Meet the Artist: Caroline Mac Cathmhaoil

We’ve recently announced the selected artists for our 2024/25 Emerging Artists Programme. To celebrate the announcement, we spoke with 2023/24 Emerging Artist Caroline Mac Cathmhaoil about their experience being in the programme last year. Caroline’s exhibition, Ticket to Turyia, was on view at Orleans House Gallery February – April 2024.

Could you tell us about your approach to creating? 

I work as an artist (@restlessidiom) both on my own and sometimes collaboratively. But really I see all of my work as a collaboration.  I welcome the conversations, the sharing of stories and ideas that can happen at all stages in the making of a work. From the initial conversations to the show coming down. The artwork is always revealing new meaning to me through the insights of others; and often through its own connections to unseen worlds, or to some sort of shared subconscious. 

My moving image work is often developed over a long period of background research that can span several years. For Ticket to Turiya I turned to a different way of making work: Sometimes I wake up in the morning with an image of something I want to make in my mind, and I feel very driven (almost obsessively) to realise it. This is how the works in Ticket to Turiya came about. 

This method of post-dream inspiration was particularly apt for a show like Ticket for Turiya, which is an enquiry or voyage into the dreaming mind (Ticket to Turiya is a show inspired by lucid dreaming and what is described in Buddhism as the Dream Bardo or Milam). 

The work in the show called Cosmic Runway appeared to me in such a way. When works are very technology driven – they can at first seem very distanced from experiences of feeling and emotion. But what I find interesting about this process of making is that it can end up being the most connected to my subconscious. 

By way of example in the past, I have made artwork with robots and emotion capture systems. At the time I was making them I described them as being ‘a critique of dominant patriarchal technologies of control’. And of course, the artworks do operate on this level. But months later I realised that these works were also about my own family relationships at a very personal and previously unspoken level. I feel that there is always a subconscious drive directing the creation process from inside. 

The artwork works on many layers, some now apparent, some hidden, some to appear over time. As I was working on the electrical relays on the work called Cosmic Runway / Departure Zone in Ticket to Turiya it suddenly dawned on me that I was doing the same work that my father did when he came to London first in the 1960’s when he worked on the switches and relays in Wembley Tube station.  I felt that something unspoken was passing through time and a family line to draw my hands towards my father’s work again.

See a clip from Nightflight through the Bardo of the Sleeping Machines by Caroline Mac Cathmhaoil below:

Similarly, I also had the realisation that the video work in the show, that shows my hands as a I fly through an AI generated dreamscape, was not only about my lucid dream experiences of flying through the Dream Bardo. Once I installed the work and watched it projected in the gallery space in dialogue with the other works in the show, I realised for the first time that Nightflight through the Bardo of the Sleeping Machines was also about a past personal relationship; and that the work was trying to also show that there were more kind and beautiful ways to experience flight than flying planes in war.  

I always try to keep my creative process open, so that these additional meanings can reveal themselves in the work and eventually make themselves known to me. Even though I think I start off with a clear vision in my head, I am always at the bidding of both the goddesses of chance, and the trickster coyote ghosts of the other realms.  They will always decide between them how the final work turns out. 

What is at stake in the use of lo-fi, repurposed and accessible technologies in your work? 

Most of our technology in use today is developed in the first instance for war and violence. The advanced technologies within our phone cameras, GPS location systems, location systems, and even early incarnations of what would later become Siri, were all developed in their initial stages by the American Military – so arguably for the ultimate purposes of being used against other humans in war and conflict. Even Google works on missile guiding systems now. I always lament the billions of dollars, pounds, yen, yuan, rubles and euro spent on the development of warfare technology and how it could have been used to create technology that would have cleaned up the oceans, saved animals and plants from extinction and stopped world poverty long ago. How technology is actually used instead is both crazy and horrific and saddens me every-day. 

Despite all of this I still believe that technology can help us create a better world – if only we could take it out of the control of the tech-bro greed merchants and the surveillance military industrial complex. My practice shows that I still retain hope. I like to think my work works in counterpoint to the tech-bro and military industrial complex agendas for technology. The deliberate gesture of getting very technologically ambitious artwork made with very small budgets is an important part of the practice. Piecing together things. Working with cheap, re-used and lo-fi solutions. I spend a lot of time rummaging through bins of electronics; and always carry a screwdriver to the recycling in case I see something that needs to come home with me to have a new life. I always loved repairing things, and can’t stand the disposable culture we have around technology. All of this feeds into the work. I describe it as a queer feminist DIY approach to using technology in an art practice. 

When I use more advanced tech like AI in the mix, I always try to also push it towards this queer feminist imaginary. I work with the polar opposite of military and Silicon Valley budgets to try to imagine into being a very different and ever hopeful and compassionate deployment of technology. So, the work serves as a radical antagonist of hope. It’s a very small gesture. But it hopefully helps show that another world is possible.

Ticket to Turyia was part of our Emerging Artists Programme. What did you learn from this programme?  

It was great to have a solo show for the first time and understand the work and considerations involved in bringing pieces into dialogue with each other in a large gallery space. This was a new experience for me. I was daunted at first with the size of the gallery – and there were some good calls made by the curatorial team to push me to using the space fully with the addition of the video work Nightflight through the Bardo of the Sleeping Machines, which gave a coherence to the show that I was very happy with. Many thanks again for the support of all at Orleans House Gallery who made it all happen and had plenty of patience with me along the way. 

You can follow Caroline Mac Cathmhaoil on Instagram @restlessidiom for updates on forthcoming work.