EM: Marie, I know you grew up in Goresbridge at the meeting point of Kilkenny and Carlow. Goresbridge straddles the River Barrow, so, obviously, water has been a feature of your life since really early days. I’m curious to know what life was like growing up in that place and at that time.

MH: Idyllic — I look back on it with such delight and pleasure. I went to sleep to the sound of the weir on the Barrow, spent my summers swimming in the Barrow, went into every neighbour’s house [absolutely every house] — I would just open the door and walk in. My parents had a local shop in the village; it was one of those ‘sell everything’ kind of shops, everybody came there, they mingled, they talked. I’m sure there were problems that I didn’t see as a small kid, I saw everything that was lovely and my childhood was really happy.

EM: And what influence did the river have? Did it flood? Was there an industry around the river or was it just there as part of an idyllic background?

MH: There was fishing, local people went out in small boats. There was the mill and a limestone works further away — I was never there, it was too dangerous, they used explosives and so on, so it wasn’t a place where kids ever went or would have been welcomed. For me it was just playing — swimming and playing, doing mysterious things. I remember on one occasion, I made a little raft and put a whole lot of boxes on it and set it sailing on the water, thinking somebody would think there was something worth having on this raft. Of course it only got so far before the boxes became waterlogged. It was a wonderful place to spend not just summers but winters as well.

EM: I grew up by the sea, and it’s kind of always there. We’re now understanding the role water plays in our life much, much more than we ever have. So, it’s interesting that you grew up by the river and this body of work is about water. So, skipping forward a few years, then you ended up in UCD [University College Dublin]. What was the decision in terms of becoming an artist and why the decision to do an Arts degree in English and Art History?

MH: I was guided by the people who were financing me, but I always had in my mind that I would go to art college when I finished in UCD. That didn’t materialise — I had to get a job. I taught for a while, but always harboured the idea of going to art college. I discussed it with people at the time. The advice I got was, ‘Start making work,’ and that’s what I did. Then I decided to give up teaching — just jump off and see what happened. I handed in my notice and started making work over that summer. I hadn’t a studio, except a small room in my house, I had nowhere to display the work and I remember taking it down to the art room in the school — it was absolute rubbish, all of it went into the bin and I started over. I just kept making and kept working until I began producing something where I said, ‘This feels good, this feels right.’ Then I started entering things for open submission and looking for a gallery. I became one of the Rubicon Gallery artists; so it went from there. That’s pretty much the beginning.

EM: Looking over your vast CV, you’ve done a huge amount and I’m interested in that point where you were having solo shows in Temple Bar, Triskel, Rubicon,
Wexford Arts Centre, up to Draíocht, Solstice, and then you went back to college to do an MA at NCAD in Art in the Contemporary World.

MH: I did.

EM: I’m always curious when people do that. You’re having all these solo exhibitions in great galleries across Ireland and group exhibitions as well, why
do you need to do an MA, why do you need to go back to study? I’m curious to know at what point you thought there was something missing, or there’s an itch I need to scratch or whatever it may be? And how you found that experience? I assume, and I don’t mean to be pejorative here, but you were obviously much older than your peers when you were studying.

MH: Yes, I was.

EM: And how did you find that experience of going back to education after what must have been a forty-year gap?

MH: There were two things that helped me to make that decision. First of all, my work was changing. I had been doing a lot of painting, and then began making ‘things’, small things; the first was for an exhibition in Rua Red. I had two vitrines with ‘things’, stuff that wasn’t on the wall. Also, for one of the Rubicon shows I painted boxes, small wooden boxes displayed together — in a way they were still paintings, I suppose. I also started making little videos, working with Rhona Clarke particularly, but also a few other contemporary Irish composers. I found myself moving in this new direction and aware from reading and looking at shows that art-making was changing very much and very quickly. I felt that I really needed to know what was informing all of that. So that really was the basis of my decision to go to NCAD and do an MA.

