Working across photography, sculpture, and participatory projects, Cork City artist Chris Finnegan has built a practice centred on collaboration. By engaging with young people and adults in diverse contexts, he continually explores new ways of bringing play, creativity, and artistic production together. This week, Elysia from our Box Office and Marketing Team sat down with Chris to discuss his ongoing residency and exhibition in the TRISKEL SAMPLE Project Space. 

Three words to describe your art?

Playful, collaborative, and optimistic.

Tell me about Play Testers Needed and Play This Way?

Play This Way has been developed from research I’ve done in early-years settings, looking at early-years play. I was really interested in working with younger children and figuring out how to make art that is accessible for them. It’s the result of looking at early-years play, the materials, and what activities they do within those settings, and thinking of how I can build upon that and expand on it, rather than giving them the exact same materials and activities they do in school.

Play Testers Needed! was an invitation for young people to come in and try out the materials in the TRISKEL SAMPLE Project Space. I’ve tested this work in school and pre-school settings but also at the May Sunday Festival in Killeagh. They were a variety of both indoor and outdoor offerings of the materials, and I was really interested in finding out how it would work in this particular space, what each space brings to the work and also the challenges. I knew what I wanted to do with the TRISKEL SAMPLE Project Space but I wasn’t ready to offer it to the public until we had the chance to let some little people in to play first.

What sparked your exploration of the relationship between play and art-making?

Looking back on most of the art I’ve made since graduating from my Fine Art degree, it has been playful. Quite often it’s dressed up in a serious aesthetic, under the title of “conceptualism”, but actually I was just playing with materials, and I was doing things which made me feel excited. I’ve made sculptures out of chairs, temporary sculptures that I then photographed, and that’s where I got into photography, through the need to photograph sculptures that only exist for a few seconds or minutes. I think my teaching practice where I taught secondary school art and photography for ten years, there was a lot of technical exploration, but as I got through the career, I got looser and looser, giving the young people more freedom. I was very lucky to be working in an artistic educational system where they allowed a lot of freedom of materials and choices. I was able to be playful with my teaching quite a lot, and I worked with some really amazing teachers who helped me see that art teaching doesn’t have to be conventional or technical. The stuff I’m presenting to early years in Play This Way, I have done stuff like this with teens and older kids, and even adults in different settings.

Has becoming a father changed your artistic process?

I don’t think there’s a separation between myself as an artist, myself as a parent, and myself as an educator, I think it all works together and sometimes you have to define the time to position yourself as one or the other. Parenthood, fatherhood, but specifically being the parent of three boys fueled into my art-making and vice versa. I think my boys sometimes see the world through the lens of what I do, like a few years ago we had a few boxes in the corner of a room, placed precariously, and my son said, “look dad, it’s art!” so I think they do have an appreciation of what I do. I’m constantly surrounded by objects and items and I play with them, they play with me, I’ve collaborated with them a lot. Alongside being testers, which is helpful to have, they definitely are also collaborators with me. The real starting point for my body of work here began with my project Grammar of Home where I explored the objects that represent home, and a lot of my son’s play was incorporated into that because play and the home, to me, are intrinsically linked.

What is the end-goal of your ongoing project in the TRISKEL SAMPLE Project Space?

I want to see it used. I want to see materials with some life, and some wear and tear. I’m not precious about the materials– most of it is recycled and has had past lives, so I think that’s quite a goal; to know the materials have been used. I do plan to come into the space to photograph it as it changes, and present those photographs in the space in some way like prints or maybe zines, or concertina books. This is experimental so I don’t know how that’ll work and I never know what’ll be here when I come in, so we’ll see about that. The main thing I’d like is for people to come away from here thinking it was fun, and that it was different. Good different.

What’s next for you after your TRISKEL SAMPLE residency and exhibition?

Alongside this project, I’ve been working on quite an ambitious launch of another collaborative project with young people called Playspaces. This has been a two-year project where I’ve been working with young people to design child-only play spaces around Cork City. That would be launching during Cork Midsummer this year and there will be a trail of five play spaces around Cork City that young people can interact with, and play in, up until the end of August.

Cats or dogs?

Cats, even though I’m allergic!