Caelan has been involved in art and architecture for three decades. Educated at the American University in Paris, the Architectural Association London and the Southern California Institute of Architecture Los Angeles, she’s worked in a range of disciplines for architects Frank Gehry, Nasrine Seraji and Don Bates as well as American artists Bill Viola, Jeff Koons, Mary Miss and Peter Erskine. On moving to Ireland in 1999, she gained eco-architecture experience with Solearth Ecological Architecture (Dublin) and since 2004 runs her practice incorporating ecological principles into residential and public commissions throughout Ireland. Alongside her architectural work, she has made art projects and curated & designed installations for many decades (see www.caelanbristow.com). In the late 1990s, she exhibited “Dead Horse” in Los Angles and New York. In Ireland, she exhibited “Clop” (2006) at the Birr Arts Festival and “Dong” (2006) at the Electric Picnic. She curated the Birr Arts Festival from 2004-2006, designed & managed the 160th anniversary Student Art & Design show at Ulster University Belfast in 2009, project-managed the Irish Showcase at Dutch Design Week 2015 and developed community art projects with Open House Limerick Education (2012-2017), “Re-possession” for Eva Biennal Limerick (2012), and “Slowweave” with Slow Architecture (2010-2011). Current art/design facilitation projects include working with the community of Kilcormac, Co. Offaly on a Creative Ireland Climate Action Project, “ReImagine Workers Villages” and developing a walking trail of environmental projects from the past 4 decades of Limerick’s Eva Art Biennal. Since 2017, she’s been renovating a 200 year old 3-storey stone house in Cloughjordan, Co. Tipperary. She’s a member of the RIAI Sustainability Task Force and of Irish Architects Declare, as well as Treasurer of Live Art Ireland. www.caelanbristow.com caelan@caelanbristow.com
How does one orient towards a place, how does one locate themselves somewhere? How to make physical strategies to do so, how to develop tools for situating yourself somewhere? How to help your body arrive to a site, to the land, to all it has held, holds, will hold? How to include what you are, what you’ve been and what you’ve held, how to mix, how to converse. How to create an occasion, the way, the how, the style, for being together? How to be friends with an unassuming green field by the road in Tipperary? How to understand its constitution, its specificity, its habits, its personality? How to arrive here, how to arrive here, how to help my body understand, I am here.
1. A Large Wooden Hexagon Structure, Something To Push Up Against. Something to lean against, something with mass to make me feel my scale, in this site, something that can move with me. A solid structure to be in relationship with, to, towards. Make a tool to practice convening, my Structure’s structure convening with another Structure’s structure. The force, the exertion, the push back, the bounce, the weight, the roll. Acclimating to a field by exertion of an object across it. How to arrive by laboring, the laboring through a material as a means of arriving somewhere.
2. A Suit On Which to Map-Make. A set of shirt and pants, made of industrial wool felt, found in the pile in the backfront of Milford House. Grey wool felt, acting as a piece of paper, a drawing instrument that is worn. A piece of chalk with which to draw in one hand, draw on the suit that sits atop your body. Practicing mapping, from multiple prompts and points of view. Draw (to map) the architecture in front of you – on the back side of your suit. Draw (to map) the lines in space people make as they move – in the armpit of your suit. Draw (to map) the negative space between bodies – on the collar of your suit. Most importantly – Map Affect. Map all the moments in that green field where you affected or were effected. Map the experience of mutual affectation. Map where these moments happened, translate them onto your suit, map their tone, map the act of affecting as if it were shapes, geometry, curves, spatial punctuations. Map the composition of affect.
3. Daily Practices In/With the Green Field. Using the act of measuring and mapping in new ways. Repurposing the act of measuring as a tool through which to meet this field. This field, who is steadily becoming an acquaintance, I measure this field. Its 3.5 acres of volume, I measure this field with the length of my body. The length of my body as a ruler, a unit, a surmised unit of measurement. I measure this field with the length of my body which is to say I measure it imprecisely, subjectively. I measure the volume of this field in footsteps too, which is also to say I measure it imprecisely, subjectively. What is the use of measuring imprecisely, what ‘result’ it yields. Maybe I measure it this way so that it has space to measure me. Put me in perspective, relief my body with its presence, my lack of accuracy holding open space for it.
3a. I draw diagrams daily for a while. Diagrams of walking backwards in the field, diagrams of sprinting eight times around the field, diagrams of the names of the trees lining its perimeter, diagrams of pacing back and forth for exactly one hour. Diagrams of the weekend I was away from the field, the distance between me in Belfast and the field in Tipperary, diagramming my longing for the field. Detailed and rigorous practices in the field giving way to loose and subjective diagrams. Another ode to affect, repurposing the form to subjectively index.
How does one orient towards a place, how does one locate themselves somewhere? How to make physical strategies to do so, how to develop tools for situating yourself somewhere? How to help your body arrive to a site, to the land, to all it has held, holds, will hold? How to include what you are, what you’ve been and what you’ve held, how to mix, how to converse. How to create an occasion, the way, the how, the style, for being together? How to be friends with an unassuming green field by the road in Tipperary? How to understand its constitution, its specificity, its habits, its personality? How to arrive here, how to arrive here, how to help my body understand, I am here.