EM: What was that experience like, having lectures and talks and seminars and back in the library, all those things we reminisce about being a student in art school?

MH: It was great. I was fascinated with what I was learning. I missed two days in the entire time: one, because I was at Frieze [London Art Fair] and the other
because I was sick; so, I suppose that answers your question. I enjoyed the lectures and the reading — I loved all these ideas. I wanted to be informed and then take from it whatever I wanted. By and large people were very nice, it was good place to be — and the cafe in NCAD was very good!

EM: Did you feel that you learned what you wanted to?

MH: Yes.

EM: Because you went in with a sense of wanting to know more about contemporary work and what was happening around the globe, do you feel
that after your period of study, you were much more equipped and much more knowledgeable in that area?

MH: Yes. ‘Knowing’ is a kind of power. It’s the same thing people say about money: people who have it say it’s not all that important, but for people who don’t, it’s crucial. So having knowledge — you take something from it that fits with your own life view and the kind of work you want to make. It’s important perhaps to know that you’re working within a certain framework,so in that sense, yes, I took something from it. There were a lot of things that were far less interesting, but that was true also when I was in UCD. There were certain lecturers I really enjoyed; in UCD Denis Donoghue spoke about form, how a novel was put together, how the metaphors worked, why they were so important. I would say that’s been crucial to all the work I’ve ever made — how it’s put together, how it works in terms of those basic components. So, yes, you take what fits with your own ideas, your own character, your own personality, your own being in the world — you take what fits and you go with that.

EM: I think you’re right, a culmination of a career is built upon many learnings and many experiences, it’s not just one avenue — that approach of a longer period
of time taking different influences and different lived experiences and how that manifests itself in the work. And to sort of tease that a bit further, I know your partner is a composer and you’ve collaborated with composers in Ireland and internationally for over a decade. Tell me about the importance of music on your practice, both in terms of the collaboration with other composers, in terms of exhibitions and presentations at things like festivals and also more generally
as a kind of an inspiration perhaps for some of your work?

MH: A lot of the work I’ve made in the past is abstract and of all the arts, music is really abstract. I have endless conversations with my partner, Rhona, and other people about making work. I’ve come to the conclusion that it doesn’t matter what discipline a person is working in, essentially you’re doing something very similar: you’re trying to form something, trying to shape it, dealing with elements and putting those together to make them fit. Music is very much the same, it’s just aural rather than visual. I find music really exciting — of all the arts it’s the one that hits you hardest and strongest, your response to it is immediate. I just enjoy music, I always have; I think I have a good ear, so it’s reasonable that I would make something which can incorporate music. There’s a sound piece in the show at The LAB which we might talk about later.

EM: Is it important for you to collaborate with people from different disciplines?

MH: Only when the need arises, I don’t seek it out for its own sake; sometimes another dimension may complete or add in an interesting way.

EM: Moving on to talk about the exhibition itself, Water — More or Less, what was the genesis in terms of the ideas for this show? Was there a particular moment that happened or was it just something that was always there?

MH: Two things happened, first of all, there were the water protests here in Ireland. I think that was around 2015/16, and fairly soon after that I found myself in NCAD. I had never even heard the word ‘Anthropocene’1 until I was doing the Art in the Contemporary World course in NCAD. That really introduced me to the concept, but also to an awareness of what we are doing to the planet. We’re hearing this every day now, but even four years ago that wasn’t the case. As for the protests, I found I couldn’t align myself with any of the groupings. I do think we should pay for water, so I wasn’t with the protestors but neither was I with the government, I thought they were very heavy-handed; it was all about getting money and getting money fast — nobody was really thinking about the water per se. I was realising that water is a finite entity, there’s only so much of it; we’re contaminating it, we’re wasting it, and as we waste it there’s less available. But the real crux is that population rise is extreme. I think we have 7.9 billion people on the planet now and by. 2050 that will have increased by a quarter. So, you have this diminishing availability [of water] and rising population, then waste and climate change in the middle of that — all those things coming together. Yeah, it made me very exercised and I thought I’d try and make work that addresses it in some way.

