Interview with Artist Mark Joyce
Michael Dempsey, Head of Exhibitions, Dublin City Gallery–Hugh Lane. February 1st, 2012.
MD: I understand you correctly, this is a set of drawings from a scientific theme?
MJ: Yes, there are diagrams of light, physical light. It is a process of science and light, physical, rendered and scattered. I work with ink markers on paper, which seems to get closest to light in motion, so that they are treated works.
MD: How do you arrive at the compositions — do these works relate to actual facts?
MJ: It’s an optical thing — we know the light around us originated in the sun, and we can see it with our eyes. It becomes continuous light, and the shadow is the other side that we are discovering between in mysterious ways. When things don’t match up, it can be a factual area, or not, to work in.
MD: What are the conditions — the work references light, is it the same thing?
MJ: I am working with representations of light, drawings of physical light. I look at a lot of the schematic representations — chromatic values, colours, reflection, and particles in a field. I imagine a sea of waves and particles, things in motion. Alternating, I make a coloured line, then crosses — I want to move from the focus out into a rhythmic scheme.
MJ: It’s transparent.
MJ: Yes, I’m looking at the laws, orders, and natural architectures that have literally expanded our human physical knowledge, and these drawings come from that analytic inspection. The drawings have an aesthetic order rather than an illustrative function.
MD: You have talked about lines in space and nature before.
MJ: When you work with lines, of course you have to think about the action of drawing as movement across a surface over time — how long you make a line, and where one line intersects another. The function of the line is where the style of drawing emerges, through the lines and the markers. I want the work to be part of that — the stimulus for a synthesis of aspects of our experience. There’s a lot to be seen, but it starts with the bigger questions.
MD: To what extent do you plan the colour in your work?
MJ: Colour is what exists here — spectral colours, the amount of exact light. Each colour, or light, so confined, is a spectral band. There is a basic anatomy to drawing — coloured light, coloured pigment that exists. I work with three values in one: the actual line, the saturation, and the tonality. The rhythm is maintained by using these values in contrast, stepping down from spectral to other mixed or broken colours. Those drawings were made as sketching acts of what you see characterised by which colours they are — it’s something, in the end, very minimal, when you get a few points of colour lined up on their own.
MD: You select colours in a way that displays the drawings as a direct, scientific rendering, yet we have no way to orient the work with a degree of science in its aesthetic — how do these come together in this work?
MJ: There is a place in colour phenomena where art and science meet. I know there are easy versions of this, but really, when you meet a scientist, they are debating the interaction with their instruments and the way these are controlled. I think artists can take this work very far — not only through the physical, but through harmonics. There is also a huge common history of working instinctively, and what I understand of that radical analytical thought is that art, in many ways, is now invisible, and scientists do that too — everything points from the present into the unknown.
