it through kind of a haptic sense. And I started thinking about making paintings as big as Kiefer, I wanted paintings bigger than Kiefer. But I’d do them bit by bit; I’d do them in a very intimate way. I wanted that you could piece together a language out of false starts or out of small moments.”

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