At the Kiosk: Eve McGuire

What inspired this work?

This work is part of an ongoing project I started about three years ago called Everyone I Have Ever Loved. I’ve been keeping a list of everyone I’ve ever loved, from family members to old school friends to ex-boyfriends and beyond, then making sculptures of each person, most of them wooden and 2-dimensional. There are about a hundred people on the list now, and I’ve made fifty-seven sculptures so far.

This piece, Ro and Alice, depicts two of my close friends that I met at university. I originally installed it outside on campus, near a building where they both had lectures. From a distance it looked like two real people standing there, but up close you could see they were just wooden cut-outs. That sort of falseness really intensified what the whole project is about: that space between performance and confession.

I grew up in theatre and was really inspired by set design, the wooden 2-dimensional figure is supposed to look like a piece of a set. I liked the idea of making aspects of my own life feel a bit staged or ‘put on show.’ I find that mix of intimacy and public display both funny and fascinating.

What drew you to painting and installation?

What drew me to painting and installation was my mum, whose life was defined by art. She loved both mediums, I remember her telling me how, as a child, she once painted her entire room white to turn it into her own painted installation.

It’s a story I heard thousands of times, but that sense of creating without boundaries is something I try to capture every time I make work, and I think about it every time I paint.

I like art to feel like an intense emotional experience for both the artist and the viewer. In painting, you can sense the artist’s presence through the speed of brushstrokes or the thickness of the paint. With installation, the viewer is invited in, immersed in the work and the emotion behind it.

How would you describe your artistic process?

I would describe my artistic process as almost entirely led by emotion, it is deeply intuitive and largely unstructured. I think of my paintings as diary entries: each one is made with purpose, often as a means to process or channel my feelings about events or experiences.

I very rarely start with a fully formed plan. For me, having a rigid structure can limit the creative freedom and the spontaneous, in-the-moment decisions that often make a piece deeply evocative for both me and the viewer.

As a recently graduated artist, do you have any exciting ongoing/upcoming projects?

As for new and upcoming projects, I’m continuing my ongoing series Everyone I Have Ever Loved, adding to the list and making new sculptures. It’s something I hope to keep working on throughout my life.

I’m also beginning a new series of paintings on wood with cut-out holes for faces, like the ones you find at fairgrounds. I’m using those cut-outs to explore ideas of absence and grief, painting moments from my life my mum wasn’t there for, or memories of her.

I think now that I’ve graduated, I feel more comfortable exploring grief as a concept, and allowing myself to make work that’s deeply personal without worrying about being judged too harshly. I’m also interested in how humour and play can coexist with those heavier emotions, how something that looks playful can still hold real emotional depth.

Follow Eve on Instagram at @evecmcguireart