PK 6 PACK
Eimear and Cat Mc Clay
'Neither of us believe in the high/low dichotomy of cultural tastes.'
-You mention that your practice is informed by the reclamation of witchcraft by women as a space for community, collaboration and empowerment. Could you expand on how you work collaboratively as a duo?
We share a lot of research interests, and our individual practices have always been driven by similar aesthetic styles. Working collaboratively facilitates the combination of our ideas into more ambitious works; this allows us to work on complex projects using time-intensive processes, like 3D modelling and animation. In addition, we constantly critique each other’s work, which allows us to develop work more rapidly.
-Describe your ideal coven.
We are both interested in queer and feminist politics and would like to create a space where these issues can be discussed. Most of our focus on magic has revolved around the witch trials during primitive accumulation. In this way, for us, the symbol of the witch operates as a figure of resistance to the most harmful mechanisms of capitalism. Therefore, our ideal coven would be a network resistant to capitalist ideology and neoliberal individualism.
-You are creating a lot of digital objects that carry a strong visual language. As you say, these symbols are created by your personal experiences, do you also consider them emblematic of greater contemporary issues? How would you like to see them totemised and carry relevant social discussions?
In our recent work, we have paired Catholic iconography with narratives surrounding queerness to explore the historically fraught relationship between queerness and religion. Regarding our recent focus on Catholicism, we have played with representing eschatological disasters such as floods and fires in our animations. In this way, we have used the visual element of our work to incorporate ideas of final judgement and Biblical punishment, which we have then developed to illustrate Catholic church’s conservative attitudes towards queer people. We are both interested in using case studies as examples of wider societal issues. In the past, this has led us to use our own private life events as material. Such an approach follows a genealogy of feminist praxis highlighting the political potency of personal experiences.
- As digital artists, what do you think of NFT artworks and the promise of a greater market transparency that has never existed in the traditional art world?
Neither of us agree ethically with the sale of NFTs for a number of reasons. Digital artworks sold through this network function primarily as a form of currency, with their concept and content subordinated to a secondary consideration. This precipitates the co-option of digital artwork into Capitalist markets, from which they have heretofore remained relatively safe. The process of minting editions of the work also creates artificial scarcity for digital objects: a concept which did not previously exist. In this way, cryptoart arguably reproduces many of the worst aspects of existing art markets. Compounding these issues, the environmental detriment associated with the sale of NFTs is enormous. For us, the only viable option is the total moral rejection of such practices.- Your work is about empowerment- queer empowerment- female empowerment. Sometimes essential meanings and movements fall behind the curtain just because they stop trending at a given moment or are hijacked and co-opted by other forces resulting in a dilution of the message. How do you envisage yourselves and your art practice battling against such sinister elements?
Our joint practice primarily focuses on queer narratives, as a way of contributing to the rebalancing of the unequal representation of LGBTQI+ people within western culture. We don’t make work based on political trends on social media or other popular networks. Instead, we develop work following our independent research into queer and feminist politics. We hope that retaining the integrity of our research in this way will protect our practice from co-option.
- High culture and Low culture… In your opinion, what’s the line that demarcates the two?
Neither of us believe in the high/low dichotomy of cultural tastes. We feel that such demarcations are propagated by a distinct classism, which reaffirms the violent social and cultural hierarchies native to western capitalism. Considering this, the dissolution of such perceived boundaries is an important consideration of our work. In our own research, we draw on a heterogeneity of resources, ranging from pop cultural material to philosophy and cultural theory.
