Editorial by the Macken Monkey about the Mammy Monkey and all those other spas.

This is a short editorial I wrote for Never Never and Elsewhere Volume II. Available to buy at www.neverneverandelsewhere.com It's a beautiful collection and I recommend it not only because I helped to make it BUT ALSO as it is just really funderwol and includes one off imagery from each of the artists mentioned below combined with some incredibly talented authors.
I think it's my proudest ever project;

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My mother’s wrists have always fascinated me. Ever since I was a girl, watching her fingers caress the edge of a wine glass or the curve of her wrist as she would rest her head upon them regaling guests with tales of her youth in Paris. She’s always been the epitome of glamour to me. She has a way of looking at me with such love that I can smell it in the pots of moisturiser that I pilfer, in the hairspray that crunches upon my head. There’s a visuality to her love for me and my love for her that, being primarily a visual artist, I can only describe obscurely, and clumsily, through paint. The fragility of her health in recent months has made me savour these images, try to express and savour them. Record something. Keep it. Not through photographs, but through the visceral quality of sight, through the intention and emotion that can be manipulated by my hand; I gush.



Approaching Memoirs of Youth, as a publication, I wanted to respond, in kind, to the beautiful written works within this journal, in my own, that being visual, language. Having read each of the works I chose a series of artists, whom each in their own way, have agreed to create works for the launch of this publication with an exhibition and a series of printed works within the journal itself, thus creating not only a written, but a visual memoir. These will include;

Caroline Campbell and Fionn Kidney, who have been working together as Tu Me Tues since 2009. Their current practice explores the intersections and boundaries between accepted fact and constructed fictions. Old formats are re-imagined; the fictional is inserted into the documentary.

Peter Fingleton who has the ability to capture your best happiest youngest freshest self, a self you never knew existed prior to his creation.

Catherine Harty who's way of seeing the world, dominated by excitement, cinema, and seemingly having knowlegde of everything... (She has been an unpaid educator of mine for some years now)... is something of a marvel. Her visual knowledge and agency results in astonishing, and many times hilarious, but always supremely delicate and touching art works.

I admire Gerry Lee. Not only as a generally splendid human being, but I feel that the intricacies and visual language he possesses are simultaneously delicious and indulgent but also terrifying and threatening. He has a way of frightening me in the most wonderful way.

Kieran McBride who seems to be a collector. He collects images and somehow they manage to resonate a subjective memory from myself. There’s a thought process to his eye that allows for recognition. He seems to be able to recognise the tangeable traces that make images familiar, upsetting, absurd and at times just generally funny.

Katherine Nolan who is known for her captivating performative works. For Memoirs of Youth, she will perform a brand new live piece on the launch night in collaboration with Eleanor Lawler. Katherine has a visual presence to her, a palpable consciousness of the intentionality of that presence, and a gentle yet savage interrogation of the politics and ironies of desire.

Here's some images of Launch Night by The Woman of the Moment herself, my mother, Máire Uí Mhaicín;
http://www.pbase.com/maire/memoirs_of_youth