In progress:
Sand and sea
By
Nigel Ryan
John O'Carroll, artist, has been working in Egypt for two decades. When not engaged as an archaeological illustrator on the Dakhla Oasis Project he divides his time between Amsterdam and Cornwall where his work has been heavily influenced, both in form and content, by the experience of Egypt's Western Desert.
I first came to Egypt in 1980. I had met Jenny Liemert in the Museum of Fine Arts in New York and she introduced me to Tony Mills who lives part of the year in Cornwall and who is the director of the Dakhla Oasis Project. He invited me to work as an archaeological illustrator on the project and since that time I have worked seasonally, for three or four months a year, in Dakhla. The rest of the year I spend on my own work, dividing my time between Amsterdam and Cornwall.
This time in Egypt I will be continuing with one project, a book, that will be a development of archaeological etchings combined with more abstract, personal work. So it will be a combination of archaeological stuff from over two decades and my other work, which is primarily based on the desert, and on the environment. I use techniques, ground pigments, waxes, graffito, that the Ancient Egyptians used.
I plan to be in Egypt for three months. I already have work for a show in Amsterdam, at Gallerie Nanky De Vreeze, in May. In June I will be exhibiting in Hamburg, at Gallerie Pimm Van Der Donk, and in October I'll be doing a land installation, combined with paintings, in Lyons, in a sculpture garden, with Richard Long.
One interesting feature of the dig is that we have a man, an author called Harry Thurston, who has been coming down to the project and who has written a novel, a combination of fact and fiction, called Isles of the Blessed. I have done illustrations for the novel, which is being published by Doubleday in spring.
I have also just closed an exhibition in Cornwall, my home base, based on the sea. That used many of the techniques I learned from the conservators on the dig, particularly encaustic, bees-wax mixed with ground pigment. Some of the pigments I found in the cliffs in Cornwall, where there used to be ochre mines, and which I ground myself. So I've imported an Ancient Egyptian technique to Cornwall. That exhibition was primarily about nature, sacred aspects of nature, fields of colour, using graffito and waxes.
Egypt, the desert, informs my work a lot. I lost the figure in Egypt. I was trekking through the desert with Arita Baent. She's a writer and I was illustrating a book called Geur Vande Kamel (The Smell of the Camel) which was published in Holland. I was illustrating camels, but I was also doing work for myself. At that point, 12 years ago, I was still working in a figurative way, butrecking through the desert, looking at the sand, looking at the movements of the landscape, the figure disappeared in my work. It became abstract, and the figure has not reappeared, at least for the moment.
I have also made large installations constructed from sand and based on observations of how the sand moves and on the primordial, arid aspects of the landscape. The temporary nature of the shapes intrigued me. The fluidity, the beauty, the harshness, they all have to do with time. So there is a sense in which my work is very much about temporality. A large sand installation is likely to be a major piece in the Lyons exhibition.
Urban themes don't interest me. The spiritual aspects of landscape, the quietness, the solitude, these are what I'm interested in. I'm not interested in noise. I try to take away the noise of urban living in my work and pare everything down to the minimum. The desert is the perfect place for that. The sea is the perfect place for that.
I spend about five months of the year in Cornwall and then when I'm not in Egypt I'm in Amsterdam. But even in Holland the work that I make is about landscape, the large flat lands of Friesland, for instance, the way the water interacts with the land. It's on a very intimate scale, and it is about a landscape that is very much controlled by man, unlike the desert where it is nature that has the defining hand.
A year ago Tony Mills and I had an exhibition at the British Embassy in Cairo, Desert Excavations: An Archaeology of Place, which was very successful in that it introduced a lot of people to the Dakhla Oasis Project. We had a lecture on the dig and my work relating to the project was exhibited.
The project has been going for 20 or more years under the umbrella of the Canadians. It is not a conventional archaeological project but has a far greater time span. It's an archaeological and environmental project looking at geological time as well as at specific archaeological sites. We found a new species of dinosaur and we have been working with people who were students of Leaky in the Rift Valley, Kenya. So we are looking at the movement of humans out of Africa, into Asia and Europe and the settlement of the Nile Valley as well as more conventional archaeology.
One of my jobs in Dakhla is to record neolithic rock carvings which I find incredibly exciting. These are marks left by humans 10 or 14 thousand years ago and they have a primal quality. They display an inherent human need to make marks. And there is something reassuring in this, this scratching and marking of the environment, because in the end it is what I do, what all artists do, this kind of commentary on the world. People have been doing it forever. It is that basic.