EM: So, the first of those works must have been Water Table, which you created for The Luan Gallery in 2018. It has sound by Rhona Clarke. Tell us more about that work. As we know, Luan sits on the river Shannon.

MH: Yes. The Luan Gallery is as close as a building can be to water, it’s almost in the Shannon and of course they have severe flooding there as well. That piece is composed of seven glass tanks laid out on a long table; at one end full right up to the brim, at the other end empty and graduating levels [of water] in between — so from absolutely full to completely empty. It’s just an abstract way, really, of drawing attention to the fact that we have now such extremes of flooding and drought across the globe. The sound piece was very important. It starts off with very heavy rainfall; it’s an electronic piece, not just ‘rain’ recorded, but rain manipulated electronically. As it goes along, the rainfall reduces, you get other sounds coming in, like empty containers and there’s one moment where you get a kind of call, like a dying animal — it’s very brief, but it’s there. So it’s telling the narrative of excess water and diminishing water. I like to display that piece in darkness with spotlights because it allows the sound to play its full role. It could be shown in full light, but I think it works better in darkness.

EM: Tell me this — the water that’s contained within those seven vessels, is that water from the Shannon?

MH: Well, the technicians filled them in The Luan Gallery. I don’t know where they got the water, possibly from the tap. All I can tell you is that when I use water in the studio I bring it downstairs afterwards and put it on the garden, I can’t throw it down the sink, I just can’t, even though it’s hell to transport, but I’m concerned that it shouldn’t be wasted.

EM: So when the work goes to The LAB [near the Liffey] you’ll be fishing out the water for it?

MH: I’d say Sheena [curator] is ordering the buckets as we speak!

EM: But joking aside, is that local resonance important, that it is water of the place where the work is shown?

MH: Not necessarily, because all water is connected and not just freshwater; freshwater flows into the saltwater of the sea, the whole thing is connected. So, every single thing that we do, everything we put down the sink, everything we put down the toilet, it all goes back into the same system.

EM: The work, The Water You Drink, is very much the idea that we turn the taps on and we think we’re getting this fresh, clean water from a local spring that is totally pure. The reality is very different. I’ll let you explain the subtitle in that piece; it isn’t just this mythical liquid that has come from the grace of the Gods that’s flowing and beautiful. So tell us more about that work and the reality of the water we drink.

MH: The text is very much part of the installation. Title and subtitle are: The Water You Drink — will pass through seven pairs of kidneys before it reaches yours. I heard a water expert on the radio saying this and of course it’s true. We have too little water and too many people needing it, so water is reused; we don’t like to think about it — toilet to tap — that’s the reality of it.2 It’s unthinkable in a water-rich country like Ireland that we have to think about increasing our water, but we do. We have three measures in mind: recycled water, channelling water from the Shannon to the east where the demand is greatest and desalination. These are the three options that the government are considering. It’s abhorrent to think about drinking water from our own toilet, but it can be cleaned to absolute pristine quality. And you know, the whole thing of drinking water is full of myths and craziness. We buy bottled water, but very little of it comes from pure springs, a lot of it is just treated water — cleaned water — packaged.

EM: But sticking with that idea, of what comes out of our taps, Cut Off 3 is this beautiful installation of a line of taps; the flow — what would be water — is made of clear plexiglass tied at the end. Perhaps our taps may well be cut off at some stage. So tell us more about the ideas behind that.

MH: Of course, one tap would be sufficient to carry that idea, but one tap could get lost — better to do a group. I gathered as many as I possibly could — I didn’t want all new ones, I didn’t want it to look like a showroom in a plumbing shop. I decided it had to be a line and that’s very much to do with the gallery, which is a long space. It’s really interesting to think about that — like making an abstract painting except that instead of two dimensions you’re thinking now about that long space, following the line of the wall. When we talked before, you made a really valuable suggestion — that the taps might work best at use height instead of placing them higher on the wall at eye-level — and I think that’s the way they’re going to go. A work starts out as a single tap with a knotted flow and becomes something bigger, something better in the end.

