MTU Crawford College of Art & Design

BACK to MAAP 2021

Michael Hegarty

MA:AP 2021

Michael Hegarty

Raw canvas became an anchoring element in my paintings. The colour of cotton became the first colour of my abstract compositions. However, the question inevitably arose; why restrict oneself to painting on cotton canvas when there were lots of other fabrics that could be painted on? I began to paint my hardedge geometric designs on pre-printed fabrics from haberdasheries and soft furnishing suppliers. This juxtaposing of painted form and patterned textile created an exciting visual incongruity. The variety of printed fabrics available to me warranted their own study, and I began to see the potential of cloth material coming off a roll with the same possibilities as paint squeezing out of a tube.

Curtain and upholstery fabrics proved more useful than more tenuous cloths. Studying this material led me to study the synergies and parallels between non-objective paintings and decorative curtains. Both employ various colours, designs, and forms on fabric. The major difference between these soft furnishings and paintings besides their function is that the fabric on paintings is stapled onto wooden frames while curtains hang from poles. This difference needed scrutiny as does the prestige of fine art painting versus the lowliness of decorative curtains.

My works explore the topographic nuances of consumer culture, the vagaries of taste in the use of found fabrics from domestic interiors and the rotations of fashion and obsolescence. The oval format I use references the quaintness of modernist abstraction; and the utopian belief in new promises and shapes of the future, a future that certainly cannot be taken for granted any more.