Kathryn Ferguson

So as you said, I went to the Royal College of Art

And it was whilst I was there, I really started to think about the potency of film.

I also thought about the potency of the fashion image and how you can create such an engaging, immediate image that draws people in.

I was excited about the immediacy of the image itself.

and then once you can i kind of thought with film if i can get them in with how it looks and then pack a punch with what i'm trying to say when i've got them there that feels like an interesting way to be able to start making films so basically on the back of that i made my first i guess instead of it being a commission film or a fashion film i made a film called mathr which is gaelic for mother and it was a film about my own mother and it was my graduation piece um at the rca and

It was looking at themes of Mother Ireland, Irish women under Catholicism and the state.

And I guess I was really starting to look at the country where I was from through the lens of my own mother.

It was still very experimental.

It was very visual.

I had shot a documentary element, but I ran out of time and decided to make a very visually driven experimental piece.

But what was quite unbelievable about that whole situation is I was in the midst of this film and I knew that I needed the right score for this film.

And there's nobody I could think of as music who I wanted more than Sinead's.

So I was a scrappy little student and I reached out to her manager at the time saying what a fan I was and how much I adored her and how much she'd meant to me, most importantly, as a fellow Irish woman.

And could I please get access to the stems of her music?

of her catalogue and he agreed so I was able to get access to all of Sinead's music and then deconstruct it for this very experimental graduation short film and that was 2011 that was Mather and I guess for me that was my first putting my flag on the ground about trying to

I don't know, make the personal more political, I guess, with my work.

I was trying to eke out these themes of these areas, which obviously went on to form Nothing Compares a decade later.

That was where it really began, was starting, you know, actually having the space and being at somewhere like the RCA, where I was very much encouraged to explore.

I realized that so much that I wanted to explore was about the country I'd come from.

Yeah, I mean, I think we all grew up confused in Ireland in the 80s and 90s.