Soul/Energy/Feeling
The Process
From Earth to Art
A chat with artist Brenda Kennelly
Brenda gathers stone and slate and also makes her own tesserae with recycled mortar and pigment. A walker for many years, she has a great affinity with the land under her feet. “I walk and I observe,” she says, “The stones speak! Some stones are ready to be picked; others don’t want to be! There is a time…” Brenda also creates with tile and smalti glass.
She tells me that her artistic journey is at the very beginning. Despite having 25 years of experience with tile and mosaic, she is slowly finding her niche with slate and stone. “I feel I’ve done this in another lifetime and intuitively know how to create, and how to use the tools.” When she is working on a piece, she is in a space she calls her Zen Zone. She thinks of nothing else save allowing her hands to flow.
She knows that forcing the creation doesn’t work; even a structured plan goes off-plan! The creativity is linked to knowing how and when the time is the right time, to go to the studio.
"It comes from deep with the soul when I am in a very quiet internal space, present with the stones. It is my form of meditation."
She knows that forcing the creation doesn’t work; even a structured plan goes off-plan! The creativity is linked to knowing how and when the time is the right time, to go to the studio.
She generally starts with a blank sheet and allows it to just happens. “It comes from deep with the soul when I am in a very quiet internal space, present with the stones. It is my form of meditation.” It is a process and very time consuming.
When asked about her journey through inception to the creation of a piece, Brenda explains that sometimes, she is inspired by a colour to begin with. Some of her colours are created using mortar and pigment and she also uses many processes which are time consuming.
Brenda guided me through the journey of making this piece below. While she often uses Wedi board (a light tile backer board used in showers) as a substrate, in this piece she created her own using a Fibreglass mesh. She cut the mesh into shape and pasted it with a cement-based adhesive. For this rectangular black shape shown in the picture, for example, she moulded it into a shape that had curve and flow. It demanded layering and a lot of time. Once the first layer is dry, a second and third layer are added to give the substrate strength. Whilst most of her pieces are framed and made on a flat surface, this was a new experiment, playing with flow and dimension. She reminded me that the earth isn’t flat, it’s full of lumps and bumps and full of grooves and ups and downs and meanderings. Thus, she began to experiment with this new form, a stand-alone form, with curves and flow. Substrates such as this, once made, can be left sitting for a time in the studio. It knows when it needs to be used and created on.
Many of the stones in this piece are from Co. Clare. With every piece, Brenda plays around with what might work for the piece. Here, she has played with the stone and it’s shape as well as colour. She liked how the shape was evolving. It demanded quite a bit of ‘cutting’ to support stones ‘fitting into’ the piece. To give it a more earthy look, she changed the colour of the adhesive by adding an earthy brown/red pigment to it.
The inner circles of the top and lower halves, for example, were made first; then the smaller stones needed to be cut into shape to become compatible with the semi-circular flow. She tells me “I liked the shape of the inner piece and I enjoyed making this particular shape. There seemed to be something tribal about it.”
Colour, shape and size all relate together. She commenced on the top half following the curve with the stone. She then needed to cut some smaller coloured stone for the inner curved shapes. Sometimes she may do the edges and then fill in the middle. For this one, she made the first circle, bottom circle and middle in one day and then made the bottom and top on another day. All in all, this piece took over 6 days to complete over a period of time.
Brenda feels that everybody relates very differently to the pieces she creates and each person sees something different. She explained that sometimes, she dislikes naming them for this reason. When there is no name, the viewer has freedom to enhance the piece with their own personal meaning.