Paul O'Neill, a final year VisComm student at NCAD, talks to Russell about his recent projects and work.

What projects have you been working on recently?

Well I'm in the middle of a long thing at the moment. I've been doing installations since 1990 and for all of them there has been sound, it's been central to the work. I was approached about a year ago by a fine art book publisher to consider publishing a book that documents all these installations visually, textually and with audio. So myself and a guitarist sound engineer I work with, Mike Fearin, started remixing all the sounds and sound elements from all these installations. This is going to amount to four separate CD pieces. They are all, what I like to call, contextually anchored. All the sounds that are in them are from somewhere or someplace or something and have a general relevance to the general idea of what the installation is about. There are not just connected for gratuitous reasons.

So is the there a theme throughout them all?

Well they're all in different installations. In a piece called 'Republic of Thorns' which dealt with issues about land ownership, the heritage industry and tourism in the area of England where I live, the Lake District, the sounds are from the river I live next door to, the Rothay. Rothay is William Wordworth's favourite river. He and all the romantic poets used to walk along this river, so the sound of this river carries the connection of these people and what they signify. There are also sounds of a local quarry which is the land being used in a contemporary way all the time. They're cutting stone out of the rock to make objects to clad buildings around the world. Yet there's great debate in the area as to whether they should allow this to extend or not. I find it ridiculous that they shouldn't. 'It's a scar on the landscape if they make it any bigger than it is' they say, but I think this has been going on for hundreds of years. The way we use the land has been going on for years so why are you getting so precious about the landscape in this respect. This is part of our heritage.

Do you find designing for CD packaging limiting?

I used to do 12-inch album covers. The irony about that switch from the 12 inch format to the 4 and half inch CD package was that the text you had to play around with was minimal. They'd say 'here's my name, here's the name of the album, here are the musicians and musician credits, track listing and thanks to the tea-lady, mum and dad' and that was it. We would have all this space and a tiny little bit of text and now we hardly any space and they want fucking dissertations written. The credits are just all over the place. They want all this crammed in and they want it to look stunning, beautiful and innovative. So that's the difference really. In essence, it's no problem because these elements are like designing a poster. With a postage stamp the same amount of rigour should be brought to it as to a billboard. Your still working within the same constraints like number of printings, amount of text, what audience you're dealing with, who your trying to appeal to, what content are you trying to convey. It's the same for any format.

Who was the most inspirational music artist you've designed for?

Brian Eno, not because he's visually creative but just as a friend and a mind we have a lot in common. The ideas just fly all over the place and lead somewhere else all the time. That's why he's so good at working with groups too. As long as they accept the conditions that he lays down 'If you want me to produce you then you'll have to follow some of my rules. And some of those rules at the time might not make sense at all and some of the things I want you to do might not lead to anything interesting, but they might. You have to trust me a little bit'.

Did you notice any change in your work when you moved to Cumbria?

No not really, because my work was always informed and inspired by ideas that were rooted in the natural world processes of nature. Even when I was living in the middle of London they were still rooted in that idea. I guess its given me more opportunities to study these things at close hand and given me more time to think and to get out of London. A lot of the time I wasn't even aware of the need to get out of London. It was kind of two-fold thing, when I was in London I was happy most of the time. It was only in the last few years of being there I just thought 'this is terrible, I've got to get out of this place it's abysmal. I need some space to think. I need to get away from this rat race.'

As an artist what do think about the current state of design?

Well I don't really think about it to be honest. I design, and I do illustration but I wouldn't call myself a designer or an illustrator. That was another reason for getting out of London. I found from being in London, much like being in Dublin I guess, that the territory your working in, media, design and creative industry was quite small. Everyone knew everyone else. I felt it was so incestuous. You'd meet people and all they would talk to you about were tools. 'Have you got this program, have you got that, have you got that?' No one was talking about ideas or asking questions 'why are you doing this?'

In interviews before you've said designers have become 'photoshopaholics' and technology is overshadowing creative design.

When I have paid attention to design, which I have to because I teach students in various colleges in the UK, I've noticed a backlash against all that. It's great. Students are actually thinking about why they're doing something and saying 'what is the idea I'm trying to convey here?' Getting the idea sorted out first and then asking what do I need to appropriately show this rather than going for the tools first and squeezing in the idea afterwards. The idea tends to get grafted on so the work looks very stylish and polished but at the end of the day it seems to be empty. There's nothing there. It's bloodless.

Do you think you are an artist who has become a designer?

Just artist. These things have been categorised by someone else. The fact that they're all separate little pigeonholes has nothing to do with me. Historically that was never the case. It's only recently since the war that art historians, administrators and critics have felt the need to put these things in pigeonholes to protect them. Fine art, graphic design, typography, illustration, ceramics, animation are all part of the same thing to me; there are just different tools, that's all.

Andy Medhurst said your music pieces "evoke rather than describe, suggesting moods through contrasted textures and carefully situated tones... operates with wit and warmth rather than making a fetish out of obscurity" Do you think your design carries these inflections too?

Yeah I suppose. I'm unconscious of this but other people have noted that there is a real correspondence between all the different areas that I work in. Right across the board in every area that I work in there is a consistency of working going on, which I'm really proud of. I have kind of been conscious of the fact that that's what I want to be. All the people that have ever inspired me in the arts have also been like that. They may have operated in different little pigeonholes but you can always tell there's one mind at work even though the outcomes could look and sound totally different. Duchamp is the prime example for that. Captain Beefheart is another one. Look at his paintings. Look at his lyrics and look at his music. There are three different mediums there but there is consistency, you know it couldn't be anyone else.

You mean a similarity in theme?

Just the way they approach an idea and problem solving. The way their mind works. It can't be anyone else. That is what's really important and that's the way I teach as well. In the projects I give I try to get the students to get inside themselves and not to emulate what already exists in the world. Which is why I don't give out projects saying 'design a book cover' or magazine cover. They'll just go and look at stuff that already exists, what's the point? I want them to find another medium that's theirs.

Getting back to that quote of 'warmth' is important. I've used the word 'bloodless'. There are a lot of things in this world in terms of creative art that are totally 'bloodless'. They're very well done, very witty and sharp but they don't seem genuine to me. It just seems like that piece is just part of that bandwagon and very hip but there's nothing genuinely distinct about that voice or the mind behind it. So the end result is shallow and I want something a bit more organic with some real rigour behind it, and guts.

Contact Details:
Website: www.matter-shed.co.uk
Permanence : dedicated to the art and music of Russell Mills and Ian Walton.

Previous artices >>