EM: Having seen that work, what’s really great about it is the fact that the taps are all different and the lengths of the flows are all slightly different as well. Walk into The LAB and see a tap and recognise it as the tap in our bathroom, or a tap in our kitchen, or a tap where we work. And the idea of it being ten taps, it could potentially grow to become something much, much bigger. It’s really powerful as well because it is so relatable to our lives. We forget how much we use taps every day.

MH: Part of my thinking about this show was all the ‘opposites’ about water. We completely take it for granted, it’s just there, yet it’s so essential to life; I think we can only survive for five days or something without water and yet we’re so disregarding of it. I had included initially the kind of tap we have at home in the garden, but it didn’t work with the others, for some reason, so I decided it could go into the exhibition separately. If we lived in a water-stressed part of Africa the notion of an outside tap would just be inconceivable. So I’m putting that in separately to point out how much we use treated water, that has been processed at high cost, in our gardens, for washing cars and everything else. We’re not organised in such a way as to have graded water — stuff that costs less to process — that can be used on the garden and the car and whatever else.

EM: A piece we haven’t yet seen because it’s still in construction is When Water Becomes Explosive. It’s going to be a large sculpture installation of plexiglass tubes measuring two metres high and 4.5 metres square. In that work, you’re looking at fracking and the impact of fracking in terms of material extraction from the earth. But also it’s referring to a piece of play equipment in the US. I’m interested in that, that line you’re walking between learning and educating.

MH: Yes. There’s a game they have in America called ‘Nine Square in the Air’; it involves a structure of uprights and horizontals and it seemed a good template for this because America produces more oil than any other country, more than China or Saudi Arabia or anybody. I felt the American connection was important; they’re going headlong with extraction whereas other countries are looking at the dangers and trying to roll back; it seems in America they’re not restraining the extractive industry at all. So the verticals are filled with oil and water — when you put those two elements together the oil rises to the top, water is heavier so it stays at the bottom. We have a phrase, ‘cream rises to the top’. Oil is the substance which is prized and water is disregarded, but there may come a time in the future when water will be more valuable than oil. And the other issue around this is ‘fracking’, deep drilling. They drill down something like two kilometres and then three kilometres horizontally and use water to explode the rock, especially for the horizontal drilling; you can exert pressure downwards, but you can’t exert pressure horizontally, so water at high pressure is used to explode the rock. When that water comes back up it’s contaminated beyond cleaning; water which has radioactive residues is then injected back into the ground and you have pockets of contaminated water — this is water which is no longer available to us, it’s gone, our amount has diminished. And what’s happening now is they’re putting pressure on the various environmental agencies and bodies to let them reintroduce some of this ‘produced’ or contaminated water back into the system. These are the corporations making huge money, but they won’t spend money finding ways to reintroduce it, they want to put it back into the system to have less bother for themselves. And there are all sorts of other issues as well about destabilising the ground and so on. I find the whole thing really worrying. I hope the artwork will convey that idea in some way, that this is something which is going on and we really should raise our voices to try and stop it. It’s going on in the North of Ireland, in Fermanagh, so it’s on the island and that should be a concern.

EM: So the final two works in the show are two video works: Drinking the Ocean and When More Is Less. In some respect, for me, they deal with the same issue which is the reality of climate change. I’ve seen it even just looking where I live, two massive downpours of rain and the impact it has on rivers and flooding. In When More Is Less, you’re showing a series of images of flooding in Ireland, yet you see populations that are exploding, you see certain companies that are water from somewhere — we have these seemingly unrelated things, but they’re totally related, because you say water is everywhere, and water dictates everything
we do. So, in terms of those processes, what do you think we can do? These are big questions. What do you think of things like the proposed solution in Cork, in terms of the building works and raising the walls in the city centre, that kind of harsh reality? In terms of desalination, you talk in the video about pros and cons, you don’t come down either way, but I suspect which way you’re leaning, so just in terms of those two works, what do you want us to take away from them?

