The art of boatbuilding
Mark Redden builds boats. More specifically, he builds currachs—a millennia-old skin boat, chiefly associated with Ireland but whose origins may trace back further to the north of Spain, where the first Irish settlers are thought to have hailed from. Redden is Barcelona’s sole manufacturer/proprietor of currachs. Apart from the dozens he has made for third parties over the years, the three which he has held onto reside in the Base Nàutica Municipal de la Mar Bella, on the beach, and see action on the Mediterranean at least a couple of times a week. One is green, one is white and one is orange, each colour representing a section of the Irish tricolour. Testament to Redden’s passion for the vessels, every March for the last nine years he has held an annual currach race as part of Barcelona’s St. Patrick festivities.
To build a currach is not simply to construct a vessel, but to take up a legacy. “The first currach in Ireland probably came from the north of Spain or western France,” explained Redden. “I believe the first settlers would have made their journey with livestock, on a boat made of animal skin that looked like a halved whale. They’re very whale-like, don’t you think? They’ve been in the west of Ireland from time immemorial, and there are different types of boats as you move up the coast. They’re all built a little bit differently to cope with the changing conditions. They’ve been used to fish and transport goods. They’ve even been used as taxis to get to parties up on the next island.”
Despite his knowledge and passion for currachs, Redden is, above all, an artist. His physical frame alone undermines any notions I may have subconsciously gathered as to how an artist should look. He is muscular in a way that no personal trainer could promise you in good conscience, unless the prescribed regime involved two decades of physical labour under sun, snow and rain. He is what in Ireland we call ‘farmer strong’, and his ethic has been hard-won. “I maintain a work ethic in art as in everything else. I got that from the boatbuilding, way back. And from my dad in the fruit market, which was an everyday grind.”
Redden originally hails from Dublin, where he studied sculpture at the Dún Laoghaire Institute of Art, Design and Technology. From there he traversed the globe on a path heavily trod by Irish college graduates to Australia, and then to Tasmania. There he lived in a forest with another artist for three months, laying the groundwork for the artist he would become. “It hadn’t really dawned on me that you could be an artist until I met this guy. He put a lot of ideas in my head—that you could build your own house, live from the land and create as a living were among the most resonating.”
Returning home a year later he took to rural Galway and practised solitude: “I lived in a cottage by myself, with a little studio, and worked for a boatbuilder who didn’t talk much. My youngest neighbours were 70.” More travels followed, most memorably a stint working on bronze sculptures with a perpetually drunken priest in northern Italy.
Entering Redden’s studio, located in an old factory, is a breathtaking experience. There’s a beautiful chaos to his space. It feels personal, like walking around someone’s soul. If I weren’t in his company, I would be an intruder. Redden’s policy with regard to his working area is “the bigger the space the more things you can fill it with”. When I asked him how important it is to be surrounded by his own work he replied, “That’s the idea: to build up such a body of work between the sculpture and the painting, dynamic shapes and colours, as to design my own language”.
I asked him what he would name his ‘language’. “Magic-realism, speaking in terms of literature,” he said. “Something like what Carlos Castaneda, the American author and godfather of the New Age movement, does—he puts you in a very imaginative world, where you can be convinced that magic exists. Through [my work] I’m trying to draw you into an inner world, so you can use your own imagination to interpret it.”
It is impossible to not get drawn in. Alone, his pieces might seem truly abstract, but collectively they form a syntax that unites them. The mammoth ‘Mother’s Love Spasm’, around which the room centres, seems to be a blood relative of ‘Strongbow’, the dog made of discarded boat material, who stands guard over Redden’s dreamworld at the door of the studio. Much of Redden’s work is wood sculpture—imitations of sealife constructed out of steam-shaped wooden pieces that were once part of the currachs. The connections between them and the boats are not just physical but spiritual: “Channelling the tranquillity I get from going out to sea, I go back to the studio and let my brain go crazy.”
When I asked him why he settled in Barcelona, he made it sound simple: “The food was cheaper than in Dublin, and I could sell a few paintings.” Then it dawned on me that he doesn’t consider himself settled. If I hadn’t learned this from his words I could have garnered it from his chaotic, progressive and earnestly unfinished surroundings. Unfinished is, to me, the whole point. Redden will never be finished, and neither will the city of Barcelona as a lengthy stop-off for artists. Perhaps his stopover is conceivably lengthier because Barcelona is by the sea, and by the sea there are boats, and Mark Redden is a boatbuilder. Among other things.
To see more of Redden’s work, visit markredden.com.