Herakles and the Stympalian Birds

Herakles and the Stympalian Birds is an internal, wall mounted artwork presented in two parts. The main work is located in The Source Arts Centre library, and explores methods of writing up to the 20th Century. The second postscript piece of the work is located in the centre foyer, relating to 21st century communication methods such as texting and e-mail. It uses extracts from a locally relevant text by Thurles born writer Dennis O'Driscoll; the phone texts are extracts from the King James Bible translated into 'textspeak'.

The following are comments on the work by the artist, John Kindness, October 2009:

"Painting has often been compared with alchemy, and it can, both literally and metaphorically, turn base metal into gold. Great paintings are among the objects we value most highly in our society and yet they are technically just accretions of earths, resins and oxides. The idea of orchestrating base materials into beautiful objects is what drives most of my work. Herakles and the Stymphalian Birds is not painted in any accepted traditional manner. Canvas is replaced by the unlikely substrate of zinc. Oil paint is only present as a light scumble, in fact most of the basic painting is done with car paint. If the work was to be placed in a Carnegie library built with Victorian red brick I might have considered other materials, but McCullough Mulvin have designed the Source Arts Centre with glass and concrete topped with a rather lovely patinated zinc cladding. 

It is not often that a building material becomes a catalyst in the creation of a new art work, but in 2006 I had used a piece of recycled zinc, found in the marshes near where I live, to make a version of a 500 b.c. Greek vase painting of Herakles riding his patron of a flock of troublesome birds. So when I was asked to propose a piece for the Source Arts Centre, it was the architect's use of zinc that brought me back to Herakles. In the early work the birds were newspapers, like bad origami, fluttering in the way papers are blown around a city dump. It was a short step from newspapers to books and from books to the origins of writing. 

One of the most influential artists for me since my student days was a writer, not a painter or sculptor. When I read James Joyce's Ulysses it was the "big bang" in my aesthetic consciousness. Here was someone for whom every scrap ever written held literary potential; from shopping lists to Shakespeare, death notices to Dante, it all held latent power. It was the Oxen of the Sun chapter that provided the other part of my concept. As a baby is brought into the world, Joyce brings the English language from its origins to maturity and on to a modernist disintegration. I 'borrowed' this structure and made the birds tangible versions of scripts from Babylonian cuneiform to Futurist chaos. 

Herakles is formed from the base materials of a modern fly-tipping site. He is an interesting figure in Greek mythology and was immensely popular, subsequently being taken up by the Romans as Hercules. His archetype still exists today in the form of the super hero, but Herakles didn't have the moral agenda of a Superman or Batman, in most of his exploits he is just following orders. Ireland has passed through the dark ages of banned books and proscribed authors, but there will always be threats to the freedom of the press and the licence of the poet. Joyce knew that literature would always survive; a book is a delicate structure, but the idea it contains can be the most robust thing on the planet."

Selection panel for the curated selection of artists.