RESIDENT SHOWCASE: CECILIA DANELL

Cecilia Danell is a Swedish artist based in Galway, Ireland. She is a painter with a multidisciplinary practice that also involves textiles and installation. Her work is in the collections of the Irish State, Trinity College, Dublin and the Irish Arts Council and she has won many awards for her practice, including the 2022 Hennessy Craig Award for painting from the Royal Hibernian Academy. Other residencies include: Centre Culturel Irlandais, Paris, the Nordic Artists’ Centre Dale, Norway, Ballinglen Arts Foundation, Ireland and Aras Eanna Arts Centre, Inis Oirr, Ireland. She is represented by Kevin Kavanagh, Dublin. Cecilia was a Monson Arts Resident in Jan/Feb of 2024.

1) What was the best part for you about being at Monson Arts? And what, if anything, did it teach you about your own creative process?

It was my first residency in the US so for me it was a creative as well as cultural experience. I loved how Monson as a location very successfully merges the sense of being immersed in small town life with a really outward looking feeling of meeting artists and writers from so many different places with different life stories and practices. I loved the generosity of everyone I met in Monson, the helpfulness of the staff and the willingness of the other residents to share their process. My studio space was amazing and I loved not having to worry about cooking for a full month as we were provided with great food from the Quarry restaurant. There was a great balance between focused creative time and socializing and I felt like I got a lot done while also making new friends. My creative process is very much concerned with landscape and place and responding to my first-hand impressions of the landscape in the studio. It was easy to employ these working methods in Monson as nature was on my doorstep, so I often spent part of the day snowshoeing or skiing along the local snowmobile tracks followed by work in the studio.

2) Did you start a project while in residency and/or were you able to “complete” or wrap-up a work during your time here? What’s been your focus since you left Monson Arts?

As a Swedish person resident in Ireland for the past 20 years, I do miss proper winters with snow. One of my reasons for wanting to come to Monson Arts was that I wanted to research snow and its different properties for a project I’m working on dealing with the concept of memorializing snow for future generations as the winters have gotten milder due to climate change. I got to spend plenty of time in the snow, which I loved, and worked on ideas for future sculptures and wall-hangings as well as conducting material research. I also painted some of the Monson landscape, including Borestone Mountain, which I later got to hike up. After leaving Monson I went on a residency to one of the Irish Aran Islands and this led to some different work, and I was also making textile plant sculptures for the Galway International Arts Festival, but now I’m finding myself back dealing with the Monson research again and am working towards a large solo exhibition at Solstice Arts Centre in Ireland next year, where I will show new work stemming from research done in Monson. As I’m inspired by nature writing, I read Thoreau’s ‘The Maine Woods’ while there and afterwards I had the opportunity to visit Thoreau’s Walden Pond in Massachusetts before returning back to Ireland. This engagement with the New England landscape has proven really important to me as it reminds me of the Swedish landscape where I grew up, yet it’s vaster and wilder.

3) Name 3-5 writers, artists, books, musicians, or visual works that continue to inspire you.

I’m very inspired by classic speculative fiction and Science Fiction that deals with the natural world and our place in it. Some favourites would be ‘The Chrysalids’ by John Wyndham, ‘The Left Hand of Darkness’ by Ursula LeGuin, ‘The Crystal World’ by JG Ballard and ‘The First Men in the Moon’ by HG Wells. Other people whose work inspires me are (film director) Andrei Tarkovsky, Edvard Munch and Hilma af Klint.