Caragh Thuring

The brick I started, I can't remember using that, but for me it was the perfect mixture of something that was man-made and human and it came from under the ground and emerged above the ground.

So that for me was a very simple, small object that contained a lot of what the whole work is about in a way I realise now at this point.

And the submarine, again, is something that's subterranean, hits the surface and something that I sort of looked at as a child.

So these things emerge without you really at the beginning knowing how they got there.

But they sort of emerge over a period of time and some of them stick and pyramids and pyramid volcanoes.

I used to do a lot of drawings of pyramid volcanoes.

They were sort of hybrid of bricks and volcanoes.

So these things, I wouldn't say that they're always intended or and certainly not previously.

They just emerged and evolved through making the work.

And some of them have remained there.

And I use them.

It's a bit like a Venn diagram or a sort of shifting Venn diagram.

Things float in and out and come back and forth or a bit like walk, you know, two steps forward and one step back.

Yeah.

Like a brick is a shortcut for me in a sense in language it's almost like it embodies a whole idea and you know whether other people get that or not doesn't really matter it's just for me that's what it represents and it manifests in different moments in different ways throughout all the work.

Yes, and I mean, I've always thought of the paintings as being built.

You know, bricks are used to build things.

Also, I've always thought about how do I get the human figure into the painting or into the work without painting it figuratively in any form.

So at one point I made a series of brick paintings of humans in a way, like sort of flat, sort of taken from adverts, very generic images of people and they were built out of brick.

Yeah.