It is eighteen years since the French artist Julia Pallone moved to Ireland, settling in Kinsale, Co Cork, where she has become very much part of the creative community.
Pallone is one of four artists – along with Sarah Iremonger, Don Cronin and Stephen Brandes – from the Kinsale/Inishannon area currently showing in the exhibition at the Lavit Gallery in Cork.
“ was the curator Brian MacDomhnaill’s idea,” she says. “I’ve known the other artists for a long time, and it’s lovely to be showing together. I think we all bring different elements to the exhibition. Our work is not very similar, and yet there are links; Don Cronin’s sculptures are all very abstract, for instance, and I can see a connection to the abstract elements in my own work.”
Pallone works in different media – she has shown her photography at previous exhibitions, and teaches painting and drawing at the Cork College of FET Kinsale Campus – but most of her pieces in are collages.
“I was given all this lovely paper by a friend who was moving house, and I started playing with it during covid, when we were all staying in. Collage is less scary for me than drawing or painting, as I can move the pieces of paper around as much as I want. I take loads of photos of the work in progress; it could be a week before I decide which positions I like best, and then I glue things down.”
Pallone’s teaching job is part-time. “It’s two days a week,” she says, “so I can still work on my art. We have two small kids, so there’s only so much time I can devote to it anyway.”
Her current work is largely inspired by her family’s search for a permanent home.
“Finding a place without a crazy rent was a bit of nightmare. And not just a place to eat and sleep, I also needed a space to make art in. But we finally found a little house for ourselves.”
Along with her collages, Pallone is showing a single bronze sculpture, called ‘The first artichoke we planted has not been eaten’.
“I used to do papier-mâché and paper sculptures, and then I was commissioned to reproduce one of them in bronze. I got someone else to make that. But I always like to learn new skills, and when I got an Agility Award from the Arts Council, I studied bronze casting with Mick Wilkins at his workshop in Carrigaline.”
Pallone’s sculpture depicts a house with an artichoke bursting out of it.
“I used the very first artichoke we planted when we moved to our new home. Not everyone here eats artichoke, but coming from France, we love it. Maybe it’s a bit symbolic as well, I don’t know. There are different types of artichoke, and so many different ways to eat them. You can just boil the big ones and dip them in sauce. But the Italians have tiny artichokes, and they cook them in wine with garlic. That’s really nice.”
Pallone traces her interest in art to her childhood in the Loire Valley in Central France.
“I always loved art at school,” she says. “My teacher taught me photography, and I was working in the darkroom by the time I was ten. I didn’t come from a family of artists, they were more traditional, but they didn’t object to me pursuing it in college. I studied languages as well. I studied art on an Erasmus programme at the Accademia delle Belle Arti in Venice, and Italian at the Sorbonne in Paris.”
She will return to Paris in June next year, on a residency at the Centre Culturel Irlandais supported by Cork County Council.
“I was supposed to go this year, but the Olympics are happening, so it was put off to 2025. Having lived in Paris as a student, I think It will be fun to go back and see it from more of a Franco-Irish point of view.”
Pallone’s last exhibition was in Ennistymon, Co Clare in March. She has no further projects planned just now, “but I hope to start on a new body of work in the autumn,” she says. “It’s not always easy to find places to exhibit in, we could always use more arts centres. But if I had two shows every year, I’d be happy.”
- , featuring Julia Pallone, Sarah Iremonger, Don Cronin and Stephen Brandes, runs at the Lavit Gallery, Cork until 6th July. Further information: lavitgallery.com