Caragh Thuring

And then I think probably Otto Dix.

I was very interested in Otto Dix, actually, when I was younger.

Just the portraits.

I can't remember the name of the painting, but there's a woman smoking a cigarette with her legs crossed.

That's a fantastic painting, yeah.

And there's just seems so much in that to me, both horrific and beautiful and naughty and exciting.

And, you know, it covered so many things.

And that's something that I found over a period of time quite frustrating because I think at the beginning people sort of saw the work as just about painting.

And to me, it never has been that because I have some sort of social conscious, you know, I'm very interested in humans actually and how they exist in their environments and how they can become something else or how things can change or change.

And having grown up in an environment that, you know, whether you like it or not, these things that heavily influence what you do and you sort of it's a cliche and you want to avoid it.

But actually, it's always there.

And I also didn't want to be literal or didactic about those aspects of the work.

But, you know, I'm glad you could see that because it is all in there.

And I always think of everything as a sort of social economic geography project in a way, which sounds extremely dull, but it's actually, you know, in there through the excitement of making a painting as well.

Totally.

And I mean, there's many strands to that in a way growing up in that environment where I saw these nuclear submarines and in a place where the docks were declining and the oil rigs were being built.

You're sort of aware of this heavy sort of militarization of an area that's quite sort of innocent.

It's, you know, amazing landscape.

All the mountains are overgrown.

hollowed out in the Cold War full of ammunition and different things.