We were happy living in County Cork ... until lockdown hit

RETURNING to Cork from his native South Africa was a bittersweet experience for artist Stephen Hobbs.

He is here to create his installation and exhibit it (from May 25 to June 23) at Studio 12 at the Backwater Artist Group.

The art work - inspired by the low-lying houses of rural Ireland and specifically that of the pink bungalow in Glenville, Co Cork, he rented with his wife and two children - recalls the challenges of living through lockdown before running out of money after 19 months and having to return to Johannesburg.

The move to Ireland was instigated by Stephen’s wife, Bronwyn Millar, who is of Irish descent and once represented South Africa in the Rose of Tralee.

“As a consequence of the tour the Roses went on, she fell in love with Ireland and met all her relatives,” says Stephen.

“Before we got married, she said to me that she wanted to live in Ireland for the rest of her life. Fifteen years later, she brought it up again. We have two kids, now aged 14 and 12.

“In 2017, I was invited to Cill Rialig in Co Kerry for a residency. I thought I’d do that gig and see if I could connect. I fell in love with the people I met in Kerry and felt certain that we should make the move.”

Stephen, who has internal scarring adhesions following abdominal surgery, was feeling a bit delicate. And he felt Ireland, “with its softer pastures as opposed to the rough city of Johannesburg I’ve always worked in, would be a good option for our children. 

It’s safe while Johannesburg is notorious for being a dangerous environment.

Also, Stephen’s partner in the collective they formed in Johannesburg, ‘The Trinity Session’ was moving to Vienna to be with family members. With a team back in South Africa consulting on urban design and public art projects, moving away was possible.

“We landed on December 12, 2019. We spent a month in Kinsale. I wanted to live in Cork or near to it. We chose it because it’s ten years behind Dublin in urban development. That was attractive to me, as someone who made a big impact in my city. I have an international career. I didn’t want to live in Dublin. If anything, I needed to be in a calm, quiet place. For me, it was about living in a comfortable home.”

The four-bed bungalow in Glenville fitted the bill. While Ireland has housing problems, the situation is at least as bad in Johannesburg.

“It’s hugely problematic because we have a massive population and massive unemployment and huge problems as a consequence of the apartheid special planning laws.”

The house Stephen rented outside Mallow had no walls around it.

Where I come from, it’s all walls and electric fences. We were happy there, until the hard lockdowns persisted.

Art materials were hard to come by.

“For me, that was quite a positive thing. Scarcity is a nice way to work. It’s like that in South Africa. You make what you want with what you can. I became obsessed with the house. It was a diminutive version of what we sold in South Africa. There was something very twee about it and it was part kitsch. It was full of art works which to me were a tautology. Outside, you saw a meadow. Inside there was a framed picture of a meadow. During lockdown, those things became interesting – and very much a chokehold. The house was mostly painted in a pink palette.”

In the lead up to his exhibition, Stephen made a number of art projects. The first one was called A Short Life with Bungalow Bliss inspired by the book Bungalow Bliss by Jack Fitzsimons. The bestseller, first published in 1971, is a collection of house designs that people could use to build a home for themselves for an affordable price.

Over 30 years, Fitzsimons sold over a quarter of a million copies of his catalogue. The first edition contained 20 designs while the final edition boasted 260 designs. Critics of the phenomenon of once-off bungalows scattered around rural Ireland use the term ‘Bungalow Blitz’.

Stephen says he is interested in what he calls ‘war aesthetics’, which he has been studying for a long time.

“I’ve been looking at the role artists play in creating deception in the battlefield. I’ve done research into what artists did in World War I and II, up to modern times involving technology. It’s astonishing to me that you can justify putting a box in an elegant gentle landscape. It doesn’t occur to anybody that maybe they should be painted green.

“My understanding is that the heritage act in Ireland is pretty conservative. When you’re building in rural Ireland, you’re lucky if you can move outside of (building) a barn as a modern house. Really, they’re just mimicking farming architecture... It’s pop-up architecture that’s just plopped down.”

However, Stephen has sympathy for rural dwellers of old.

“As an outsider, I think it’s appropriate to be empathetic and to recognise that for generations of Irish people, they needed to be provided with the dignity of a decent home after the famine era. But can we move on a little bit? There’s a shortsightedness in the acquisition of land. There’s a sense of ownership in having a home but people are not really thinking beyond that.

Actually, you have a responsibility to the environment.

When the weather was good during lockdown, Stephen “built things outside. I converted the dining room into a ‘war room’ so I could run my office from there. In September, 2020, I visited the Imperial War Museum in London that Churchill founded. A war room is basically a highly technological space that allows for critical and tactical decision-making.”

Stephen, who is highly critical of the strict lockdown rules we had to obey during the pandemic, documented “everything. The kids were involved in a lot of it. We had grounds in which to grow vegetables. Outdoor fitness and health was very much a part of our lives.”

While the plan had been for Stephen to commute to South Africa, he says that by September, 2020, “we were really starting to feel isolated. The mental health challenges my children and my wife were experiencing were palpable. It was hard to get out of bed. They were online all day, on their cell phones. I was running the show from the war room. It was very hard for all of us.

“At the end of 2020, we made a return trip to South Africa to see our families. We came back feeling optimistic but there were more hard lockdowns. It’s not that I don’t believe in following the law. But in South Africa, you have to duck and dive. Not that the Irish necessarily like to follow the law. But it was untenable. The writing was on the wall.

“The resources we had at the end of 2019 sustained a team of seven employees in Johannesburg. We were struggling, living on the equity from the sale of our house. That was pretty much gone by April, 2021.

We made plans to go home to save our asses. 

"I hadn’t cut my ties with South Africa and I have work all over the world. My wife is a kinesiologist and travelled for work (in Ireland.) She wrote her first novel here and it’s with an international agent.”

Despite the mental health pressures Stephen’s family experienced during the pandemic, his children expressed themselves creatively.

“My son has become prolific at drawing,” he says.

Hobbs’s installation at the Backwater Studios draws viewers into “a psycho-spatial translation of life during lockdown”. It’s a period in Stephen’s life and career that is deeply embedded in him.