MH: Well, let’s look at the flooding one first. Eric Luke and Samuel Walshe gave me some images, and I also used a database, because obviously I can’t be in all these places to get pictures of flooding. But I thought it was interesting to put them together. When floods happen and we hear it on the news, we’re completely engaged in the moment, we look at the pictures and when the waters recede we aren’t thinking about it; we go back to our day-to-day. But the problem is our day-to-day: we’re generating the things that are causing the flooding; it’s all these — I hate to say this, it’s such a killjoy — all these car journeys we don’t need to make, all the stuff we put down the sink, all those moments when we don’t bother, all those small savings that would make the difference. I suppose I want people to think about behaviours [and me too]. How can we change things so we’re not constantly contributing to stress on the planet resulting in these very short sharp falls of rain — a very high amount of water coming down in a very short time span — that’s really the problem. And then you get mudslides, and houses in Germany — big, strong German houses — just sliding away.4 That was really shocking. We don’t expect German houses to collapse. So yeah, I think stringing the images together, putting a whole lot of them in one big long sequence, might modify our behaviour a bit. You haven’t got to this yet but I’m going to say it myself: one of the big contradictions in the show for me is that I am using materials which are petroleum by-products — plexiglass, that is. I’m using this material, I shouldn’t be using it because I’m contributing to something that isn’t good by doing so. Artists have used this material for a long time and it’s interesting that during the pandemic this material is everywhere — shielding screens are everywhere now. When you stop and look, we are using materials [to protect us] that are contributing to the problem; we all have to think about this into the future.

EM: Can we say what we want to say with different materials and how can we transport our stuff from A to B without generating more emissions? We have to think about that. I’m going to finish off with a kind of final question. I hope this isn’t too difficult a question — you were alluding to it there. Do you think art can make a difference? We all have noble aspirations in terms of our own life, but to present a body of work, to highlight this big issue as an artist, what are you hoping for? As you said, there are contradictions and we’re all going to have to travel to see this show, there’s a lot of contradictions, but at the heart of it you’re trying to get us to think about something — and how would you know you’ve achieved that, I guess?

MH: I’ve always been of the view that art doesn’t change anything, but it’s about what the artist does. In conversation with artist Anita Groener recently she said she doesn’t feel she has the luxury anymore of just making beautiful things. I think that answers it really, we are obliged to play some kind of part in the urgency of the current conditions, we can’t just ignore it. Whether anybody takes a blind bit of notice, I don’t know. At the end of everything, I’m making images, I’m making images to stay in the mind. I hope people will come and see it and those images won’t leave them. We’re in a different time now and we might more readily make changes and take note because the price of not doing so is so very high.

EM: Absolutely, I think you’re right, I’m trying to see the positives of the pandemic and I think one of the things it shows is that when we need to change our ways, we can. Taking that approach to our use of the materials on the planet and the impact on climate change, we can do it. It’s not that big of a sacrifice at the end of the day. Listen, Marie, thank you so much, that was fascinating and you’ve given us brilliant insights into the work and I’m sure that everyone will flock to see it and we’ll love it. Thank you very much for your time.

MH: Thank you, Eamonn.

1. Our current era in which human activity is the dominant influence on climate.
2. Ireland’s drinking water is mostly treated surface and ground water. Recycled wastewater for human consumption is a reality in various parts of the world but not yet part of the Irish water system.
3. The original title was Run Dry, replaced later by Cut Off.
4. In July 2021 heavy rains across mainland Europe caused severe flooding; the impact was greatest in western Germany.