An American in Cork, and not Cork
American artist Senan O'Connor has been making his singular art in Cork for eight years. He's also been trying to make a living and keep a roof over his head, but it ain't easy in his adopted city.
If you’ve walked down Paul Street in the last few years, chances are at one stage or another, you’ll have passed Senan O’Connor selling his art near Waterstones bookshop. Not one to make a big deal of his work, O’Connor goes about his business with a minimum of fuss, so much so, sometimes passersby don’t even understand why he’s hanging around there in the first place.
“People have dropped change in my cup an embarrassing amount of times” he says with a big grin, as we sit down outside a pub in the city center over a couple of pints of stout. O’Connor is on a flying visit from Galway where he’s based for the summer, and over the course of an hour or more, we discuss why he has had to leave his adopted hometown of Cork, the project he is currently working on and how he feels the city is changing.
“When I lost the place in Mayfield where I had really cheap rent, I thought well, Ireland doesn’t work for me anymore, I can’t afford to live here and I had the idea of moving to Miami because they have the whole Art Deco thing and it’s pink and there’s a beach and maybe I’ll move there, if I can’t afford to live here.”
Ultimately this plan never materialised, but O’Connor did return to the U.S.A. for some time after leaving Cork. This journey, going over and back across the Atlantic is a familiar one in his family.
O’Connor grew up in Rhode Island on the East Coast. When he was eighteen he left home and moved to New Orleans and ended up living there for ten years. In 2016 and in search of a change of scene, he moved to Galway, the town his father hails from. Not long after that he arrived in Cork. Moving around from place to place has been a big part of his life.
“I’ll be in Galway for the summer because I can make more money on the street there and I have a cheap box room, but the plan is to get back to Cork eventually and hopefully I can afford to live here. I need to be here to finish the film I had started; it was unfortunate timing losing the place in Mayfield.”
The film O’Connor mentions is Return to the River, a collaboration between himself and two other Cork based artists; Artem Trofimenko and Sophia Santababara. It was filmed in various abandoned and disused liminal spaces around Ireland and has been a couple of years in the making.
“I was on my own a lot during Covid, building puppets and scarecrows to make the corners of my little room interesting.”
“Then I had this crazy dream that I wanted to share with people, so I wrote it into a short story so people could understand the dream logic.”
“After a while I thought this story might work as a short film, but I couldn’t figure out how to create these big scenes especially when you’re locked in a house and no one is around, so naturally you build scarecrows and paint nuns on your fingers!”
While the idea for the project is a product of O’Connor’s vivid imagination, filming was a collaborative effort and luckily, finding people to bring his vision to life wasn’t all that difficult.
“Cork is like a big town; you meet people quickly, there’s some gumption here, and people are making stuff.”
“I was living with Artem back then and we were always talking about collaborating because we liked each other’s art. We got Sophia onboard, who was Artem’s partner at the time and after a while working on it, I was like, I think we have a movie here.”
“It’s a real collaboration in terms of directing but Artem does all the filming and Sophia does the editing, because I don’t even know how to turn a computer on!”
Although the film was unfunded to begin with, now that the trio have reached post production they have started a Go Fund Me page to help with some of the costs. Finding the time to complete the project though has proved to be rather tricky.
“We squeeze it in where we can, but everyone has other projects to do as well, so it’s kind of hard and it was supposed to be short, but got bigger and bigger and we have a lot of footage to edit, so we’re asking people for a little help with costs.”
Listening to O’Connor talk about his plans for the months ahead, puts into sharp focus the kind of discipline and creativity required to maintain the lifestyle he leads.
“I clean a B&B up in Shandon, pick up a bit of work doing that and I worked as Santa Claus in Cobh last Christmas and will be doing that again this year.”
“With my illustrations I work on my own and pull from my subconscious, which can be a real pain in the ass, but I’ve been doing this for fifteen years and it pays for my life and that takes a lot of work.”
But back to Cork, where O’ Connor says there’s a lot going on right now, yet there is also a nagging feeling among artists that the city could be doing more.
“I feel very frustrated here as well, because there is huge potential, but something needs to be pushed over. There are people creating work, but they’re not getting the space to show it or the interest.”
“One of the first things I did when I came to Cork was wander around a big building by the river. There were a couple of junkies living there and I thought this would be a great place to make art and then I found out it was a great place to make art, but then they kicked out all of the artists who were using the space.”
“Eventually people are going to get fed up. I’m rooting for Cork and I like it, but it’s the same everywhere. I found the same frustrations in New Orleans, Baltimore. It’s just the modern world I guess.”
“We’re not going to get away from the problems in society, but at least other places aren’t as interested in the tech thing as here.”
What are the chances then of him exhibiting some of his work in the city? Does he envisage this happening any time soon?
“I like the idea of having a show, but it’s a bit down the list. I had a show in The Friary one time, but I’m not super ambitious. I want to make work, I want it to be seen and I want to make money off of it, but there’s not a ton of spaces here.”
The lack of space is a recurring theme, but as anyone who has encountered his work can testify, it deserves to be seen by as many eyes as possible and Cork would be lucky if he returns to the city again.
“There’s a lot to be said for staying in a place, I mean the nomadic life is wonderful and has great benefits, but you don’t get the benefits of staying and slowly building something.”
“The good thing is they do care in Ireland about art, they have grants, they have a chunk of money on the side for art.”
“The States is so big, being an artist is viewed differently everywhere you go. Some people might ask, is that even a career, whereas Ireland as a whole, they value it as a concept, just maybe not always in reality.”
You can see more of Senan’s work here and contribute or find out more about Return to The River here
Interesting to hear that Senan feels frustrated in Cork that “the city could be doing more”. Totally agree. There’s an Anti Fun brigade in Cork stifling the city. The City should be rocking every weekend.