The National College
Sculpture - Academic Staff Profiles
Philip Napier,
BA, MA
Acting Head, Fine Art Sculpture
Philip Napier has a broad experience of acting as art consultant, public and conference speaker, selection panel member, art college lecturer and artist. Formerly a Rome Scholar, Philip Napier is a Director of Flaxart Studios and is currently the (acting) Head of Sculpture at the National College of Art and Design, Dublin.
Between 1996 -2003 he was The Integrated Arts Co ordinator at the Royal Victoria Hospital in Belfast, responsible for the development of a commissioning strategy and its implementation. He was the architect of a successful bid to the National Lottery and responsible for the implementation of permanently sited artworks within the redeveloped hospital environment. This involved acting as team leader to a number of artists. The project represents a major body of sited work in the public environment.
The practice of working with other design professionals has been part of this experience. The negotiation of architects, engineers, designers, managers, fund holders, clinical staff, patients, visitors, artists, art committees and acting as art team leader required a body of project management skills and practical working knowledge of timescales, building programmes, contracts, etc. Particularly important was an understanding of the language of construction, scheduling etc. and the mediation of the artwork
Napier has worked collaboratively with a number of artists, Alphonso Monreal (Exterior Facade, RVH, Belfast) Michael Minnis, and Michael Hogg (IT Blanchardstown) in realising Public works. He was commissioned by BAA through the Public Art Development Trust to install work at Heathrow Airport, Pier 4a Links., He has installed temporary Public projects in Italy, Korea, Brazil, Scotland, USA, England, Wales and Ireland in addition to projects internationally articulating public concerns. In 1994 He represented Ireland at the Sao Paulo Biennale, Great Britain at the Kwangju Biennale in South Korea and Northern Ireland at the Montreal Biennale
Through his work at the National College of Art and Design, in Dublin, Philip Napier has been leading a programme working with students and stakeholders in an inner city Dublin context in partnership with CREATE and Dublin City Council. Issues of culture lead regeneration, urban aesthetics, and the practicalities of developing meaningful negotiated art practices with communities which have real art outcomes of exhibition and intervention, are archived as a catalogue and soon to be launched website. Napier is one of those involved in developing an MA in this area of Participatory Practice.
Napier with his colleague Michael Hogg who work together on public projects as Carbon Design, have been appointed as Lead artists in the Regenerate Programme which links the Councils of Craigavon (lead) Banbridge, Cookstown, Dungannon, Armagh, working closely with arts officers
Later this year Napier will show work at the Apartheid Museum in Johannesburg, South Africa.
Research Interests
The work of Philip Napier has evolved as a kind of contemporary Detourne. That urban tactic evolved by the Situationists where the appropriation of systems of signage became a means of contesting space and its determinants. In Napier’s work this re routing of meaning has been presented in both public and gallery based projects.
His work evolves out of a practice based of the north of Ireland, a context heavily inscribed by the visual components of social, political and national affiliations produced for public consumption and where meaning is not neutral. Napier’s work has attempted to renegotiate the power inherent in aspects of language, signs and symbols and produce the possibility for new meaning. Particularly in the last number of years there has been a consolidation of placing the work in situations where physical and human geographies overlap. That is to say that the work has been evolved for contexts where space is encountered not only as a physical and economic phenonomen but also as a psychological condition.
The work has been made over a 15 year span and has examined elements of a post colonial condition intersecting with post conflict agendas. The societal movement from a war/warrior footing towards civil processes and, broadly speaking, the suspension of temporary provisions and architectures replaced by civil ideas of future space and reconstruction, have been traced and given form. Napier has also been interested in the transmission of memorial and public memory.
An important strand of Napier’s activity has been the development of work/projects with other artists. These collaborative processes have had both conceptual and practical elements but have also provided a means to initiate a recent large scale negotiated project, Regenerate, which will unfold over a 3 year timescale with a substantial budget, in a major project to research and activate a range participatory projects.
Napier represented Ireland at the XXII Sao Paulo Biennale and Great Britain at the inaugural Kwangju Biennale in South Korea.
Projects
Apparatus II 1994
XXII Sao Paulo Bienale, Brazil, representing Ireland
Bus Destination Blinds, fluorescent lights , soundtrack.
