The Season: What has your own artistic journey been?

Geoff Ireland: I think my artistic journey started as a 3–5-year-old on my father's building sites. My mother was extremely ill most of her life, and so I was assigned happily to bricklayers’ sand, wooden offcuts, and a whole lot of exciting materials that I amused myself with for many hours in wonderful imaginings making castles, buildings, whatever! This set a wonderful base for later studio work with meditative time thinking about what to discover and making three dimensional “stuff” with my hands. 

I became an Art teacher in a High School. This was a test artistically as I was a young married man and had a child, a mortgage, and Church commitments. However, I still made work somehow!

Eventually I was asked to join the staff at the National Art School in Sydney. In time I became Head of Sculpture and then finally Deputy Director/Head of Studies. During my time at the School, I was awarded a Fellowship to go to the Johnson Atelier Institute at Princeton, New Jersey, USA (1982-3). I learnt fine arts casting there, and my technical processes in making sculpture changed. I tried casting as we had a casting foundry at the NAS. Our family of 4 travelled to Utah where I worked at the Wasatch Bronze works and became friends with Neil Hadlock, who asked me to make a commissioned work. I became aware of LDS artistic culture there, which was a culture I thought whose sensibilities seemed to be strongly aligned with artistic Romanticism.

It was the Reagan years and the fall of the USSR. Culturally, I became very aware of symbols in the US, the flag particularly, and this was reinforced by a large exhibition of Jasper Johns’ work at the Whitney. Subsequently, I made many works based on flags with a political narrative which stemmed from my time in the US.

I saw a wonderful show at the National Gallery in DC, of hundreds of works by David Smith and was intrigued by his use of paint on his work. This somehow revived itself in my later work. I became more aware of the possibility of narrative in sculpture, which appears in my current work.

I was awarded a research grant which sent me around the world to look at the “Sculptural aspects of Architecture.“ The result was that my forms became architecturally based, platforms, stairs, arches, etc.

The next major and perhaps the most significant turning point in my life occurred when my wife Janice and I served a full-time mission in Poland as S&I Country Coordinators. We had faculty meetings all over Europe which reinforced the image of strong architectural elements in religious settings.

However, we both returned with cancer. Janice passed away 6 years later. Now during this time many very important questions began to surface, emphasized by another bout of cancer in 2018. What seemed to happen was all these artistic and moral/religious issues I had been trying to live throughout my life somehow seemed to form into a more unified whole. This was reflected in a drive to make visual statements about all these deeply felt passions.

The Season: These are works whose titles draw from scripture and comments about life. As a religious person, how does your faith find its way into your art?

Geoff Ireland: When I enter my studio, I often pray for grace. The 18th Century composer, Johann Sebastian Bach had thoughts about God’s grace: “Where there is devotional music, God’s grace is always present.” I’m not sure if Bach was referring to the presence of grace in himself or his audience. But in an attempt to add some enabling ability to my making, I seek grace through prayer and strive to create visual poetry. Does it always work? No. I don’t expect the Lord to grant me “perfection,” rather to help me join with Him in the godly gift of creation. I have a shared testimony with Michelangelo who said, “I work out of love for God, and I put all my hope in (with) Him.”

When I am about to make a work, I am not consciously clear about anything. I often sit and look out of my studio into the mangroves opposite. In the past decade I have been reflecting more and more on my mortality (I’ve had cancer twice in 6 years), and I am stimulated by the depth and breadth of the Plan of Salvation. This reflection has been wonderfully fruitful for the images, ideas, and deep feelings it consistently yields. I believe my religious beliefs are so embedded in my total being that inevitably they become the focus/heart of my work. I also believe that as I have progressed in years, the different parts of my identity have become much more harmonious and centered. 

From an abstract and responsive beginning, each work unfolds intuitively. At the same time my mind remains occupied with the questions and ponderings of the time. The work therefore, relatively unconsciously explores the complexities of those ideas, until a central cluster of ideas becomes apparent in the work. The work’s title reflects that central focus. 

Making visual art by this intuitive and reflective method ensures that the work is fundamentally connected to one’s senses and emotions, subsequently challenging the mind to unpack those responses in light of the symbols evident in the work and the title it is given. I hope that this approach opens one’s soul to the potential for personal spiritual experience.