Video transcript
ARTEXPRESS 2023 - Student interview - 05. Maeve McNulty

MAEVE MCNULTY: Hi, my name is Maeve McNulty. And I studied visual arts at Freshwater Senior Campus. Well, this work is about-- it's entitled Man's Favourite, Memento Mori, and it is the study of the connection of man's best friend and the study of life and death between the two. And it engages the idea of different life-spans and the fact that one life-span is much longer or shorter than another but still valuing the same type of connection.

Well, what inspired me is my real-life connections to animals, as I have been working in a vet clinic for about 3 years now. And I see constantly the connection between man and animal. And the figures themselves are inspired after my grandfather, who passed away a few years back. But he was an aspiring artist, and I judged a lot of things after him and his dog that he used to have.

And the artist that I studied when looking at this, I was quite inspired by Giacometti, who makes-- I think it's metal sculptures with abnormal proportions out of humans and animals. And it makes them a bit sickly, malnourished looking. But you can still tell what they are despite their abnormal proportions.

When I first started at Year 11 in Freshie, we had been doing continuous line drawings, and we formed them into different wire sculptures of faces. And since then, I've quite liked the idea of wire. So when we started studying the body of work, I took amounts of wire and created little skeletons out of them, which then I found that if I coated them in a paper-mache, they quite became realistic with muscle and tone with them. And I found that I could make proper sculptures out of it.

So these are made out of wire skeleton coated in paper-mache, which then I found-- buried deep within the art rooms, I found different rust patinas and oxidising paints that can rust quite quickly. Instead of leaving it up to the elements, it can quite expedite the process. So I decided to experiment with painting over the sculptures that I had made with those and found that I really liked the look that they came out with.

And then so I had them at a small scale, and I quite enlarged them with using thicker wire and more paint and more paper-mache to create quite bigger sculptures. When making this, I found that they are incredibly time consuming to create. I spent a lot of late nights at home, working on them, shaping the wire mostly because the wire can be quite flimsy and quite delicate to use.

And once that was all done and dry, I also found these sculptures have quite a imbalance to them, meaning that keeping them standing for a lot of the tall ones was a very difficult process. And it required a lot of counterbalance and drilling them-- drilling holes into the boards. And putting really, really tight screws and everything to hold them up was a major process. And then getting them to actually not break, because paper can be quite brittle once it's fully dried with the mache, and getting them to not break was a very difficult task. And having smaller scale models or maquettes, as some would call it, really helped being able to study what needed to be done in order to transfer it to the larger models.

My art teacher was crucial to the success of this work, as she was the one that directed me around our school for all the different mediums that I could use and made sure I had access to all the proper materials that I could use so I could bring my creation to life. Any advice I'd give a Year 12 student is to stick to your intuition because I originally-- a lot of people told me that I wouldn't be able to do this, that it would be too difficult. But part of me knew that I could. And if you trust your own gut and your own artist's intuition, I'm sure you can come up with something great.

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