Interview by Christabel Stewart
Portrait by Celeste Doig

CS Let’s talk about Gareth McConnell, the artist. What has been your path to making art?

GM A camera first came into our house because my mother suffered from her mental health, and my dad got her to go to night classes. For one class, they had to bring in some personal objects to photograph. My mum came back with these pictures of guitar-shaped ArmaLites. I remember thinking about the camera, that instant gratification. There was a darkroom at school, where I did some black and white printing. I got into the magic of a print slowly appearing. I left school, didn’t do my A-levels, and in 1990 got into a foundation in Belfast. The college itself was this huge, rundown, ramshackle building, with an incredible student union. I was taught by Paul Seawright during his first teaching job. He had made a photographic series called Sectarian Murder (1998) – saturated flash landscapes with a little text about what had happened at the site. It completely blew me away. I remember him saying to me, “Go up to the library and look at the [photography magazine] Creative Camera”, where I found the work of Willie Doherty. The first Doherty picture I saw was a very long black and white photograph of a body of water, with text overlaid that reads, “We shall never forsake the blue skies of Ulster for the grey mists of an Irish Republic”. It really hit me, because that slogan was also written as graffiti on a wall where I would get the train to go into town. I look back at that as a pivotal moment in my thinking.

CS It’s interesting to hear you talk about how art schools were a bit more maverick.

GM It was a really special time. Some of the tutors were practising artists, so you’d be in the student union at lunchtime and there’d be some bonkers performances. We also had huge raves. It was wild how my focus changed when I came to England, having been accepted to West Surrey College of Art and Design. To leave Belfast and go to this place, where people still really hated the Irish, was weird to come to terms with. But I met two other guys from Northern Ireland and another from Teesside, and we all got accepted into the Royal College of Art around five years later.

CS What was the temperature in 1997, being Irish in a royally constituted college?

GM When I think of the Royal College, I always remember that Tracy Emin line about the best moment you’ll have is getting the acceptance letter. I was in such a fucking state at the time, I just went to avoid any responsibility. Within the first six months, my good friend committed suicide after coming off benzodiazepines. I was going backwards and forwards a lot, detox after detox. When I would come back after a break, I’d make a lot of work, obsessively walking around Belfast, taking pictures of sectarian murals from about a centimetre away. I also did some work in the Albert Bar, a notorious Ulster Defence Association bar. This was during the Good Friday Agreement coming into effect.

CS Have you hung onto that work? Do you consider it all part of a growing practice? 

GM Yes, I was able to take those photos because I’d been to school with the guy who ran the place. My family was also well known in the town, so it was like, “Oh, it’s Gareth, he’s an artist, and he goes to college”. Then I submitted two photos to the John Kobal Photographic Portrait Award, which is now called the Taylor Wessing Prize at the National Portrait Gallery. One piece was runner-up, and one got picked up and published in magazines and newspapers, under the title “Loyalist prisoners on Easter parole (Under the terms of the Good Friday Agreement)”. Despite my lust for fame and recognition, I knew I was betraying somebody’s trust. Someone threatened to shoot me over it. There’s no ill feeling now because there’s been such a passage of time. But oh my god, I was so out of my league! I had a terrifying interview in response to my show Anti-Social Behaviour in 1995, which captured the self-inflicted wounds of injections. I tried to get as far away from Larry Clark as I could, but I had absolutely no idea where I was going. I still cannot face reading the interview. 

CS Could you explain how you were furthering yourself from Larry Clark?

GM I remember seeing his 1971 book Tulsa and noticing that there were not very many pictures in it, maybe 20, with accompanying text like, “I grew up in Tulsa, Oklahoma, and started shooting methamphetamine”. The book goes straight into all those pictures, the drugs and the violence of it. It’s such an iconic piece of work, but I decided very early on that I didn’t want to emulate it.  For instance, the way I shot the murals was all about texture and colour, composition and form. My recent work is much mellower, but still talks about the same things and interweaves my personal story of drugs, addiction and recovery, but in a different language. 

CS Could you tell me a bit about the current Belfast project, which you’ve just returned from?

GM It was commissioned through Wonder Arts, created for a group called Alternatives, formerly Northern Ireland Alternatives, a restorative justice company stopping paramilitary violence towards teenagers for anti-social behaviour like drug dealing and hot wiring. During the Troubles, many people didn’t allow the police into their communities, and citizens began policing their environments, targeting young boys from lower socio-economic structures, with beatings, shootings and banishment. I was asked to do this project to celebrate the Alternatives going for 25 years. The work is 25 diptychs of portraits and floral works side by side. All the floral works are from buddleia, or “butterfly bushes”, shot on Shankill Road, which is the heartland of loyalism. It’s also the city centre of Belfast, which has fallen under siege from property developers. Often, society looks at the buddleia bush as a propagator of life, but also a symbol of urban decay, a tenacious destroyer of buildings and railway lines. I wanted to produce something abstract, ethereal and psychedelic. Psychedelics cannot be dislocated from the conflict – the Northern Irish conflict was partly funded by drug dealing, like the Taliban and heroin, the FARC and cocaine, the IRA and UDA and cannabis. I’m interested in the link between paramilitarism and shamanistic figures in the community, dispensers of drugs and spells. I try to think about all that stuff while also making something gentle and hopefully beautiful. .