My Career: Cork artist's year-long project at the Glen River Park culminates this weekend

Name: Julie Forrester 

Lives: The Glen Cork 

Job title: Artist, Art Producer and Arts Facilitator. Instigator and director of the Creative Climate Action Project, ‘Gleann a’ Phúca’, responding to the ecological, cultural, industrial and historical heritage of Cork’s Glen River Park.

Salary bracket; (€35- 45,000)

Education background: BA Fine Art Sculpture Slade School, MA Art & Process Crawford CAD.

Hobbies: Wandering and wondering.

Describe your job in five words: Exploring opportunities for Creative Engagement.

Describe yourself in five words: Dreamy yet focussed.

Personality needed for this kind of work? You need to be easy going yet highly motivated, curious and caring about the world.

How long are you doing this job? Since I was a child, professionally since I graduated from Art College, there have been many many meanders.

How did you get this job? I grew up in a pottery, my mum being the potter and my dad was a painter, this was always a way of life. I went straight from School to a Foundation course in fine art at the Crawford College of Art & Design. I left Cork in the 80s and moved to London where I lived in a series of squats with interesting others, doing some growing up. 

I kept up with art by doing night classes, and built up a portfolio that got me into Chelsea School of Art and then the Slade where I did a bit more growing up and getting lost. 

I studied Anthropology of Art, an interest that runs through my practice in a sense of place and belonging. At this time I was also working as a banqueting waitress at the Savoy Hotel with a very cosmopolitan team of illegal immigrants and as I was developing ways of communicating with them. I decided to get a skill that would help me to travel. I learned to teach English as a Foreign language and settled in Catalunya, Spain for a while. I fell for a gentle giant and we had a daughter together. Becoming a mother made me homesick and I came home with Annie in the early nineties. I was a single parent for some time and got by by teaching English and art in a room on Oliver Plunkett Street, at this time I joined the Backwater Artist Group in Pine Street Studios. 

As my life pretty much revolved around my young daughter, I proposed, with another parent, to build a play sculpture for Wallaroo Play School, and the Sand Serpent occupied their garden for many years. 

I began working with Cork Community Art Link and trained in art therapy, community development and Community Arts Practice, gaining experience of Arts in Health, working with people in Sarsfield’s Court and St Stephen’s hospitals, The School for the Deaf, and Greenville House for adults with autism and learning how to make massive puppets for street parades. 

I bought a car and began working up and down the country accompanied by my young daughter, often on residencies in the border counties, as there was plenty of investment in radical art practices as part of the Peace and Reconciliation Programme. I was resident in twinned schools in Leitrim and Tyrone on a project called Multimedia Maps, exploring location and communication using “new technologies”. This work encouraged me to buy my first computer and I went back to college to gain some digital art skills, enrolling at Coláiste Stíofán Naofa on their Multimedia course. 

In the early noughties I was developing a stop motion practice with children, which I still offer today at summer camps at the Crawford Art Gallery. At this time I was also going back to my roots and began working in clay, creating stories through tiles and working with communities.

As part of the Cork 2005 celebrations we created the “Snake/dragon” Ying Yang Sculpture, a kind of fine art graffiti, which is much loved by park goers today. I won a few Euro for Art commissions building sculptures and murals with school communities in counties Galway, Wexford and Cork. 

I worked on a long term residency project with Kids own Publishing partnership called Virtually There, hooking up from my studio with a school community in Antrim. This experience served me well during the pandemic when I was able to offer the skills I’d learned for creative experiences online. 

The pandemic brought me back to the Glen where my current project is based. Gleann a’ Phúca aims to celebrate place acknowledging the faery voice of the Púca.

Do you need particular qualifications or experience? Having a track record is important so it’s a good idea to build a portfolio one way or another. A degree is a good springboard for many, but artists can struggle with academia. Nowadays there are so many routes both in academia and in skill based trades. 

A career in art is really more of an approach to creativity or a certain sensibility than something you study necessarily. You need to love what you do, and it’s a mental health thing too, you need to be aware of the consequences if you don’t do it.

Describe a day at work: I wake up early and lie for a while remembering the night's dreams, shower and come downstairs and flick the switch of the kettle roll out my mat and login to my yoga class. I let in the visiting cat and I drink my tea cold. 

On a good day I might walk to the park and meander around, tuning into the sights sounds and smells, allowing the sense of the day to percolate through. This is an early morning activity so if I have a free day I will do this before anything else, or if I am in a creative writing phase I will do this in the early morning before attending to anything else. 

Most days after breakfast I go to the screen and clear what I can for the day. This always takes longer than I would like. 

From here there is no typical day. I might load up the car with boxes of materials and drive for up to an hour or more to work with a group. I enjoy this escape from the city. We chat about what we are going to do with the materials and then draw/paint/build/create together. I load up the car again and drive back to the city for a bite before my afternoon activity which might mean a walk into town to work at the gallery or to meet another artist or a colleague to plan a project or reflect. 

Other days I have a late breakfast with my partner. On rare days I will go across to the studio and have a whole day pottering and feeding the soul, reading, drawing before settling into whatever project I am doing at the moment. 

I might go out again in the evening for workshops with a youth group or to give a gallery tour. I usually have a delicious late dinner prepared by my partner who is an excellent cook. We will catch a bit of light entertainment on Netflix or one of the players and I often fall asleep over a mint tea. Then to bed around midnight.

How many hours do you work a week? Across all my working activities, I’d say between 10 and 12 hours a day - sometimes more. One of the things with being self employed is the amount of self-administration that keeps on growing as this data driven age progresses. I spend a lot of extra time producing and processing data about the work I have done or the work I am about to do. Anything that involves funding eats up time all around it.

What do you wear to work? It depends if I am teaching a “clean” session or if I’m giving a gallery tour I get dressed like a lady, otherwise and more habitually I wear one old linen shift dress or another with layers that can come on and off, the bottom layer being fancy yoga gear that holds everything in place and makes me feel trimmer than I am.

Is your industry male or female dominated? Female dominated.

Does this affect you in any particular way? Not really, it’s been part of the territory for so long, I am accustomed to it.

Is your job stressful? How? Rate it on a scale of 1-10: It can be stressful as being self employed demands a hunter gatherer lifestyle and has a level of perfectionism attached. You are only as good as your last job.

Do you work with others or on your own? Both, I need alone time as well as sharing time. Over the last year I have been organising and at times managing Gleann a’ Phúca so I am not getting enough studio time.

When do you plan to retire or give up working? I would like to give up the administration right away and just do what I do without the digital paper trail. An impossible dream that longs for the days before the digital age. One day I will switch off that feed. This isn’t going to happen any day soon as so much hangs on it.

Best bits: The joy of being in the moment.

Worst bits: Being inundated with administration.

Advice to those who want your job? Just do it, you’ll find your own way.

Any other comments? For more information about the year-long Gleann a Phuca project which culminates on Saturday September 28th with a series of events in Cork’s Glen River Park and Glen Resource Centre, see https://gleannaphuca.ie/