Apparatus II evolved as a recognition of fugitive first language experience of place against an on going military context in Northern Ireland where the power to name and the transmission of specific place in urban and rural space was by turn estranging and familiar. The work evolves as a traumatic encounter with identities which occupy place and contrasted local contested environments with the context of international global culture.
Bright Beach 2004
In collaboration with Michael Hogg
Institute of Technology, Blanchardstown, Dublin, Ireland
Architects: Burton Ahrends and Koralek
Steel Structure, Plastic Casts, Fibre Optics, Timers.
Bright Beach was a major public commission created for the Institute of Technology Blanchardstown. The college context is that it provides graduates for mainly the IT Industry which itself characterises Blanchardstown on the outskirts of Dublin.
The work developed as a very large wave screen with a prototype casting process off the beach at low tide. The work was designed to sit in the junction between virtual and physical experiences of the world and is formed around the idealised breaking wave of technological and economic revolution that has gripped this country. The work does not find this junction to be a formally resolved experience but alludes to questions of how we experience this world of rapid change. Fibre optic lighting provides a virtual tide within the work operating over an 11 hour cycle.Gauge 1 & 2 1997 and amended for subsequent specific contexts
Weighing scales, public address system, sound , running water, speakers, sound.
Gauge was first shown on the occasion of the 25th anniversary of the Bloody Sunday shootings in Derry. The work attempts to locate, in measurement and in language, the call and response to the demand for a public apology. The work fits into a wider context and debate around post colonial conditions for apology.
The work was resited in the last remaining architecture fragments of Glenfada Park in the Bogside, Derry, where the shootings originally took place.
The work will be further evolveed and resited in the Apartheid Museum, Johannesburg, South Africa on Reconciliation Day 2006.
Re Turn
Heathrow Airport Pier4a. Commissioned by BAA and the Public Art Development Trust
Customised Destination Blinds, Voice over.
Return evolved to contest the space in between English and Irish airside spaces by alluding to the power to name and the role of wandering destination and language as a key to differentiated experience of place. A stammering voice over alerted the traveller to a quality of trauma replacing the flawless classless (middle class) flight announcers address.
The stammering component was removed and disputed due to complaints around its meaning.The Road to the Future 2001
Variable Message Sign/ plastic template/ text
Shown as part of the International Language curated by Eoin McTigue
Plastic stencil, variable message sign, prepared messages.
This work was sited to address city traffic repeatedly called out aspects of public language addressing future space. The use of civil construction metaphors had become part of the context of articulating the possibilities of the Belfast Agreement and post conflict reconstruction. The use of a generic architectural template through which the texts of the message board showed through alluded to constructions of future space.
The work repeated texts such as:
‘THE ROAD TO THE FUTURE IS ALWAYS UNDER CONSTRUCTION’
‘CORNERSTONES OF AGREEMENT’
‘CONFIDENCE BUILDING’
‘FIRM FOUNDATIONS’
‘BLUPRINTS FOR PEACE’
‘BUILDING BRIDGES’Title: The Soft Estate 2006
Philip Napier/Michael Hogg
The Soft Estate is the name given to that area which lies between the Hard Shoulder and the Visual Amenity (which is the view beyond)
The Soft Estate, 2006.
Philip Napier and Michael Hogg have evolved collaborative art projects in the public domain since 2001. This is their first collaborative work in a gallery context. It will launch a 3 year series of new works developing aspects of negotiated and participatory practice in the public realm.
This new work is evolved as a set of tools to aid dialogue with various stakeholders. The talks will centre around how we might identify and model forms of language, which might usefully occupy a literal gap or deficit which appears as a significant component in one of our negotiating tables.
The table, in one of its identities, is conceived as an architecture of negotiation. The languages of political blueprints, of confidence building, and of post conflict reconstruction all allude to a ‘civil engineering’ of future formal spaces. The actual negotiations, yet to take place, may act as a means of understanding how we inhabit these abstracted utopian spaces.
Within the genre of relational aesthetics there is also an impression of a kind of utopian visualization of problem solving and this work both acknowledges and contradicts that condition.Download: Philip Napier Curriculum Vitae (PDF 52k)
