Sinéad Kampff - Instagram Takeover

#ArtistTakeover | Sinéad Kampff | Day 1

Hello there! My name is Sinéad Kampff and I am the Current Visual Artist in Residence at Draíocht. I'm taking over the Instagram account to share a little bit of what I've been up to in my time here at Draíocht.

I graduated from NCAD in 2022 with a BA in Fine Art Painting and since then have been a part of a small studio collective, Ormond Studios. I work primarily with oil paints and some other multimedia materials such as grout, resin and tiles. The focus of my practice is navigating abandonment and loss through the vessels of empty space/ buildings and the beauty that makes up that space.

With my time here in Draíocht I hope to have expanded my focus on the beauty of the regrowth that often takes over these empty spaces such as weeds, wildflowers, grass and trees. I see this regrowth as hope and connecting it to my own feelings of growth through loss.

My 1st week in this dreamy studio space was all about settling in and reflecting on previous work. Something I like to do when starting to develop new work is to draw from past work, literally! Laying out older paintings and drawings I will sit and draw thumbnail like collages of previous work and see what I'm called to that may have been overlooked in the past. As it was the 1st week of January, I wanted to shake off any cobwebs from the Christmas and New Year break so I called these warm up drawings and set myself a time limit for each one, this exercise gave me a nice idea of where I wanted to take my research.

#ArtistTakeover | Sinéad Kampff | Day 2

This is the first time I've had access to such a large studio space completely on my own and it's been a dream to be able to spread out and work on multiple things at the same time. This has allowed me to experiment with the scale of my work since being in Draíocht, this is something I have been wanting to do for a while, however I have not had the space.

I felt that the regrowth of foliage that inhabits the empty places I visit and photograph needed to be portrayed on large canvases. I spent a lot of time building stretchers, stretching the canvas, fighting with my staple gun and then priming each one. I enjoy the craft of building and stretching canvases and it is a very important part of my process.

I have focused on the shadows of trees and weeds for the paintings and so have been experimenting with my colour palette and blurring the edges. I generally paint small and on tiles, they are quite detailed buildings and empty structures so I am excited to try painting larger and more loose with these shadows.

#ArtistTakeover | Sinéad Kampff | Day 3

Painting on tile is something I have been doing for a few years now and it has been a completely different process compared to any other surface I've used before. The small scale forces me to focus on details I otherwise feel the freedom to overlook and the standard sizes allow me to play with composition. I like to take away context from the spaces/buildings leaving them almost floating, this highlights the emptiness. Once the paint has dried the tiles are then covered in a layer of resin, I started this process as purely a way of preserving the paint so it would not scratch or chip off of the tiles. The resin however does change the context of the paint on the tile and gives it a deeper look making it in my opinion more beautiful but also more hardy meaning it can be set into the grout with no fear of the painting being damaged at all, almost like preserving the beauty in an empty space.

Most of my work has been quick snapshot photos I take in my day-to-day travels of buildings and spaces I pass regularly and so I have mainly been focused on the outer shell and have felt that maybe the randomness or lack of connection to the spaces has led me to this new direction I'm hoping to take with the work. Whilst on my residency here I am developing a new body of work looking at abandoned churches and the symbols that are often the only thing left once a space like that becomes empty.

A huge thank you to the wonderful team at Draíocht and to the Fingal Arts Office for giving me this opportunity and beautiful space. My time here has been incredibly motivating and has allowed me to explore new paths in my practice.