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Turning Your Tumblr Into IRL Sculptures With Eilis McDonald

Dublin-based artist, Eilis McDonald, has a lot to say about the digital-meets-physical art realm.

"

jst chillin fur real"

by Eilis McDonald

Dublin-based artist Eilis McDonald creates offline versions of her vibrantTumblr. Florescent tubing leans against the walls while piles of stuff—from paper to florescent tube lights—fill her exhibitions. These found objects are inspired by social media images, be it reblogged content to old school personalized pages, even the stuff on Angelfire or Geocities.

Since Tumblr was recently purchased by Yahoo, there are some changes in the platform, including the terms of service. As social media companies grow, we often have to ask if its culturally-rich content be watered down or adjusted. Even McDonald hasn’t posted since 2013, though we hope it will not become another online graveyard of posts that no longer hold for web-savvy producers of digital content and beyond.

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McDonald questions this and more in a way that combines the conscious with the subconscious. Her Numinous Objects Collection feels so New Age with candles and rainbows, that we can smell the Nag Champa incense from across the room. Meanwhile, her colorful GIFs take us off into a fairytale romance, with galloping unicorns in a Zelda-like forest. You’ll find Kurt Cobain’s spirit hanging out in her work, too, in an environment which feels a bit like high school.

McDonald is currently showing at The Lab in Dublin. We spoke about her problems with Tumblr’s new terms of service, the 1990s, and what she loves about Geocities.

 View of "Tonight, you can call me Trish," showing detail of installation by Eilis McDonald and Mark Durkan, with sculptures by Brenna Murphy and video by Rachel Maclean

The Creator’s Project: At what point did you want to make Tumblr-inspired sculptures?

Eilis McDonald:I was asked to contribute to a group show in Temple Bar Gallery and Studios, Dublin in 2011. The show, Offline, included some works that used found images from the web, for example Jon Rafman's 9 eyes and Parker Ito's Most Infamous Girl in the History of the Internet.

I was the only Dublin-based artist in the show, and I discussed with the curator, Rayne Booth, how best to incorporate my work physically into the show. I had put together exhibitions before with other artists work (e.g. The True Artist Helps the World by Revealing Mystic Truths and Hate Myself and Want to Die) and wanted to explore that process in a more immersive way. I use locally-sourced found objects along with imagery sourced from my online social networks and web surfing in my work, so it made sense to think of these other artists work as possible raw materials, with extra-strong layers of authorship, context, and history attached.

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I've often used a Tumblr analogy to describe what was going on in these installations because, like my own, the majority of the Tumblr's I would have followed, had this mix of found images, original content and reblogged content, all layered on top of a sometimes very individualized theme design. For a while in the late 2000s, it seemed to be acting as a new surrogate for the 1990's free personal homepage style sites (e.g. Geocities, Tripod, Angelfire, etc.), allowing users a huge choice and flexibility in the customizing and designing of their image collections and personal realms.

I have a lot of problems with Tumblr recently since Yahoo acquired them. Yahoo seems to have taken the role of Grim Reaper for online heritage and websites I've actively used in my work and research (Geocities, Delicious.com). It's a strange situation because Yahoo was an integral part of many people's early web experiences, and as such a long-running Internet company, owning the assets they did (and do), they could have exploited that cultural heritage in order to establish themselves as a steady, stable feature in the history of day-to-day online life. A company who can delete a website that held so much culturally important content (and not even that, it has the result of creating so many dead links on other older sites, too) isn't one I feel I can trust to care for the vast content a site like Tumblr holds.

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I'm a big fan of the work of Olia Lialina and Dragon Espenschied who devote a massive amount of time and effort to sharing, analyzing and exploring what was saved of Geocities by Archive Team back in 2009.

 Installation view from "Offline." Featuring work by Parker Ito. Temple Bar Gallery + Studios, 2011.

Your work has a mystical feel to it (candles, pyramids, rainbows). Is that intentional or accidental?

I stare at a spinning rainbow every time my old Mac starts to crash. The NSA stole a rainbow prism image to make a logo for a secret internet surveillance operation. Mystical imagery has become a symbol, and sometimes, a trigger, for frustration and anxiety in contemporary life.

I like the conflict in the realization that you're attracted to the things that make you cringe; the dark humor in being self-aware and knowing the things you're doing might be really dumb, kind of crazy, or just shallow, while also being comforting and helpful; appreciating yourself ironically, mocking yourself and your world, and at the same time, maybe subconsciously, wanting to preach the process to help others. So, to answer your question, I suppose it's both intentional and accidental, in the same way it's both self-conscious and subconscious.

What's next for you?

I'm currently in an exhibition called Tonight, you can call me Trish in which I've collaborated with artist Mark Durkan to create a world which absorbs, exploits, and converses with the works of other artists. We're working on expanding that practice to go deeper into fantasy world-building and role-play, using the work of real and imagined artists.

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Image from artist's Tumblr

Tonight you can call me Trish runs until March 22 at The Lab in Dublin.

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