Róisín Coyle is an Irish visual artist based in Galway, who has worked nationally and internationally across multiple mediums. In this article Róisín shares her personal story and how it has shaped her artistic practice. She also discusses the creative process behind the earth pigments, featured in the new Earth Action exhibition at Galway City Museum.
‘if only they knew they have rainbows under their feet’ – Elif Shafak
I am an artist living and working in Galway. I have worked with drawing, print, paint, sculpture, sound, light, film and animation. I develop this work into immersive installations.
I had a thriving art career from my first exhibition from 2006 exhibiting nationally and internationally until 2013 when I developed neurological lyme disease from a tick bite and became very seriously ill and bedridden. The past decade took my full attention in attempting to return to health and I have made good progress but the pace and way I work has taken a different route.
My previous work delved into how we, as humans, engage and relate emotionally to our environments, particularly in solitary experiences. Examining the alternating feelings of insignificance, connection and numinosity when faced with vast natural spaces.
In recent years I have been fascinated by collecting, processing and working with natural earth pigments, most of which are millions of years old. This slow, deep and ancient process resonates with the pace of life I have had to adjust to due to my illness. It has been a huge learning curve to work with these pigments, letting them lead me into a new way of working within my practice. Over the past four years I have spent many months in nature collecting and grinding natural pigments (ochres) from the Canary Islands, France and Ireland. Most lands have a rainbow body, a full expression of colour, and I have collected an extensive and beautiful library of pigment colours. Each colour carries their own stories and language of the place from where I collected it.
I am intrigued by the capacity these ochres have to affect us. Crushing these rocks closes their particular cycle and transforms it into a new cycle and by transforming them into art I am carrying forward the stories in the earth. We are interconnected with all the billions of life forms we interact with on this living planet, indeed we are the future pigment bodies for other times to come as we are part of the microbiome of the earth.
Each handful of earth contains eight to ten million micro-organisms. This makes it a very different experience to painting with synthetic materials, it seems more like a collaboration with the materials, an intertwining of human and material.
Our earth is a multi-coloured billion year old rock . Ochre is humanity’s oldest colour, a basic part of paint and art material known as iron oxide in mineral terms or hematite in science terms. Ochres and the earth pigments hold the stories of what the land has seen. They’re the border between atmosphere and the deep heart of the earth.
Red ochre in particular was used by the early Homo sapiens for several purposes; cave paintings, burials, rituals, ceremonies and vessels. To this day it continues to be used and revered by Indigenous people around the world for spiritual and religious practices and medicines.
Each landscape has its own palette of colour. Each colour carries the memory of the place where it is collected.
Here in Ireland the first evidence of ochre dates to 10,000 years ago. Ochre stained flint tools and an ochre crayon were among the finds of Ireland’s earliest known settlement, which are displayed in the Ulster Museum.
When working with ochres there is a devotional slowing down. For me, working with the pigments is pure medicine.
All photos ©️Róisín Coyle.
