TD 1
ANDREW CLANCY Andrew Clancy will happily admit he
’s a bit of an outlier. Working out of a studio down on the Pigeon House Road which was a former British mining station and then a TB and isolation hospital, the sculptor and set designer has no problem working to his own beat outside of the scene. “It’s always worthwhile keeping a slight fake reputation of being slightly difficult to deal with because then those people don’t go near you. Most big theatres wouldn’t countenance me because they think I do weird shit.” As such, his loyalties rest with those directors more open to a form of “blue sky thinking” such as Pan Pan, Dead Centre and Collapsing Horse. Clancy is also a riot of robust opinions bearing little concern for pricking the sensitive egos enmeshed in aspects of the arts scene. But first, a little bit of background. Being the second eldest of ten, Clancy remembers being surrounded by painting and drawing in the family home in the Wicklow Mountains. Going to art college was inevitable. “In those days you had to get two honours and three passes to get into art college, so the bare minimum, moron stuff really. If you were good at art you were basically useless to everybody so you either went out and got a job or went to art college. It was also the ‘80s so there was no work.” After studying sculpture in NCAD, Clancy worked in a bronze-casting foundry for a year before ‘drifting’ into Ardmore Studios which became the “best education in how to make things accurately and quickly.” “I was the model maker there, and because the unions were so strong, I was constantly referred to as ‘the student’ and paid in cash for five years. I’d be asked to make an eight-foot reproduction of the galley of a ship and ‘make it out of that shit over there in the corner.’ There was no buying materials or anything.” He juggled this with teaching in NCAD at night for a number of years, before getting a sculpture commissions for the National Museum in Castlebar which afforded him the chance to focus on his own work. However, he remembers the world being relatively hostile to his chosen field of practice. “There was a certain point in the ‘90s when you’d tell people at parties that you were a sculptor and they’d go, ‘oh, that’s where my tax money goes.’ I stopped saying it. Then there became a certain point where everyone no longer thought of us as spud-eating and muck-gravelling. We were entering Western society and art became fashionable. It literally became intertwined with fashion where suddenly you had these really good-looking artists doing things in the Irish Times Magazine. People would spit on you ten years previous. And the other thing people always said was, ‘can you make a living out of that?’” “I know we’re known as the country of the arts but we’re not. It’s just literature. Everything else is irrelevant. If there is one in a 100 interested in buying a painting, there is one in a 100 of them interested in buying a sculpture. You’d be lucky if you got 300 people to see an exhibition you worked on for two years. I think it’s part of the Irish psyche that they are kind of getting above their station. It’s a snobbish thing, middle-class and upwards, where you spend money to buy taste.” It was during his final year in art college when Clancy encountered Gavin Quinn from Pan Pan. He needed a digital rake for a show and they hit it off, resulting in him designing Oedipus Loves You and collaborating to this day. Quinn states that as a sculptor Clancy brings an “engineering ability and precision” to work, having the ability to work with “interesting materials and find solutions, considering the efficiencies of design, whilst making it practical also.” His most recent work with Dead Centre was Beckett’s Room at the Gate – a show with no actors reliant on a lot of technical wizardry. In contrast to most theatre shows, this was one where the set and spectacle was truly centre stage. “It seemed like a completely undoable project, but we did it.” His own team consisted of himself, Jason Lambert, Ciaran Bonner and Eugenia Genunchi. “I’ve designed kinetic things before, but this was a whole different ball game because it was in excess of a hundred different special effects, and they were live and operational by people who were not professional puppeteers. Everything had to be very analogue. I just designed it as if I was doing it.” What engages him to people such as directors Bush Moukarzel (Dead Centre) and Dan Colley (Collapsing Horse) who he worked with on their Theatre Festival production of A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings, is their “analytical mind being applied to lateral thought.” “What’s interesting is they both studied philosophy and side-stepped into theatre. They think outside the box. I’m often working laterally around things. They are very anchored and I drift around the outside trying to visualise it.” One of Clancy’s bugbears is “design by Google which used to be called plagiarism.” There is no Mac adorning his working space. He’s a sketch-in-notebook creator and relies on an impressive memory for dates and detail. “Constant referencing actually results in bad design. People are bombarding you with Google images and YouTube videos. You end up with this constant leap-frogging where, ‘this reminds me of this and this reminds me of this.’ Where is the end to it? You become incredibly linear. The point in having me as a designer is to get an original piece.” Clancy is also straight-up about his role when it comes to the interface of set design with theatre. “There is a story, facilitate that story, collaborate with people, I facilitate their work. It isn’t my work. I’m a cog. They are mini art-projects, which is interesting for a fine artist because you are in a perpetual art process. Whereas, these kind of remind me of being in college. It actually ends.” Unsurprisingly, Clancy is not a fan of social media and the self-branding exercises it facilitates. “It reminds me of a Kurt Vonnegut novel where the protagonist was stuck in this perpetual world looking at porn. He became snow-blind from it. “Coming out of art college in the 80’s and ‘90s you had a certain level of art college paranoia where the thought of self-promotion was incredibly distasteful and made you instantly feel sick. You came out of art college thinking you were incredibly shit at what you do which Andrew is pictured on the set of Beckett’s Room at The Gate Theatre as part of the Dublin Theatre Festival. A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings runs at the Peacock from Tuesday December 10 until Saturday December 28 was very healthy. Now kids are coming out of primary school thinking they are amazing and being told they are. I understand it, but I don’t like it.” And as for cultural criticism, he’s not afraid to give it a lash too. “I think criticism here in the arts is a total joke, it’s just shite. Before, it was fusty academics who literally wore tweed jackets and were kind of unapproachable and slightly ridiculous. Now they’re just all mates, guys you meet in your local bar… I always find it much more interesting when a show gets a bad review. People are outraged. I’m like ‘the play was shit, get over it.’ People now think being offended is a grievous thing. Criticism is healthy, it’s just that ‘the critics’ are often unqualified to be critics. People often drift into it without any technical training. It’s just descriptions of things in a tokenistic way.” Clancy appreciates that “working as a designer in the arts is you are really vulnerable to thinking you are shit, you are on the edge of that all the time, no matter who you are. You have a day where you think you’re shite and the next one where you think you’re not. In the hierarchy of theatre, you can be overruled. That is fine to a certain point. I wonder if being in control of everything is a good thing in itself. It seems to permeate through all society, like where have all the drunk authors gone? No one writes books pissed anymore.” Refreshingly forthright, Clancy sits outside the conventional scene and in many respects is fortunate to do so. He’s somewhat of an elder in the game and thus breathes the confidence which comes with this. “I’m not particularly pushy but I know my mind. Some people think I’m a massive horror. I’ve heard people say you’re really tricky and they’ve never met me. I think it’s great. It’s so handy. It’s a great filter.” However, it doesn’t prevent him being spurred on by the perpetual fear of the selfreliant when he states, “After tomorrow, there is nothing until the end of time and then you get a phone call.” And regarding that phonecall… “I’d like to design a really good adventure playground, one with more than a zip-line.” Pick up the phone people! ➝ 29