Joseph Noonan- Ganley

Wednesday 10th of October

Joseph Noonan-Ganley is London based - originally from County Clare, Ireland. His practise focus' more on other people and is a lengthy process. He revolves his work around an artist, one that is dead and follows up on their life and reproduces work inspired on the information he has gathered in his discoveries. A notable piece of work by Ganley is "Femme Fabrications". 

  These were pieces of work produced when he followed up on the life of Joseph Cornell. Looking through every source available to him such as books and archives, he has made artworks based around the comments an author or another artist has made about Joseph Corenll. Specifically Joseph Noonan Ganley was interested in a problematic area of Corenlls life - his sexuality. Which also brought Fanny Sarito into the picture. Noonan Ganley had a problem with how women were represented so in his work he used flowers to figuratively represent them.

 He created a show were he had boxes filled with unfinished roses and used materials. With the making of these fabricated roses, through out the rooms where he had work displayed, he had a different audio to each. He wanted to materialise his research,  Noonan Ganley had all this text from researching this artist but no way to show this. He decided to draw a connection from research to his physical work by turning it into a sound piece which worked alongside his work presented in these boxes.

Hearing a brief description in what Ganley does I was not sure if I would enjoy his work. I think if I was there physcically at an exhibtion of his I would like it as it seems to bee a very immersive experience. Even though i liked the concept of Ganleys work, when he was talking about it I could not help but think of him engulfing his practise around other peoples lives. I think it would be very interesting to see if he took that dedication from other peoples lives and focused that onto himself and made artworks based off him. What would they say? What would it tell the story off?

I think I could relate these realisations to my work. We are on a course were we look up to all these artists and wether we want or like it we are compared and inspired by them. To move forward in the art world however I feel us as students need to step back and realise yes previous practises by previous artists who are incredibly talented do some amazing work but it is time to stop the comparisons between our work and theirs. We are in a new era and art is going to constantly change, views and opinions will change so as the students and the future artisans of the world we need to create what we are passionate about. We get fixated on grades and marks and researching other artists we skip over our own flair that we bring to our own work and it is very easy to fall into the tracks of artists before us instead of working on our own uniques style, outlook and approach.