‘It almost feels a bit surgical’

Perched on plinths in the gallery of Town Hall Arts Centre are fantastical creatures, and distorted figures. A man’s face gives way to a lion’s nose and mouth, a feathered woman has a beak, elsewhere familiar faces are doubled, sometimes looking forward, others suffocatingly melded together face to face.

This is John Rainey’s eyecatching exhibition, that forms the visual arts highlight of the Cavan Arts Festival programme.

Beside us is the sculptural head of an even tempered woman from antiquity, but with the snout and mouth of a horse. It’s called Enchantment II (pictured right). This isn’t just any woman, it’s Venus Italica by Antonio Canova. The horse meanwhile has been corralled from the Parthenon Sculptures, better known as the Elgin Marbles after the buck who, ahem, acquired them from their rightful place in Greece.

John explains that many galleries have released scans of their most famous sculptures which permits artists to use them for creative purposes. Using 3D printing and mould making the Tyrone man began bringing them into his own work.

“I’ve been working for some time now with these historical forms and reworking them in ways that feel more contemporary – they are addressing more contemporary ideas or way of seeing,” he says.

With his archive of classical busts in his Belfast studio, he mixes and matches them to come up with new arrangements. It strikes the Celt as sculpture’s equivalent of a DJ mixing samples, say if Jam Master Jay was let loose with Chopin and Mozart LPs. However, for John, there’s no scratching involved.

“In a way it almost feels a bit surgical. I’m casting these things separately and then splicing them together and slowly creating these joins,” he says of the imperceptible place where they connect. A surgeon would be proud of this work.

The Venus and the horse come from separate moulds and are cast separately before John slowly constructs them into these compositions.

“One of the broad themes of my work is to do with transformation. In Irish folklore transformation is something that happens very easy there, in a way that seems unfamiliar to us, but in the ancient world that was much more fluid and possible. That’s one of the things I’m exploring here, I’m creating these forms which seem to be in transition between states, they are moving from one thing to another.”

Rather than have the supporting architecture blend in with the pieces, he draws attention to them through Liquorice All Sorts colours. It really should jar.

“There’s tensions there,” agrees John. “It feels like it should but equally it doesn’t. In the last few years I’ve been experimenting with colour a lot more. Obviously there’s thematics going on in the work but in some ways I think what I am doing is quite formal in terms of composition, form, colour – those are things I’m exploring in themselves,” says John, a graduate of London’s Royal College of Art.

Despite Venus’s placid countenance, you can imagine that like the rest of us, she could rear up if pushed far enough. John agrees it could be viewed as expressive of an emotion.

The Celt asks John if he finds the piece beautiful, or disconcerting?

“Both of those things, and that’s something I’m very interested in – strangeness and beauty, and when those two things combine.

“When I first started showing these works, one of the comments that stuck with me was that you feel like it should be horrible, but it’s not.”

John Rainey’s Retrofits runs in the Townhall Arts Centre until Wednesday, May 20.