Artist puts his foot in it

Ben Reilly's exhibition runs to October 29

If you haven’t already seen it, Ben Reilly’s exhibition in Townhall Cavan, it is quite the spectacle.

Eight charcoal coloured life size feet are affixed to the tippy-top of elongated bone-smooth wooden limbs. A matter of inches separates soles from white ceiling. At the base are remnants of timber structures, something from a centuries old shipwreck. Casting swaying shadows across the white walls of the modestly proportioned gallery, the artworks are at once elegant, absurd and slightly disconcerting.

What it’s about? Well, it could be about something, or maybe nothing. It might be everything.

At the launch of the exhibition the Celt confides to Ben that first impression is it conjures the idea of famine boats, and I’m shocked and smug in equal measure when Ben generously tells me that this stab in the dark is ‘right’. However this is one of those participatory events where everyone gets a medal...

“If ever I’m putting in proposals for anything I always find it very difficult,” begins Ben, “because there’s so many different things going on in it that I don’t want to be saying: ‘This is what it is’.

“Because someone else is going to be saying: ‘Oh, I thought it was this.’ It’s whatever you think it is. I have my own ideas about where certain things come from.”

That freedom of interpretation is echoed in the freedom in creation. Ben embraces an element of happenstance in constructing the sculptures.

“How a piece might start, like this for example,” he says, bringing us to the makeshift wooden base, “I was thinking about the whole raft theme, the Armada, the tentative nature of the boat that is actually not much use as a boat, but it has an island thing, a semi-protective kind of thing with it. There’s that, there’s the kind of head mast, captain, whatever you want to call it and then there’s the human element with the foot.”

An artist’s residency in West Cork where Ben walked around the coast gave him the chance to collect wood to feed into this exhibition.

“There’s no real structure to it you know, and yet there is,” he says emphatically.

You’ll be relieved to discover the feet weren’t found the beach - however, there is a coastal dimension to it. They are cast from his own feet using a material called Alginate for the mould: “Dentists use it for casting teeth, it’s derived from seaweed.

“The mould starts to shrink, so some of these feet are third or fourth casts, and each time you do it, it shrinks in, so it almost ages as you’re doing it. I thought there was something really nice about that. And they kind of seemed to work better with the more recent kind of narrow gnarly bits of wood that I find.”

While scouring the coast he came across cuttle fish bones. Ben explains that typically you find the lozenge shaped bones in pet shops for budgies to gnaw. However, Ben found another use.

“Cuttle fish is like it’s like balsa wood - when you’re carving into it, it shatters, so there’s no distinct line like when carving into clay or into wood, it’s tricky stuff.”

Having carved into the cuttlefish bone, he uses it as a mould in which he pours in a low melting alloy to create mini-sculptural pieces.

“You get these kind of lines - that’s the pattern of the cuttle fish - it looks like 3D printing, I hadn’t thought of that when I was doing it. It’s almost like an analogue version of 3D printing, and I love that.”

Observing that the sculptures are getting thinner with every new iteration, he speculates they “might disappear”.

“I couldn’t tell you actually why they’re all in there now, but something about it that they fit. For the moment.”

I wonder what people might think of an artist saying I don’t really know what it’s about?

“That’s okay, that’s why my artist statements are always vague, because I’m kind of vague.

“I like sticking things together and things fit and things don’t fit and I change them and chop them and try things out and whatever and then suddenly something happens and it’s like that’s perfect,” he says, clarifying that he doesn’t mean objectively perfect, but suggests comfortable is a more accurate word.

“When something fits them, maybe it’s because I’ve been making things for so long i have an idea something is comfortable when it’s a particular way, but I don’t know why, and I don’t really want to either to be perfectly honest.”

Ben Reilly’s exhibition ‘Sometimes you just want to’ runs at the Townhall Arts Centre Cavan until Thursday, October 29.