Phil Irish

Phil Irish, from Ontario, Canada, makes paintings that are both fierce and beautiful. His practice extends painting into realms of collage, installation, photography, and video.

His work has been shown at public museums, artist-run centres, and commercial galleries across Canada. The Kolaj Institute in New Orleans featured his architecturally scaled installation The Green Fuse. In 2020, he competed in CBC’s Landscape Artist of the Year Canada. His work was featured at the Quebec City Biennial and has been shortlisted three times for the Kingston Portrait Prize.

Travel and artist residencies have played an important role in developing his themes. He has created new work during residencies at the Symposium in Baie-Saint-Paul, Quebec, The Banff Centre, and the Vermont Studio Center. In 2017, he began his Arctic-themed work with a visit to Baffin Island as part of CanadaC3, and in 2023, he explored Svalbard through The Arctic Circle Residency.

He holds degrees from York University (MFA) and the University of Guelph (BA), and currently leads the art program at Redeemer University in Ancaster, Ontario.


Artist Statement

Fragility is a central fact of my “Niche Species” project. This series of digital prints has its origins on the shores of the Norwegian archipelago of Svalbard. As part of the Arctic Circle Residency, I was making fragile collages in collaboration with nature. The wind, rain, sunlight, and spectacular views were key participants in making each image.

You will see painted images of animals—pinned to a wooden frame, and to each other in tenuous skeins. These pinned connections, shifting in the breeze, convey this sense of holding each other amid fragility.

The animals are painted with loving attention. At first glance, their assembly within the frame is a joyous concatenation of color and diversity, of the possibility of shalom. A closer look, however, reveals that the relationships are strained, stretched, and pained.

Of Unknowing
I set up my frame on its tripod to document the swirling snow as Hornsbreen Glacier comes in and out of view. It is there and then it is gone. There is the black void of ice beneath our feet, the white oblivion around us, and everywhere the sound of running water. With climate change unfolding, we are really in unknown territory. And yet this obscurity is achingly beautiful. There is a mystical love in the Cloud of Unknowing.

Sheol
Thinking about the rate of extinction, this barren location reminded me of a realm of the dead. All of the painted animals turned their backs to me, turning toward absence. This is also the only piece with a human figure—in matching red and black—in the distance.

Construction
As we got off the ship, returning to civilization, I faced the question of how to integrate this disorienting experience with my daily life. I set my frame facing a construction site in Longyearbyen. There is an all-over rhythm of wooden boards, metal scaffolding, and concrete slabs. The wooden boards actually echo my wooden frame, raising questions about how our mental constructs relate to our architectural constructions. The painted animals offer their life-giving question to our sites of construction: What are we building, and for whom? Are the animals, imagined to be so far from us, actually our neighbours?

The ecological crisis, and the precious wisdom of the natural order, have been sustaining themes in my work. One of the powers of art is to face and address the hardest truths. Through the compelling allure of beauty, the penetrating insight of metaphor, and the holistic engagement of emotion, I aim to crack open our callousness and denial.


www.philirish.art